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The AI era represents the biggest technological shift since the printing press. Canada helped pioneer the research behind it. Now comes the harder part: turning that research into companies that can compete and win on the global stage.

Read the full memo: www.buildcanada.com/memos/champi...

Fast-track immigration and offer financial incentives to attract experienced leaders from abroad. Build "AI Factories"—data centers with thousands of specialized computer chips—and give Canadian companies priority access. Reform the tax system to match American incentives for investors and founders.

To get there will require major changes. Create a Canadian Prosperity Fund—a government-backed investment fund that can write $50–500 million checks into promising Canadian companies. Make the federal government a "first customer" by directing departments to buy Canadian technology.

The solution is a national mission — "10x." Canada should aim to create 1 centacorn (a company worth $100 billion or more), 10 decacorns (worth $10 billion+), and 100 unicorns (worth $1 billion+) within 10 years. This could create over 200,000 high-skilled jobs.

This "scaling gap." comes from: a lack of late-stage investment capital, a small market for government and corporate customers willing to buy Canadian, low supply of experienced senior leaders, high friction access to cutting-edge research, and limited computing power for building AI systems.

His full story from community member Jorge Velez: buildcanada.com/great-canadian-builders/roy-thomson

buildcanada.substack.com/p/spreading-...

Read the full memo: www.buildcanada.com/memos/moonsh...

5. Homelessness: Cut the time from first contact to stable housing by 90% by integrating shelter data, benefits systems, and housing matching.

4. Defence: Reduce time to detect and classify airspace or maritime incursions by 90% through multi-sensor fusion and automated tracking.

3. Natural Resources: Shrink wildfire and oil spill response time by 90% using sensor networks, drone verification, and AI dispatch.

2. Education: Reduce Grade 3 reading failure by 90% through adaptive screening, personalized tutoring, and teacher support tools.

1. Healthcare: Cut referral-to-treatment time by 90% using AI for triage, scheduling, and early detection.

If Canada were to achieve the five moonshots, we would become a world leader in these services and transform our infrastructure for adopting AI:

Successful moonshots have five qualities: they are ambitious, benefit many Canadians, require AI to succeed, build infrastructure other projects can use, and cannot be delivered by the private sector alone.

Moonshots work because they force system-wide change. A single bold target—like cutting healthcare wait times by 90%—requires redesigning every part of the system with the latest technology to reduce redundancy and increase productivity.

The questions around the roll out of AI are not whether Canada leads in AI per se, but whether Canadians get faster healthcare, better education, and stronger defence.

The way to approach this is by setting aspirational, measurable, high impact goals i.e. moonshots.

Full story from Paul Austin-Menear here: www.buildcanada.com/great-canadian-builders/sir-sandford-fleming