The CTI Review

Canada’s trajectory over the next decade is not predetermined. The structural advantages are real, but so are the structural risks. The choices made between 2026 and 2030 about housing, critical minerals, defence procurement, Indigenous partnership, and CUSMA positioning will compound in ways that are difficult to reverse before 2035. Two paths. One is available right now.

The Carney government’s Defence Industrial Strategy commits $500 billion and structurally advantages Canadian firms for the first time in decades. The Build-Partner-Buy framework creates mandatory Canadian content requirements and a Defence Investment Agency with a domestic capacity mandate. The companies that position now will shape the supply chains of the next two decades.

Canada's lithium reserves could supply half of global demand to 2050. Its grid is 84% non-emitting. The IEA ranked Canada first globally for EV supply chain potential in 2024. The question is whether Canada converts structural advantage into industrial capacity before the window closes. CTI tracks the gap between investment signal and operational outcome.

Canada's fisheries generate C$7 billion in landed value and export 85% of production. They are also constitutionally intertwined with Mi’kmaq and coastal Indigenous treaty rights still not fully implemented 25 years after the Marshall decisions. The ocean economy is not just a fisheries story. It is one of the most consequential and least analyzed parts of the Canadian economy.

Canada trained the researchers behind modern deep learning. Montreal and Toronto are globally significant AI research centres. Only 12% of Canadian businesses use AI to deliver goods or services, the lowest rate in the G7. The Cohere merger with a German company is only the most recent example of Canadian AI commercialization value accruing outside Canada. This is not an accident.

Canada contributed C$223 billion in digital GDP in 2024. It leads the G7 in AI research output. It holds the lowest publicly available AI compute infrastructure of any G7 country. Only 12% of Canadian businesses use AI to deliver services. The gap between what Canada has built in research and what it has captured commercially is the central digital economy challenge of the decade.

The care workforce is not underpaid by accident. It is underpaid because it was historically performed by women without compensation, and that history persists in the wage structure today. The economic case for changing this is not primarily about justice. It is about whether Canada can build the care workforce its aging population requires in the next five to eight years.

Canada’s property tax system was built for post-war suburbs and small-town service delivery. Every comparable jurisdiction in the developed world has diversified municipal revenue commensurate with economic scale. Canada maintained a heritage fiscal structure and asked it to fund a G7 metropolitan economy. That gap compounds every year.

The criticism of Canada’s pension funds for investing abroad misattributes cause. The Maple Eight didn’t leave Canada. Canada didn’t build enough investable projects for them to stay. Airport governance reform, the energy transition pipeline, and the CDPQ model are the specific, achievable steps toward changing that.

The C$10 billion annual restriction penalty is hidden by a system that performs well enough that no one stops to count the cost. The record 2025 FDI headline driven by a UK swing factor and M&A activity is not evidence that the structural drag doesn’t exist. The window for reform has not been wider in thirty years.

Canada enters the second half of the 2020s with resource wealth the world urgently needs, trade agreement access covering more than 60 countries, and a defence industrial base the NATO alliance is prepared to fund. What is not guaranteed is whether policy and institutional capacity will rise to meet that potential. CTI frames the eleven structural dimensions that will define the decade.

The 500,000 homes per year target is the most ambitious residential construction commitment in Canadian history. Current pace: 259,000 units annually. The gap is not attributable to a lack of political will. It is attributable to a productivity crisis, a fiscal commitment being walked back, and a softwood lumber dispute embedded in every construction budget in the country.

Canadian municipalities own 60% of the country’s public infrastructure and receive 10% of government revenue. The Toronto CMA generates 20% of Canada’s GDP. Transit costs 3 to 5 times more per kilometre in Canadian cities than in peer systems. CTI examines the fiscal architecture question at the root of Canada’s urban productivity gap.

Paid care work generates at least 13% of Canada’s GDP and 22% of all employment. The C$10-per-day childcare system generated C$32 billion in additional GDP in 2024. The federal decision to cut temporary residents below 5% of population by 2027 is now producing staffing shortfalls across home care, long-term care, and early childhood education.

Indigenous-owned businesses generate more than C$100 billion annually in GDP across Canada. The trajectory has shifted from participation and employment toward ownership and governance. This shift is documented in project approval records, First Nations Finance Authority bond data, and federal procurement audits.

Canada manages C$4.5 trillion in pension assets, third globally. The Maple Eight are fully funded, generate returns that outperform their global peers, and invest approximately 12 cents of every dollar in Canadian assets. The repricing of geopolitical risk and the scale of Canada’s infrastructure pipeline are changing that calculus.

Foreign direct investment into Canada reached C$96.8 billion in 2025, highest since 2007. Canada ranks second in the G20 for FDI stock as a share of GDP. It also maintains foreign ownership restrictions in telecoms, airlines, and financial services that cost C$10 billion annually in foregone productivity.

The Carney government's positioning of Canada as a nation that builds — not just extracts and exports — represents a genuine reorientation in how federal economic policy frames itself. CTI examines what that framing means in practice across trade, infrastructure, and industrial strategy, and where the gap between ambition and delivery is already visible.

The proposal for a Canadian sovereign wealth fund has moved from think-tank discussion to active federal consideration. CTI examines the structure, the international precedents, and what a well-designed fund could mean for Canadian businesses, institutional investors, and the long-term management of resource revenues.