MICHAEL LITT: What have you learned from the technology ecosystem and the innovation ecosystem?

RT HON. JUSTIN TRUDEAU: Well, Canada’s always been an innovative country. To make it through our winters and our long nights we’ve had to figure out how to innovate, we’ve had to figure out how to do things better, do things more efficiently, do new things. Even in the natural resources sector, we’ve always had to and we’ve always been able to be really thoughtful and innovative and creative and use science and research to advance our ways of succeeding, and being competitive because of geography, because of population, the economies of scale, we’ve in many cases had to become more efficient and more innovative than our natural resource competitors around the world. Even on environment, if we’ve got higher standards we have to try and figure out how to compete with people with lower environmental standards. So there’s always been an element of innovation to Canada.

What we’re seeing now is instead of having innovation that is natural-resources-based or an add-on to other things we’re doing, we have a generation of entrepreneurs, of thinkers, of leaders who realize that innovation, as you say, can be a driver in and of itself in terms of how it directly affects people and how it directly improves our lives, and that’s going to be the story of the coming decades.
We know there’s massive disruptions around automation, around AI, around all the various transformations going on in our workplace, and making sure that we understand that, you know, what people can do better than any computer program has to do with creativity, collaboration, inspiration, innovation, and getting as many young Canadians and Canadians of all ages able to access the kind of training, learning, innovation, and ecosystem to support going from an idea to, you know, actually marketing it is exactly what we want to see.