The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
Mon, 17 Mar 2025
Jordan Peterson sits down with retired co-founder and co-CEO of Research in Motion, known predominantly for the BlackBerry. They discuss how Balsillie helped transition the world into the smartphone age, Canada’s faltering economic performance (well before Trump’s trade war), why America is taking these actions now, and the ideas of Mark Carney (Trudeau on steroids). Mr. Balsillie is the retired chairman and co-CEO of Research in Motion (BlackBerry), a technology company he scaled from an idea to $20 billion in sales globally. His private investment office includes global and domestic technology investments. He is the co-founder of the Institute for New Economic Thinking in New York and founder of the Council of Canadian Innovators based in Toronto, the Digital Governance Council in Ottawa, and the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, as well as the Centre for Digital Rights, the Balsillie School of International Affairs, the Arctic Research Foundation, and Canadian SHIELD Institute. He currently chairs the boards of CCI, CIGI, Innovation Asset Collective, and Digital Governance Council. He is also a member of the Board of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Advisory Board of the Stockholm Resilience Centre; an Honorary Captain (Navy) of the Royal Canadian Navy, and an advisor to Canada School of Public Service. This episode was filmed on March 7th, 2025. | Links | For Jim Balsillie: Read the article "We're All Economic Nationalist's Now" for a better understanding of how the U.S. and Canada trade https://nationalpost.com/opinion/we-are-all-economic-nationalists-now
Chapter 1: What are Canada’s economic challenges in relation to the U.S.?
President Trump has proclaimed that my country should become the 51st state.
We have brilliant innovators. We have brilliant researchers. We come up with earth-changing ideas.
What did we do wrong? What did we misunderstand? And what did we fail to apply moving forward?
So the number three AI research center in the world is in Edmonton. Number five is in Toronto. We gave essentially all that away to other US tech companies. I think Trump has made a strategic mistake because America's got an unbelievable deal from Canada.
You know, we actually have the opportunity to make this country roar if we choose wisely. What do you think needs to be done? Hello, everybody. This is a podcast that you might think of as primarily for Canadians, but it's really for anybody who's trying to understand the world economy. where Trump looms large.
It's been a particularly of the last 10 years that Canadian politics has become interesting internationally, not least because the things that are happening everywhere in the West effect everywhere else in the West. And so this is a good case in point.
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Chapter 2: How has Trump's presidency affected Canada?
Now, Canada is in a particularly strange position at the moment because President Trump has, first of all, proclaimed that my country should become the 51st state, and also lambasted us with some very heavy duty economic measures in the form of tariffs. And this has really put the cat among the canaries in Canada. And so the timing of this interview with my guest today could hardly be better.
I'm speaking with Jim Balsley, and Jim was co-CEO of Research in Motion, the inventors of the BlackBerry. And so Jim is responsible, for better or worse, for... transitioning that terrible word, the entire world into the smartphone age. And he was spectacularly successful as a businessman and an innovator and a Canadian businessman and innovator.
But I've known Jim for 15 years and he resigned from BlackBerry a good while ago and he's been equally successful as an entrepreneur and innovator since then, so it wasn't a one-shot wonder, large as that wonder was. Jim is one of the most reliable and good-natured and yet incisive and critically-minded thinkers that I've met, very well-connected, very competent.
A very good man, all things considered. And I'm not saying that lightly, given the importance of this discussion. I wanted to find someone I could bring to Canadians to discuss the perilous situation that we find ourselves in. And so we started the conversation really with an analysis of Canada's economic performance, which, to put it mildly, over the last 30 years, has not been good.
Chapter 3: What is the significance of Jim Balsillie's experience with BlackBerry?
We rank at the bottom of the pack with regards to the developed nations, and we're now making 60 cents for every dollar that the Americans make in terms of our production. That's not good, and the trend is downhill. And the prognosis by financial analysts is that we'll continue that downhill trend for the next 40 years. So that's not good.
And we face terribly high housing prices and a future that looks increasingly unstable and narrow, especially in comparison to the Americans. Not good. So I spent time with Jim analyzing why that's the case. And part of the reason is, is that we brought a resource... and classic production economy mentality to the realities of the last 30 years.
We've made this digital transformation and the rules of the new world are not the same as the rules of the old world. And we're not playing well in that new set of rules. First of all, partly because we're not actually helping formulate the rules to our benefit and we need to do that.
And so we talked about the shortcomings of a purely free market, hands-off libertarian approach to the new economy. And then we talked about Trump and what he's up to and why, what he's maneuvering towards and why we set ourself up to be susceptible to that. And then we talked, and this is equally relevant,
about the leadership options that Canada faces, which are very much akin to the leadership options faced by voters all around the world. On the one hand, the Liberal Party in Canada that's currently ruling and generally does in Canada, headed until recently by Justin Trudeau, has now had a replacement of leadership, that's pending tomorrow, and Mark Carney has stepped in.
