Let's Go, Canada!

A few thoughts about travel and getting big things done.

My fourth book, How Big Things Get Done, which I co-wrote with Oxford University professor Bent Flyvbjerg, was published in 2023. It has done remarkably well. (Not bragging. Observing.) Our American publisher just ordered a twelfth printing of the original hardcover and still has no plans to release the paperback. In publishing, the paperback is usually released a year or so after the hardcover in order to juice sales with a lower price. To go three years without a paperback release is amazing. (OK, that’s bragging.)

What explains the book’s success? I don’t know. I believe such outcomes are complicated beyond human comprehension and we are psychologically compelled to concoct what feel like plausible explanations because anything is better than saying, “I don’t know.” But I will permit myself to speculate about one element that, it seems to me, probably contributed: the timing.

Coming out of the massive pandemic disruptions, “build back better” was a mantra in many countries. Then came Donald Trump. Whatever else one may say about Trump, the man is a massive disruptor. That’s the generous description. “A demented bull in a china shop” would be the less generous description. However you frame it, Trump has a preternatural talent for burning any status quo to the ground. And when existing systems, institutions, and ways of doing business are turned to ash, people have no choice but to rethink from the ground up -- and get big things done.

Nowhere is that more true than Canada.

Since the end of the Second World War, Canada has revolved around the United States like a planet around the sun. The same is true of the other Western democracies, of course, but sharing a continent and an immense border, Canada’s orbit is much tighter. Canada is Mercury in the American solar system.

Or perhaps the better metaphor may be the moon revolving around the Earth. Since 1988, when free trade was implemented, our orbit has steadily tightened. Today, we’re a satellite in low earth orbit.

In economic relations. In military relations. In international relations. Across every dimension, Canada inched closer and closer to the United States. In part, we did that because American leaders asked us to. In part, we did it because it was good for us to be tightly tied to the world’s — and history’s — richest and most powerful nation. We got security and prosperity without the burdens of independence and charting our own course.

Look, we’re among friends. So let’s be blunt: It was easy. That’s why we did it. We did it because it was easy.

But then came Donald Trump, a man incapable of understanding human relations in anything but zero-sum terms and thus incapable of seeing that a close, reciprocal relationship can benefit both the United States and Canada. For Trump, your gain must be my loss and all human relationships are about establishing the winner and the loser, the strong and the weak, the powerful and the powerless. Trump didn’t stiff all those contractors just to save a buck. He did it because by doing it he demonstrated that he was winner and they were the loser.

The powerful don’t have partners, in Trump’s mind. They have vassals.

In Trump, this thinking clearly springs from his own twisted psychology, particularly a severe narcissistic personality disorder which afflicts him with a gnawing sense of inferiority and an insatiable need to humiliate others and be praised. The tell is his lifelong obsession with being “laughed at.” There is no nastier insult in the Trumpian universe than to say you are being “laughed at” – because in the twisted mind of a man desperate to prove he’s not the nullity he secretly fears he is, to be laughed at is to have that secret fear confirmed.

One might hope Trump’s warped thinking will disappear when he dies, but that is most unlikely. MAGA is a faithful mirror of the man who created it, while the Republican Party’s history, culture, and ideology have been wholly erased and replaced by Trumpian software. Thus, Trump’s sick psyche is now interwoven into the thinking of one-half of the American political spectrum, as J.D. Vance demonstrated when, as one of his first significant acts as vice president, he called Europe an American “vassal.” If Republicans and Democrats continue to exchange the White House, Trumpian gangsterism will be, at least occasionally, the foreign policy of the United States for the foreseeable future. (And if they don’t continue to exchange the White House, that’s likely because the gangsters have succeeded in hog-tying American democracy, in which case there won’t even be intermittent relief from the gangsterism.)

This is a threat for all liberal democracies, but none is in as much danger as Canada. Donald Trump’s dream of swallowing Canada whole is dystopian, to be sure, but it is not the worst-case scenario my country faces. Becoming an impoverished American resource colony is.

So what do we do about it?

