The Centre for Civic Engagement

Sean Speer argues that AI may ultimately generate abundance, but the transition could be economically and politically destabilizing. The study emphasizes timing: rapid white-collar displacement could hit consumption, housing, tax revenues, welfare systems, and legitimacy before prices and entrepreneurship adjust. Policy should strengthen labour mobility, financial resilience, and institutional adaptation.

This study argues that Canada’s entrepreneurship engine is weakening, with falling self-employment, lower business entry rates, declining venture capital, and more founders moving to the United States. It attributes the decline to over-regulation, weak competition, hostile tax policy, government crowd-out, limited capital access, demographics, and weak scaling incentives.

This study argues that Canadians’ concern about violent crime is supported by Statistics Canada’s violent crime severity index. While overall crime severity has fallen since 2000, violent crime severity has risen sharply since the mid-2010s, reaching record or near-record highs across most provinces, territories, and major cities.

Canada’s productivity crisis is rooted in domestic policy failures and requires a comprehensive reform agenda. The study proposes six mutually reinforcing pillars: tax reform, regulatory modernization, stronger competition, trade-enabling infrastructure, immigration recalibration toward human capital, and public-sector and fiscal reform to restore investment, productivity, and economic growth.