Canada has a paradox that I have been talking about for a long time.

We are home to most of the world’s AI godfathers. We have Nobel Prize winners, world-class researchers, and some of the most respected engineering schools on the planet. Those institutions attract exceptional students from around the world. And in turn, Canada trains some of the best engineering talent anywhere.

Yet an increasing number of those graduates — now approaching 80% — leave after convocation.

With them go the startups they might have built, the economic value they might have created, and the wealth that could have stayed here. We all know the largest and most valuable companies are technology companies, and they are based in the United States. Many of them were co-founded or led by Canadians.

It is a story of could have been, would have been, and should have been.

I was recently invited to speak at the Deans of Engineering Conference in Winnipeg. I want to share the core of what I said, because I think this conversation matters well beyond that room.

The root cause is not what most people think

The easy explanations are talent, capital, and policy. We hear them constantly. They are not wrong, but they are not the root cause.

The root cause is a mindset.

Clearly, we do not have a shortage of ambition or ability. One fundamental issue stands out — yet very few people talk about it, let alone address it. We have collectively learned to think like suppliers, not owners.

Without the owner mindset, we unintentionally and subconsciously optimize for producing great talent for other countries, rather than building a stake in where that talent goes and what it creates.

This is the supplier mindset made visible.

Let me illustrate with a banana

I use a banana analogy in my talks because it makes the concept concrete.

If you put money and a banana in front of a monkey, the monkey takes the banana. It does not know that money can buy many bananas. That insight comes from Jack Ma, who used this analogy to compare the mindset of someone who grabs a job versus someone who builds a company.

Jobs are bananas. They are real, they matter, and they feed people. A banana feeds you once. Cash feeds you many times.

But the lessons go further.

A banana tree is better than a banana because it can feed you forever. Ownership compounds; wages do not. A banana farm is better than a tree — because participation as a supplier is not enough; ownership of the platform is the real prize. And a store is better than a farm, because the store owns the customer relationship and captures the value that flows through the entire chain.

This is the progression from employee thinking to owner thinking. From banana to store. From grabbing to owning.

Canada has been grabbing bananas

Let me make this concrete with two examples — one personal, one national.

The Wattpad calculation. When Wattpad was acquired for US$660 million, the headline was a Canadian success story. And in many ways, it was. But here is the number nobody talks about. By the time of the acquisition, roughly half of the company was owned by Canadians. When the deal closed, about US$330 million in economic value left the country — because we had raised capital from outside Canada to build it.

Wattpad’s annual payroll was roughly US$30 million. Not small. But compared to the acquisition price, it is a fraction. Ownership creates far more value than employment. Jobs matter. Entrepreneurship matters. But nothing compares to owning world-class companies.

The auto industry analogy. Many people say Canada has a strong auto industry. We do not. We have a strong auto supplier industry. That is not the same thing. Our auto suppliers — collectively — are worth a fraction of GM, Ford, or Toyota. They build the factories, employ the workers, and take on the operational risk. When the EV transition stalled, the suppliers’ brand new facilities went quiet. When the majors slowed production, the layoffs rippled through.

The supplier bears the downside. The owner captures the upside and sets the rules.

And when the Canadian government went to attract EV investment, what did we do? We signed deals to become suppliers again — subsidized by Canadian taxpayers, while the ownership, brand, and margin stayed elsewhere. We took the risk but not the profit.

This is the supplier mindset at a national scale.

The question nobody asks clearly enough

Here is the hinge question: what does winning actually look like?

The supplier mindset and the owner mindset do not just lead to different outcomes. They lead to completely different definitions of winning.

If you are a supplier, sending your best researchers to OpenAI is a win. You produced world-class talent. Mission accomplished. That belongs in the annual report.

If you are an owner, that is a loss. You invested in that person for years, and you ended up owning nothing. The outcome looks identical from the outside — a brilliant Canadian thriving on the world stage — but the two mindsets score it completely differently.

Until we agree on what winning actually means, we will keep celebrating losses as victories.

Where the mindset gets formed

Here is what I have come to believe: the supplier mindset is not learned on the job. It is learned in school.

The mental model a student builds about what success looks like — a FAANG job offer, a US grad school acceptance, a signing bonus from a company they can brag about — is set before they ever enter the workforce.

In the US, building a unicorn startup is Plan A. Getting a job at Google is Plan B. In Canada, getting a job at Google — or going to the US — is Plan A. Building a startup, let alone a unicorn, is often not even in the equation.

That quote is from a world-class Canadian AI scientist who is now at a US company. It landed hard when I first heard it, because it is accurate.

The deans are the front line

I said something direct to the room in Winnipeg that I want to say here too.

The founders of most of Canada’s future tech giants are sitting in engineering classrooms right now. The deans who lead those schools are the single most underleveraged force in Canada’s innovation economy.

Here is why this is also in the deans’ own interest. If their students build world-class companies and keep them here, those companies will forever be associated with that school. That is a legacy that compounds for decades. The next crop of students is inspired by the tech giants that exist. Right now, leading universities outside of Canada are winning that recruitment battle — not because their engineering programs are better, but because the companies their graduates built are more visible, more celebrated, and more aspirational.

Think about OpenAI. It was co-founded by a University of Toronto alumnus. Most people associate it with Silicon Valley.

That association is not fixed. It is a choice, made one graduating class at a time.

This is not only about encouraging entrepreneurship

I want to be precise here, because there is a version of this argument that deans hear all the time and that I think misses the point.

Many engineering schools already encourage entrepreneurship. Hackathons. Incubators. Pitch competitions. These are necessary. But they do not define what success looks like. And in a strange way, encouraging entrepreneurship is still a supplier mindset — we are producing entrepreneurs for the ecosystem and hoping something sticks.

The real call to action is different. It is to start and scale world-class companies here in Canada.

That is a higher bar. A different ambition. A fundamentally different culture to build. It means celebrating the founder who builds a billion-dollar Canadian company with the same institutional pride as the researcher who wins a Nobel Prize. It means changing what the school defines as a win — not only placements, publications, and patents, but also companies that stay, scale, and own their category.

The window is now

I have saved the most important point for last.

We lost Game 1. Canada invented modern AI. The most important AI companies are almost all based in the US. That window has closed.

But Game 2 is underway. Quantum computing. Robotics. Physical AI. Space. Advanced manufacturing. Smart energy. Just to name a few. Canada has deep roots in all of these — world-class labs, exceptional researchers, and early-stage companies that are genuinely competitive.

Here is what is different about Game 2: you cannot pack up a quantum computing facility or a robotics lab and move it to San Francisco. Unlike software, the physical infrastructure is sticky. The talent clusters around it. The companies that emerge will be rooted where the labs are.

And the ground-level signal I am seeing is genuinely encouraging. I have never met more professors and researchers who want to start companies — and who want to do it in Canada. That is new. That is meaningful.

The conditions are finally aligned to address the root problem, not just the symptoms. But the only trophy that ultimately matters is homegrown, world-class companies. And we can only win Game 2 — and ultimately the championship — if we build the owner mindset now, starting with the people who shape how the next generation of engineers think about what success looks like.

Addressing the supplier mindset and turning it into an owner mindset can create the domino effect that turns Canada’s bragging rights into lasting economic wins.

That is the game we can win.