This is where How Big Things Get Done comes in: As a result of the book’s success, I’ve travelled the world giving lectures. At each stop, I talk with locals about their country’s projects. It’s been enlightening. And given the dark turn of American foreign policy, and the shadow cast over Canada, it has also taught me something critical about Canada.

We are punching way below our weight.

Iceland

One of my first stops was Iceland.

I love Iceland. I love the people. I love the landscape. I even love eating sheep’s head. (The eyeball is surprisingly delicious.) But, again, we are among friends, so let us be frank.

Iceland is a small volcanic rock in the North Atlantic. It is barren. It is ravaged by wind and ice and seismic horrors. It is the sort of place where you can wake up one morning and find lava simmering in your backyard. Iceland has been occupied by humans for 1,151 years and for 1,071 of those years it was so poor mere survival counted as success. Homes made of stacked rocks and sod were common within living memory.

But starting with the Second World War, when Britain and the United States put resources into the suddenly strategic island, things started to change. Measured by GDP per capita, Iceland is today one of the richest countries in the world, richer even than the United States.

How is that possible?

Iceland has a lot of fish. It also has a lot of rain, so it has a lot of water which powers hydroelectricity. And it has a lot of geothermal energy which can be tapped to generate still more electricity (the only good thing about living on volcanos.) With an abundance of cheap electricity, Iceland is a major base for industries that depend on it, including aluminum smelting and, increasingly, data centres.

But that’s only the beginning of the story. Look into the development of any of these industries or infrastructures and you will find determined, ambitious, ingenious Icelanders willing to take risks. Sometimes they get burned, as in 2008, when the global financial crisis cut Iceland’s new banking industry off at the knees. But on the whole, Iceland’s risk-taking has reaped dividends.

My favourite example is Iceland’s substantial tourism industry, which accounts for around nine percent of the island’s GDP. Iceland’s scenery is so dramatic as to be other-worldly, so you may think that’s something nature delivered and Icelanders simply cashed in. But that’s quite wrong.

Iceland was not an easy sell for tourists. Yes, the landscape is dramatic. But it’s also brutal and barren. Go to its beaches and you’ll shiver until you’re swept out to sea. That’s hardly mass appeal. So how do you convince people to give this strange land a try? In the 1960s, when trans-Atlantic stopovers for re-fuelling were still common, Icelandair promoted itself as a cheap way to travel between Europe to North America. With a re-fuelling stopover in Iceland. And an ingenious offer: Passengers who wanted to get off the plane and spend some time in Iceland could do so at the same airfare as for a direct flight, so trans-Atlantic tourists could tack a little Iceland onto their main itinerary at modest cost. It was a huge success. The “Iceland stopover” is still a central pillar of Icelandic tourism.

Notice also that this strategy first required Iceland to develop its own international airline. Today, that airline, Icelandair, flies to 20 countries. Given that Iceland’s population is a little under 400,000 – considerably smaller than a North American suburb like Mississauga, Ontario, or Mesa, Arizona – that’s remarkable. It’s even more impressive when you realize that Iceland’s population has grown rapidly in recent years. In 1990, it was only 250,000. Imagine Winnipeg operating its own international airline.

And consider the most popular tourist attraction in Iceland, the “Blue Lagoon” geothermal spa, which Iceland has even turned into a line of skin care products sold worldwide.

Iceland’s Blue Lagoon. Don't ask why it’s blue.

The Blue Lagoon is an enormous pond in the midst of rocky terrain. The pond is heated by underground geothermal forces (the volcanoes again) and the water is a vivid blue. On the bottom of the lagoon is a slick, white mud that tourists slather on their skin. So as you sit and soak in water that is hot and a dazzling blue, you cover yourself with mud and enjoy a landscape that resembles the surface of the moon. Surely that is an easy sell, you may think. Where does the “ambition and ingenuity” come into the story?

The Blue Lagoon gets its colour from its extremely high silica content. The silica also produces the white mud bathers smear on themselves. But none of that is naturally occurring.