He used to be the governor of the Bank of England, as well as the Bank of Canada, has a fair bit of international experience, appears on the surface to be a highly credible individual, and we assessed Carney's ideas, as put forward in his book, Values, for better or worse, and I would say mostly for worse. If you like Trudeau,
And everything that's transpired under him, you're going to love Carney because he's basically Trudeau on steroids. And so, well, you can evaluate for yourself as a consequence of this discussion if you're a Canadian or anyone else who has to deal with Canada, whether or not that's a good idea. We talked about Pierre Polyev, who leads the Conservatives and the positive signs of
within his budding administration of a, of what there's evidence accruing that he's beginning to grapple with the complexities of the new digital age and provides a real alternative, a beckoning alternative. We hope for Canadians perplexed by the new world and their position in it. And so all of that with Jim Balsley and it's, it's a very important podcast and,
at minimum for Canadians, but also for anyone who wants to understand the realities of the new world order. So a lot has changed, well, in the world in recent years, but a lot for the world in Canada since Mr. Trump was elected. And he's been rampaging around for better or worse, like a bull in the China shop. And a fair bit of that has come Canada's way. And so I've been thinking through that
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Chapter 4: What mistakes did Canada make in economic agreements?
Could happen this year.
It could happen this year. Okay, so what do you think, if we don't wake up and we look out 10 years, what's the difference between Canada and the U.S. economically?
Well, as I've said, rhetorically, we become Puerto Rico without a passport. We'll be very poor in terms of quality of life and what we can buy and no political representation, no clout. And we have a beautiful country that both you and I love, but it's an expensive country. So if you don't have the prosperity, you can't pay for the health care, the transportation.
The public safety, the social services, the heat, all the things that we value being a prosperous, sophisticated country. And we've seen those come under stress in this last era. Okay, so let's detail out that a little bit. It's expensive. It hurts a lot when you don't do well in this.
Right, okay, so our housing is prohibitively expensive, not only in absolute sense, but also in comparison to the Americans. Our healthcare system is under terrible stress. The same can be said for the education system.
Where else do you see, well, even Ontario now, which was Canada's richest province, is poorer in terms of per capita GDP than Mississippi, which is the American's most poverty-stricken state. And we're on a downhill trend.
Yes, that's all correct. Yeah, and one in a quarter Canadians have food insecurity now. Define food insecurity. Well, there's metrics on it, but basically they're not able to provide, they're skipping meals or children are unable to be fed what they need. So you're not secure in providing the food to your home. Okay, so one in four.
Yeah, that's really, and food bank lines have doubled, and these things, these are terrible consequences of economic policy and attention. Yeah, it really hits home.
Okay, now, so what did Canada do wrong in the aftermath of these agreements that other countries did right? You related an anecdote to me earlier this week. Some gentleman you were talking to talked about his international experience with committees dealing with IP ownership.
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Chapter 5: How do Canada's economic policies compare to other countries?
Right. Okay. So let's talk about, well, if it's still relevant, let's talk about what happened, why that Google proposal was dangerous. And the other two things that you mentioned to me recently that I thought were relevant was the fact, for example, that the Google executives themselves have claimed that the intellectual property they utilized to produce
a company that was for a while the largest company in the world and is still unbelievably dominant. Much of that came from Canada.
Yeah, well, okay, so let me put one more step into this and then I'll go to the Google part. And so what happens is in the production economy,
When you bring in a foreign branch plant, as I said a few minutes ago, you get management, technology, you get capital, you get skills upgrading of the workers, you get a supply chain in a factory of local vendors, and you get a tax base based on that activity. So you get a lot of positive what are called economic spillovers from the... Manufacturing branch plant.
When you go to an ideas economy, when you buy the company or come in, you exfiltrate the IP, you exfiltrate the data. All of the ownership is back at the headquarters. There is no...
management of any consequence in the in the in the when you sell your uh peterson academy into spain you don't set up a country president and a whole management team it's just you get somebody helping you sell and localize and then it's all run back wherever you run it and all the taxes and all the wealth effects happen at the home country spanish branch plant
Exactly, and you don't pay taxes in Spain and there's no wealth effect in Spain and there's no management transfer and all that. So the spillovers in the tech industry operate exactly opposite. Pretty much most of the time, not absolutely, To how they work in the production economy.
Right. So using a branch plant mentality when you're dealing with tech companies is a very bad idea.
Disaster.
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Chapter 6: What is the current state of Canadian innovation and its implications?
As mentioned earlier, he's rampaging around like a bull in a china shop and suggests that Canada is such a weak country now and such a weak and useless country, all things considered, that for all intents and purposes, it might as well be, as a totality, the 51st state because it has no... use in existing on its own, and it's parasitical on the U.S.
