There's little hope for real innovation in Canada without a clear vision, big ambitions and courageous leadership

Two Canadian business headlines have really frustrated me in the past few days.

Neither of them really come as a huge surprise. Canada isn't exactly known for being a pioneering country, lagging behind the UK and Europe on Open Banking where it has been a reality for a couple of years now. And the Sidewalk Labs thing has been a saga of conflict mostly aired in public for a little while now, you just knew it wouldn't end well.

I've wanted to live in Canada since my first trip here as a 7 year old to Edmonton (yeah, a trip to Edmonton and I still fancied living here, I know) and that became real a few years ago when I set up Market Gravity in Toronto just prior to being acquired by Deloitte. I'd also spent a lot of time in Moncton and Calgary before that and still wanted to come here so I must have been committed!

I used to be full of optimism that Canada was becoming the world's innovation lab, a place that is big enough, but small enough to be able to test something in a market that's pretty diverse, representative enough to prove something here before you take it to the US but small enough that nobody will really know if it failed. I still think a few multinationals continue to do this in some way shame or form.

Domestically it's a different story. For the most part, domestic Canadian companies, well the big ones, are quite well protected - airlines, banks, telecoms are pretty well protected by a conservative and protectionist regulatory environment. And then we have those American businesses that have a Canadian subsidiary ... someone recently described the leaders of these businesses as "puppets".

While talking with someone I consider an expert when it comes to corporate innovation in the UK and has spent a bit of time in Canada too, put it differently, suggesting Canadian leaders like to signal innovation, attend a few events at MaRS, slap their logo on a few events, speak on a few panels, tick the box on the balanced score card and move up the ladder onto the next role. I think I'll annoy a few friends saying this but it's pretty true. You get promoted in Canada by following the rules and not toeing the line, rarely are you rewarded for being the maverick. In the UK, I've found the really successful people in big businesses are the ones who do something differently.

And then we have the startup scene where Canada is actually quite flush, but if you dig a little deeper and how many truly successful companies has Canada created on the global stage? Shopify, yep. Very good. Beyond that, not much.

The same goes for Canadian politics. For the most part, there hasn't been anything remotely interesting, world leading, different, scandalous, crazy or stupid happen in Canadian politics. Justin Trudeau's recent troubles and scandals wouldn't even make the news in the UK. A notable exception might be the legalization of cannabis, though Uruguay and certain US states got there first, nor has it gone all that smoothly ... then again Canada did give us a laugh with Rob Ford I suppose.

Laggards in Open Banking

So to the first of those headlines on open banking. We've been talking about open banking for a while now, in some places like the UK it's already a reality, albeit one that people are still figuring out what it means in reality. Big banks don't like open banking, mostly because it puts them at risk to fintechs nipping around the edges of their business and finding pockets of value which can be disrupted.

Banking in Canada is a weird market, for the most part it's a closed loop oligopoly of the big 5 or 6 banks that will very proudly tell you how they kept Canadians' money safe during the last financial crisis. This is pretty good in some ways, Canadians don't despise the big banks like the Brits or Americans do, but at the same time, it hasn't really been exposed to them how they're being ripped off and how it could be so much better elsewhere. In Canada, we still use cheques! I hadn't written a cheque until I moved here at the age of 28, I had to Google how to do it.

This might seem like a minor thing but it's just one example of the archaic way of doing business in Canada. Cheques are an expensive and time consuming way of managing money, they give banks a justification to charge wild fees to their customers with most paying about $100 a year just for a basic chequing facility. In the UK that would be free.

In Canada they get away with it thanks to it being basically impossible to set up a new bank here. Slowly some challengers are emerging but getting a licence is hard, kinda like it was in the UK pre-2014. Because of that, why would a big 6 bank in Canada innovate? If you're making $3bn a quarter, the threat of new entrants is low and you've got a government that insulates you.

Now that might sound OK, but I don't see this as tenable. At some point will come a big economic shock, something will change and then those years of doing nothing will come back to hurt you.