Near the Blue Lagoon is a geothermal power plant where water superheated by lava is extracted from deep underground and used to create steam that powers turbines that generate electricity. The water then passes through a heat exchanger to power a municipal water-heating system. Because this water has an extremely high mineral content, it cannot be recycled. So it is dumped in a tailings pond.

The Blue Lagoon is the tailings pond.

Let me say that again: The Blue Lagoon is an industrial waste disposal site. Drawn by its colour and heat, people started wading in it without permission. Public health officials said it was safe. So Icelanders turned an industrial waste disposal site into their top tourist attraction.

After a millennium of poverty, why is Iceland rich? Economists would have an answer full of numbers and nuance, no doubt, but my answer is, I think, true and clear: Iceland is rich because Icelanders are smart, ambitious, creative people willing to dream big and take risks.

History and nature gave them very little. But they made the most of it.

Norway

After Iceland, I went a couple of times to the home of the Icelanders’ ancestors.

What people forget about Norway — population 5.6 million — is that it wasn’t always the prosperous land with impressive social and monetary capital that it is now. In fact, the modern Norway that is the envy of pretty much everyone (including the Swedes and Danes, though they will never admit it) is a very recent creation.

Anyone who has flown into Norway on a clear day can see why. Most of the country is uninhabitable mountains, making every scrap of flat land precious. Even tiny plateaus in the mountains, with no road connection to the towns below, were turned into subsistence farms centuries ago. Norwegians had more resources than Icelanders, including lots of trees. But not much more.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Norway developed ship-building and shipping. But that isn’t what made modern Norway. Oil did.

Norway discovered it in the North Sea in 1969. It first shipped oil in 1971 and its production peaked in 2001, when Norway ranked number seven in the world. But spending the windfall isn’t why Norway is rich.

Norway created a sovereign wealth fund as a national savings account in the early 1990s. The first deposit was made in 1996. In 2001 — at the peak of production — Norway adopted a rule that only the money generated by the expected return on the fund over time could be spent by the government, not the capital in the fund. That expected annualized return was originally set at four percent, later lowered to three percent. So most of Norway’s oil money was not consumed in the present. It was saved. And Norway’s estimates of how much money the fund would generate were severely understated. As a result, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund is today the largest in the world. It is currently worth around USD$2.1 trillion dollars.

Norway: That mountain is Norway’s cash.

So Norway recognized that oil was a temporary windfall that wouldn’t last more than several decades and it saved most of that windfall to ensure the prosperity of Norwegians for generations to come. That’s serious long-term thinking.

But everyone has problems and Norway, too, has a problem: It has too much money. Seriously. Its fund has grown so spectacularly that the amount of money generated by the cap of three percent has soared to such an extent that government spending and policy is having deleterious effects on Norway’s long-term economic competitiveness. So the great debate in Norway these days is what to do about all that money.

Do I have to mention that Alberta created its own sovereign wealth fund — the Heritage Fund — in 1976? Unlike Norway, however, Alberta mostly decided to spend its oil revenues on keeping taxes low and spending high. So its fund is now worth about $30 billion.

I’ll spare you the math: Norway’s fund is 70 times larger than Alberta’s.

And Alberta is not debating how to cope with its immense wealth.

While I’m on the subject of Norway, I should put in a word for Denmark, the home of my co-author. Denmark’s population is around six million. Its total land area is around 43,000 square kilometres, considerably less than Nova Scotia. Its most impressive resource endowment is its 1.4 million cows. And yet, as Bent Flyvbjerg likes to note, the list of Danish companies that are major players around the world is remarkably long — Maersk, Novo Nordisk, Lego, Carlsberg, DSV, Pandora, and Vestas. Denmark effectively invented the offshore wind industry and its companies, led by Ørsted, are major players worldwide.

The reasons for Denmark’s success are complex, naturally, but they surely include ingenuity and a willingness to take risks. Copenhagen’s handling of a most prosaic problem — how to dispose of trash where land is scarce — illustrates nicely: The city decided to build an incinerator using advanced low-emissions technology. The heat generated by incineration can be used to power steam turbines that generate electricity, or it can be distributed through a network of pipes to provide heat in Copenhagen, with the plant able to switch back and forth between the modes as demand requires. And the Danes went one step further still — designing the whole installation to provide an outdoor sports and recreation facility with an artificial ski slope, a climbing wall, and a hiking path.

