As the economy shows signs of sputtering to life, we wonder: What's next? What's ahead for Canada?
In this roundtable discussion, we explore ways of moving the economy forward with regards to leadership, restoring trust to the financial system and new opportunities.
The panel includes Pierre Pettigrew, former Minister of Foreign Affairs and former vice-president of Samson Belair/Deloitte & Touche International; Don Tapscott, chairman of business think tank nGenera Insight and author of Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World ; Doug Steiner, chairman and CEO of Perimeter Financial Corp.; and Jennifer White, entrepreneur-in-residence at MaRS Discovery District. The moderator is Noel Hulsman, special reports editor for Report on Business.
This discussion has been edited.
Hulsman: How do you define this period we're in and what is the way forward?
Tapscott: This is not just a recession. It's a punctuation point in history. The failure of the financial system is reflective of something much bigger. Many of the institutions in our society have come to the end of their life cycle. Our approach to intellectual property needs a new global operandi.
Pettigrew: I believe the whole Thatcher/Reagan era that brought about a divorce between government and market has collapsed – the conservative approach that depicted government as the enemy of the good, as hindering business, that believed markets should make all the calls and decisions.
Tapscott: The financial crisis shows that the nation-state is not exactly the right fit to address problems like that. Our models of government itself are now being challenged.
Pettigrew: Canada maintained a better balance of market and government than anywhere else. That explains why we did a lot better in the last year and a half. None of the problems we're having in Canada originate from Canada. That is very important for business to understand.
Tapscott: Anyone who thinks that we're going to come out of this crisis and it'll be back to business as usual is making a mistake.
Hulsman Do you see this as an opportunity to push out and create a new era?
White: The youth generation sees this as a fundamental changing time but for good. A lot of businesses are still thriving, whether in North America or globally. Having spent time in East Africa and Europe, I see entrepreneurship at its height. People are saying there are some financial problems with the institutions but that it's not going to stop their dreams of what they can do to move economies in this market. Right now, there are Africans and people in India who are building small businesses, Europeans who are looking at how they can scale their businesses. That's where we're going to find our next period, which I think is going to be a bottom-up approach to correcting some of the ills that the crisis has brought about.
Steiner: In a true crisis, people have to change their behaviours for reasons they can't control themselves – like job loss, necessary migration and when economic values of assets that people own are worth less than their replacement value. But what happens in the community is that crisis turns into opportunity.
Hulsman: Who do you see as having to change?
Tapscott: This crisis was largely created by business leaders of our corporations and to some extent by government. We need a new modus operandi for the financial services industry based on a new set of principles.
