Jim Balsillie
speaker
218 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Jim Balsillie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
He's not a back-off sort of guy, exactly. It's his orthodoxy. He's more locked in that orthodoxy than we were in our 30 years of hands-off, in spite of all the facts that came out of it. I think it's going to take—he's just going to keep tweaking it. But he's already done the damage because the law doesn't apply anymore. He says you can't have access to the U.S.
markets, so move your factories here. Nobody's going to do a press release that says I'm moving my factory in the middle of the night to the U.S. The damage is done for Canada in this current system. He barely needs to put tariffs on it anymore. Just the threat of it is de facto in, in the, in the business realities.
Uh, so the big question is what is Canada going to do in that response to that fork in the road? And if we take the higher potential route, we will have a much better future. Granted a bumpy interim phase, uh, And that goes to the point of leadership that you were... Okay, okay.
I don't belong to any party and I've given no money to either party. Okay.
And one thing we haven't put on the table, which is very important in our structural conversation, we talked about the knowledge-based economy of IP, and that's followed by a data-driven economy that's data and AI, and that that has become this new factor of productivity where it's replacing the human, it's controlling the human, and that's turbocharged this era of intangibles, which is...
intellectual property, knowledge enclosure, and then data and AI, which is the control of this factor of production, which is really changing everything. And also, by the way, the largest filing of IP is in AI with 1.5 million patents granted to date. And that's very important as I critique these two political options for Canada. We have to, when you talk about the things I talk about, we haven't
fully unpacked AI and how it's replacing human capacity and augmenting human capacity. But I think everyone agrees it's a monster factor of production. It's changing all the rules. It's putting trillions of dollars in the economy.
And you've got to have something, something there. Yeah, yeah. So that's fine. Okay, so you mentioned about Carney, then you mentioned about Paglia. And I did too read his book because I'm interested in public policy. As people, you've mentioned, you and I are active in Washington, I'm active in Brussels, and I'm also active nationally and sub-nationally. And provincially.
Well, sub-nationally, provincially. And I absolutely see myself as a Canadian, and I always think of Canada when I try to engage in these things, and I'm a passionate Canadian. So a couple, three things in Carney. He's positioning himself as an outsider when he's been an advisor to Trudeau since… and he's chairman of his economic task force.
But most importantly, he's been... So he's not an outsider. Well, most importantly, he's been a charter member of the orthodoxy of Ottawa for decades. So all this thinking structure, and I'm going to get very specific on how Bank of Canada has been a central actor in selling Canada short in these decades because they've been the keepers of this orthodoxy And he's been a central, as governor of St.
Claude Bank. He's been, prior to that, he was in Finance Canada. He's been advised. So he's got to own the Ottawa thinking. Right, and not as a follower, but as an architect. An architect. Right, right. So here's the two or three things on Carney, Mark Carney's book that I read. One, he talks a lot about pricing carbon to affect a transition. Right.
And then he's come up with his new policies to subsidize things like heat exchangers and various forms of technology to green your homes and stuff like that, very specifically. And so what happens is that when you look at Canada, it's good terms of trade. I explained terms of trade earlier. Its best terms of trade are in energy, right? That's where we get good money.
That's where it pays for the country.
Fossil fuel, hydrocarbons.
Sorry, hydrocarbons, hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons, yeah. Import, or sorry, consumption and export of hydrocarbons overwhelmingly pays for this country.
That's good terms of trade.
On the good terms of trade. I'm speaking technically. Yeah. Okay. We have a deficit in intellectual property. And that would be much more if we included data in AI. And we're major importers of intellectual property and technology products. So we have poor terms of trade in technology. The technology arena.
In spite of all the things we invent, the smart people, the government funding over decades... And the effectiveness of that even. Well, that's the issue is we're first world in inputs, third world in outcomes. Right. And there's not... And today in this conversation, we're unpacking why. Yeah. But I'm going to stay on this orthodoxy of Mr. Carney. Yeah.
So we have very good terms of trade in hydrocarbons, very poor terms of trade in... technology products. And so his proposition is that we tax the things that we sell and we subsidize the things that we buy. So if you want to affect a green transition, and you have this structure, that's called a dichotomy. You have to choose between
The economy paying for the place or the environment in his structural view of the world of scarce natural capital that we have to deal with. And I'm not making a normative comment. I'm just talking economically here. So his prescription will make us poorer.
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