United Arab Emirates

Now, if your tastes in big projects run more to the grandiose, you don’t want understated-if-ingenious Denmark. You want the United Arab Emirates, home of Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

The emirates aren’t known for their history, but they have quite a lot of it. In the 19th century, when Britain’s Royal Navy dominated the Persian Gulf, several emirates signed protective agreements, or “truces,” with Britain, and became known as the “Trucial States,” and this became the foundation of what is now the United Arab Emirates. The Trucial States were minor entities with tiny populations scraping out a living where the Arabian desert met the Persian Gulf. The only export industry was pearl diving — which was effectively wiped out by the Great Depression and the Japanese introduction of cultured pearls. From then until the 1960s, what became the United Arab Emirates was a poor, obscure scrap of land that was — to use a Norwegian folk expression for a land beyond the known world — east of the sun and west of the moon.

In the 1960s, oil was discovered and production started Today, the United Arab Emirates is a struggle to put into words. Dubai and Abu Dhabi are staggering clusters of spectacular skyscrapers interspersed with some of the most ambitious architectural experiments attempted anywhere. The UAE has become a second home for the global rich, a lodestone for tourism, and a financial centre, with a dazzling array of projects and enterprises and schemes in various stages of development. While I was in the UAE, I took a ride in an electric car that put Tesla to shame. A Chinese design, it was made in a UAE factory.

The dusty desert flyspeck known as Dubai.

From an obscure patch of desert to a real-world, live-action enactment of The Jetsons in one human lifetime is feat dizzying to contemplate.

I’ve made this point occasionally and invariably someone rolls his eyes. “Well, sure,” comes the response, “with enough oil money you can do anything.”

Some months later, I went to Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia

My reaction was the same.

At the direction of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia is undertaking an array of economic and cultural diversification projects called “Saudi Vision 2030.” For the Saudis, the term “megaproject” is insufficient. They’re doing “gigaprojects” of such scale and ambition they often sound like they were lifted from early 20th-century science fiction.

I don’t doubt some will fail. Maybe many. Failure is essentially inevitable when you genuinely push at the limits of what’s possible, after all. But pushing the limits is how we expand what’s possible. Project Apollo is remembered as a triumph for sending a man to the moon and returning him safely, in Kennedy’s immortal words, yet the first Apollo mission ended with the incineration of a rocket and three astronauts.

But again the objection is obvious. They’re awash in oil, you say. If your country wins the geological lottery, you get rich. It’s that simple. Or so we often assume.

But consider the names of a few other countries which possess major oil reserves: Venezuela. Nigeria. South Sudan. Angola. Libya. Iraq. Each has lots of oil. Each is desperately poor. Each has good reason to fear the future.

The simple truth is that oil can as easily be a curse as a blessing. To turn black ooze in the ground into shiny cities, dazzling projects, and promising futures takes sustained skill and vision. So, no, I don’t think we have nothing to learn from the UAE or Saudi Arabia.

And to underscore the point, take a look at the following chart of the world’s leading oil producers.

Canada is number four. We’re in the big league. Not far behind Saudi Arabia. Well ahead of the UAE. And we’ve been in the big league for decades.

I’m tempted to say “where’s our Dubai?” but I don’t want readers to think so literally. The UAE and Saudi Arabia are autocracies, and in autocracies rulers can make things happen with a nod. Democracies are messier, but democracies have compensating strengths. And democracies are unlikely to prioritize the glitzy spectacles that are so popular among Persian Gulf rulers. The point of my tour d’ horizon is not whether Canada is doing what others with comparable resources are doing. The point is Canada’s potential to do great things. We can discuss what great things we should tackle. But first we need to recognize our own potential.

Canada has staggering potential.

We have 41 million people, more than California. Those people are highly educated, skilled, diverse, open-hearted, and delightfully polite.