And then on top of that, which is already quite something, he's added these immense tariffs. It's clear that he's not particularly happy with the manner in which Canada is governed. It's not exactly obvious what his endgame is, but it's obvious. Okay, well, tell us what you think Trump is doing and why you think we've
elaborate on how we've set ourself up to be the recipient of his peculiar largesse.
Yeah, sure. Well, I wrote a piece, which possibly you can put on a link during this thing called We're All Economic Nationalists Now. And the reason I used that was that it's a phrase for strategic U-turns, coined by Milton Friedman.
Right.
The darling of the free marketers. The darling of the free marketers. Because he famously said in the late 60s, we're all Keynesians now. So he spent 20 years fighting Keynes. And then when there was a crisis with Nixon and they had to respond to it with a bunch of new monetary and fiscal structures, he said, well, we're all Keynesians now. Keynes was an interventionist compared to Friedman.
And Friedman was at war with him. Right. He represents the opposite. And what he's fundamentally saying is that economics is a social science, not a natural science. And you have to tune your behavior to the facts on the ground. So if you are a Friedmanite in this contemporary reality, then attune, period.
And so... Like to the realities of the new ownership doctrines in the knowledge economy, for example.
And the nature of the geopolitical era of strategic behavior. So responding very specifically to what you said, the question you asked on Trump, when you go to an intangibles economy... When you're producing economy, you trade on a principle called comparative advantage. Yeah, lay that out.
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Chapter 7: How does the resource curse affect Canada's economy?
fully unpacked AI and how it's replacing human capacity and augmenting human capacity. But I think everyone agrees it's a monster factor of production. It's changing all the rules. It's putting trillions of dollars in the economy.
It's going to change the white-collar economy completely.
And you've got to have something, something there. Yeah, yeah. So that's fine. Okay, so you mentioned about Carney, then you mentioned about Paglia. And I did too read his book because I'm interested in public policy. As people, you've mentioned, you and I are active in Washington, I'm active in Brussels, and I'm also active nationally and sub-nationally. And provincially.
Well, sub-nationally, provincially. And I absolutely see myself as a Canadian, and I always think of Canada when I try to engage in these things, and I'm a passionate Canadian. So a couple, three things in Carney. He's positioning himself as an outsider when he's been an advisor to Trudeau since… and he's chairman of his economic task force.
But most importantly, he's been... So he's not an outsider. Well, most importantly, he's been a charter member of the orthodoxy of Ottawa for decades. So all this thinking structure, and I'm going to get very specific on how Bank of Canada has been a central actor in selling Canada short in these decades because they've been the keepers of this orthodoxy And he's been a central, as governor of St.
Claude Bank. He's been, prior to that, he was in Finance Canada. He's been advised. So he's got to own the Ottawa thinking. Right, and not as a follower, but as an architect. An architect. Right, right. So here's the two or three things on Carney, Mark Carney's book that I read. One, he talks a lot about pricing carbon to affect a transition. Right.
And then he's come up with his new policies to subsidize things like heat exchangers and various forms of technology to green your homes and stuff like that, very specifically. And so what happens is that when you look at Canada, it's good terms of trade. I explained terms of trade earlier. Its best terms of trade are in energy, right? That's where we get good money.
That's where it pays for the country.
Our weakest terms- Energy defined primarily on the fossil fuel side.
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Chapter 8: What lessons can Canada learn from other successful economies?
Right, we're not talking about the renewable side.
Sorry, hydrocarbons, hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons, yeah. Import, or sorry, consumption and export of hydrocarbons overwhelmingly pays for this country.
Right. So we have a fossil fuel economy in large part.
That's good terms of trade.
Yes. Okay.
On the good terms of trade. I'm speaking technically. Yeah. Okay. We have a deficit in intellectual property. And that would be much more if we included data in AI. And we're major importers of intellectual property and technology products. So we have poor terms of trade in technology. The technology arena.
In spite of all the things we invent, the smart people, the government funding over decades... And the effectiveness of that even. Well, that's the issue is we're first world in inputs, third world in outcomes. Right. And there's not... And today in this conversation, we're unpacking why. Yeah. But I'm going to stay on this orthodoxy of Mr. Carney. Yeah.
So we have very good terms of trade in hydrocarbons, very poor terms of trade in... technology products. And so his proposition is that we tax the things that we sell and we subsidize the things that we buy. So if you want to affect a green transition, and you have this structure, that's called a dichotomy. You have to choose between
The economy paying for the place or the environment in his structural view of the world of scarce natural capital that we have to deal with. And I'm not making a normative comment. I'm just talking economically here. So his prescription will make us poorer.
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