MJ Industries

In a wide-ranging and urgent conversation, Canadian tech pioneer Jim Balsillie—former co-CEO of Research In Motion, creators of the BlackBerry—delivers a sobering but hopeful message: Canada has everything it needs to become a global economic leader, but it must recognize where it has gone wrong over the past three decades and move swiftly to chart a new course in the knowledge economy. Drawing on his deep experience in global business and policy, Balsillie highlights a critical turning point that Canada largely missed—the economic shift of the early 1990s, when the world moved from a production-based economy to one dominated by ideas, intellectual property (IP), and data. While countries like the U.S., Switzerland, and South Korea embraced this transformation, Canada continued to operate under outdated assumptions rooted in its resource-based legacy. The Missed Opportunity of the Knowledge Economy In 1994, Canada signed two transformative international agreements: NAFTA, which for ...