We have sovereignty over half a continent and all its resources. We are the world’s fourth-largest producer of oil, aluminum, and nickel. The fifth-largest natural gas producer. The second-largest producer of uranium. The world’s largest producer of potash, the mineral that feeds the world.

In Auschwitz, property taken from prisoners was stored in warehouses. Inmates dubbed those warehouses “Kanada,” the German spelling of Canada — because to them Canada was a remote land of unimaginable wealth and abundance.

What have we done with all our wealth and abundance? So much less than we could.

I’m not going to run down my country. If the purpose of a nation is to provide the conditions that allow its people to flourish, Canada is a successful country. Much has been accomplished.

But do we have a sovereign wealth fund like Norway? We don’t. We could have. But we don’t.

After looking at Iceland, can we truly say we have made the most of our natural resources? Not remotely.

Are we building futuristic cities or attempting anything like the other mind-blowing projects in UAE and Saudi Arabia? No. Does a project as ingenious and innovative as Copenhagen’s incinerator sound like something we would do in Canada? Sadly, no.

Is there a long list of Canadian companies that are major global players in their industries? No. Canadian successes get to a certain size and sell out to multinationals from elsewhere. Or the people with the vision to build such companies leave to turn their visions into reality elsewhere. If you want to see a long list, assemble all the names of Canadians who left Canada to do amazing things, or whose amazing work is being capitalized on elsewhere.

Is Canada enriched by the fact that architecture’s biggest global rock star, Frank Gehry, was born and raised in Canada if Gehry lives and works in California and his commissions come from everywhere but Canada? Not really.

Does it make the slightest difference to Canada that three of the pioneers of artificial intelligence — Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Richard Sutton — did their history-making work in Canada if AI is almost exclusively developed and shipped to the world by Silicon Valley and China? I don’t think so.

Let’s be blunt: Canada punches far below its weight.

Why? Because for so long that was enough. Let the Americans lead. Let the Americans be innovative and risk-taking. Let the Americans be masters of the universe. We will assist the masters, and as the good and loyal retainers we are, we will be rewarded with security and abundance.

And we were. For decades. It was so easy. Good enough was good enough. No need to dream and be ambitious. No need to take risks. Just be nice, helpful neighbours and we need never worry about threats to sovereignty, life, or wealth. Life was sweet.

Then came Donald Trump to demonstrate that there is a downside to subordination.

It wasn’t always this way. In 1940, Canada had a population of only eleven million. Its armament industry was trivial. But confronted with the greatest war in history, Canada got serious.

We produced 600 ships, 16,400 aircraft, and 815,729 military vehicles. At a time when the Allies were desperate for minerals to turn into weapons, Canada supplied 40 percent of Allied aluminum (most often used in warplanes), 95 percent of Allied nickel, and much of the uranium. “Uranium?” you ask. Canada played an important role in the Manhattan Project, not that anyone, American or Canadian, ever mentions it.

On D-Day, one of the five beaches taken by the Allies was taken by Canadians. By the war’s end, Canada’s Royal Canadian Navy, starting from close to nothing, was the third-largest in the world. Our Royal Canadian Air Force was the fourth-largest. An incredible 10 percent of the entire population served in uniform.

This transformation created whole new industries and corporations, notably in aerospace, which designed and produced cutting-edge technology — until we decided it was easier to let the Americans lead and to buy American weapons when directed to do so by Americans. So we scrapped the Avro Arrow and bought the Bomarc missile, as the Americans asked. When John Diefenbaker balked at arming the Bomarc with nuclear warheads, the Americans were angered; Canada was an insufficiently loyal retainer. But that gradually changed with time.