"In a few months, we won’t be saying that Canada's risk-averse approach in financial services has kept us in good stead." - Sue Britton, Fintech Growth Syndicate

At that's where we are today, under the guise of the current events with Covid-19, consultations on what open banking will look like in Canada have been pushed back again. Now I'm doing a decent enough job of working remotely, I think, and so are millions of Canadians across the country, so why can't the consultations take place in the same manner? I know Canada loves its bank branches, while writing this I had to go to a bank branch to show a paper document that a different department of the very same bank had issued to me digitally in the first place. Being risk averse might have helped before, but being so far behind the curve is going to be a much bigger risk into the future.

There's a good reason that despite having a surprisingly big fintech scene, no Canadian fintech has made an impact on the global stage. The ecosystem to support them domestically, prove themselves and then go beyond doesn't exist here like it does elsewhere. Unless something changes, you will never see a Monzo, Thought Machine, Revolut, TransferWise, OnDeck, Coconut and I could go on made here.

Economic populism

I'll flip to the second headline now, and probably the more frustrating one, as Sidewalk Labs pulled out from the project on Toronto's waterfront. What I think really struck me from this wasn't the fact Sidewalk Labs walked away from the project, we kinda saw that coming with how their ambition and agenda just didn't fit that of the city. I mean, if you get into bed with Google, it's kinda obvious they are interested because of something to do with data. Now personally, I don't have much of a problem with this, in return for my data, Google gives me a pretty good experience. I recently had someone refer them to them as negative effort propositions, a bit like when we used to go to restaurants and Google would take the reservation and remind you when to leave to get there on time. Remember going out for dinner anyone?

Anyway, lots of people in Toronto are glad they've called it. Lots of the comments in LinkedIn posts was celebratory, how we can do so much better here using just Canadian companies, building a smart city domestically. Sounds lovely, yay Canada! Apart from it's basically economic populism.

First things first, as a city we've just spent the best part of 3 years wasting our time, the city's time, a globally leading company's time to get precisely nowhere. We want a smart city on our waterfront, cool, but we don't know what we want it to look like, how it will work, who will live/work/play/visit/shop there, we haven't created any sort of guidelines for the implications for data or privacy and we've seen a potential partner who would have paid for a lot of it walk away. Brilliant.

Toronto is a fascinating city, it's growing faster than pretty much anywhere else in North America, one of the most globally attractive cities in the world, and yet locally, it's led by people with seemingly no imagination or vision for what comes next. Normally cities in this situation would have big plans for taking advantage of being so attractive, not in Toronto. I googled Toronto and conservatism, it seems it's been an issue for a while. Maybe there's something in the water here.

"The wild and rabid Toryism of Toronto is, I speak seriously, appalling." - Charles Dickens, 1842

Anyway, my question for the city on the Sidewalk Labs news as I look out my apartment window at the Quayside site as I have done for about 3 years now and wonder 'what comes next?'. In China they'd have built that thing by now, in the UK we'd probably still be arguing over planning rules to be honest, Brits don't build things quickly anymore. But are we going to make something amazing, that other cities in the western world look at and think "wow!". I kinda doubt it, Toronto is a nice place to live but for the most part the architecture and urban planning is terrible. I'm sure there's people that can tell me why that is.

Anyway, I want to be positive. I actually really like living in Canada, it's a brilliant country for a lifestyle. It's not as politically mental as the US thankfully, the outdoors is beautiful, it's diverse ... but I'm just left with this feeling it could be so much better.

When naming my new business 'Now or Never', I did so because I believe we live in a world where the incumbents of industries are often swarming around the same things as their peers, new entrants are challenging the status quo and societal change is accelerating ... I didn't see Covid-19 coming I must add. But most organizations (be there companies, cities or even countries) now have a window, a moment, where with courage and guts, they can differentiate.

Real leadership requires courage, it's never going to be possible to please everyone. Normally when you do that, you end up pleasing nobody. My plea for Canada, is we are entering a now or never moment, a chance to stop being in the background, to not settle for following what happens elsewhere and to take the lead in this crazy world to be bold.

That means we need to embrace new ways of doing things, not be left behind. We need to be appealing to global companies bringing new ways of doing things to Canada, re-write the rules and regulations that make some of our biggest companies lazy, create local opportunities for the talent we have here to deploy their thinking before they call it and go elsewhere.

Whether you're a politician, executive, middle manager, front line employee, startup founder, student, investor or government worker ... now is the time to be bold.