The standard operating procedure emerged slowly but steadily: The Americans decide what kit gets made, they make it, we buy it, and our troops train and operate with Americans, adopting their doctrines, their culture, their salutes. Canada’s only innovation on this score was freeloading. We were good at that. We cut and cut and cut military spending and pocketed the savings. This naturally led to the US military taking the lead in more and more roles we abandoned. Inevitably, the Canadian military came to see itself not so much as the armed force of a fully sovereign nation but as a sort of adjunct to the US military, which made “interoperability” the overriding concern. This is how we got the point where the RCAF is determined to buy F-35s from the United States at the very same time that the American head of state is loudly threatening Canada’s sovereignty. To use a deliberately inflammatory metaphor, that’s like the Polish Air Force insisting in 1937 that the government should buy Messerschmitts even as the German head of state loudly demands “revisions” of the German-Polish border. (In reality, the Polish Air Force developed and flew Polish planes.) It doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense — but decades of experience and habit have etched such deep mental grooves in the minds of generals that it’s hard for them to imagine any other way. Or to imagine there could ever be a need to find another way.

You know another northern country that builds its own cutting-edge fighter jets and mobile artillery and other sophisticated military gear? Sweden. Population ten million. Sweden never accepted security and prosperity in exchange for loyal service as an American retainer, so Sweden is in the position Canada could have been in if we had refused to take the easy way out.

Now, I don’t want to claim any prescience here. I’m a big free trader. I support collective security. And I certainly never imagined an American president could be such a thug as to threaten Canada’s existence.

But being surprised by history is no shame. History surprises everyone, eventually. The only shame lies in refusing to see what has happened, in not understanding the gravity of the change, and not responding with proportionate energy and determination.

That’s where Canada is now. We’ve been surprised. How will we respond?

Longtime readers will know partisan politics gives me hives so I’m reluctant to say anything about leaders, parties, and platforms. But sometimes there is no choice. As now.

I’m impressed by Mark Carney. In my view, he’s saying and doing all the right things. Some critics complain his actions are insufficiently bold and swift, that he needs to move faster. I’m dubious. These criticisms are usually delivered with lots of hand-waving but little in the way of practical actions the prime minister can take to accelerate change. What Canada must pull off is nothing less than a fundamental shift in the economic, military, and geopolitical position this country has held for the better part of a century, all while ducking the mad outbursts of the lunatic in the White House. To think something like that can be accomplished in six months is batty. (And the opposition? I haven’t heard the leader of any party say one damned constructive word. These are serious times. Get serious, people.)

But still, the critics have the right idea. We need to push. Hard. Get ambitious as hell. Demanding more — even being unreasonable about it — is not at all a bad thing. To use an inappropriately American reference, you know that scene in Patton where the general is enraged to discover his column has stopped because a donkey on a bridge won’t move? Shoot the fucking donkey. Dump the body. Move on. That’s the spirit we need now.

The great Canadian habit of saying “no” must end. Saying “no” now could kill the country. You don’t like a proposal? Propose an alternative. Find something to say “yes” to. And get to work.

Want inspiration? Visit Iceland. For a thousand years, farmers shivered in the cold and struggled to survive. Now they’re brilliant, creative risk-takers. Why? Because they never had it easy for even one damned minute of their existence. When they see a good idea or opportunity they grab it like starving man grabs roast mutton. Iceland has fewer people than Scarborough. They own a rock in the North Atlantic. But Iceland is rich and has a global presence. If Canada’s punch were proportionate to Iceland’s we could invade the United States, take the White House, and give Donald Trump history’s most epic wedgie.

This is bigger than any prime minister. Bigger than any government. For ages I joked that Canada’s national motto was “good enough.” Good enough isn’t good enough any more. Good enough will be the death of our country.

Canadians need to get scared, desperate, and hungry. Angry is good, too.

This is the time to dream big and take risks. All of us. Now. And I think most Canadians get that.

I haven’t only been travelling around the world talking about getting big things done. I’ve also been travelling around Canada. And when I speak to people who do big things for a living — the engineers and architects and construction companies — I hear an excitement I’ve never heard before. They want to say “yes.” They want to imagine crazy stuff like city garbage incinerators that double as ski hills. They want to build a wild new Frank Gehry tower in Canada. What a blast that would be.

That’s the thing about daring to reach higher. It’s uncomfortable. You may fail. You may fall down and break bones and rue the day. But it’s a lot more exciting than forever playing it safe.

You want to feel alive? Remember the SAS motto and make it your own: Who dares wins.

Let’s go, Canada.