# Why Canada Wins: I Asked “Where’s the Growth?” in 2009. Mark Carney Seems to Have Read the Playbook in 2026 (And my book!)
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So, Canada seems to be in a trade war — one it didn’t want, and one that, it would seem, most Americans don’t want either. The Wall Street Journal, no less, has called it the dumbest trade war to ever happen. And right now, everyone seems to be prognosticating about how Canada should retaliate. I want to talk about how Canada can grow. By connecting three things. What I forecast back in 2008, as the global financial system began sliding into what would become the Great Recession — and what I got right. What I later wrote into my book Dancing in the Rain: How Bold Leaders Grow Stronger in Stormy Times. And why it seems increasingly evident to me that Mark Carney has read both. Okay, probably not. But he certainly seems to be following the mindset — and the playbook — almost to a T. Stay with me as I explain. Because the most important thing to remember is that Canada has what the world wants. Back in 2008, I published a document with a very simple title: Where’s the Growth? Global Innovation Opportunities for the Long Term. Everyone was talking about what was going wrong. I wanted to talk about what was going to go right. Markets were collapsing. Corporate confidence was disappearing. Organizations were cutting, retreating, delaying decisions and waiting for some indication that things might eventually return to normal. Right at the beginning of the document, I described what I was seeing: “Gloom has set in on global markets. Volatility rages. Some organizations have gone into a mode of ‘aggressive indecision,’ deferring action while they try to figure out ‘what comes next.’ A pretty lousy strategy that is doomed to fail in the longer term.” But then I deliberately turned the argument around. Because even in the middle of all that gloom, I believed people were asking the wrong question. Instead of asking: How bad is this going to get? Leaders needed to ask: Where’s the growth? My answer? Everywhere. Future-oriented leaders, I wrote, understood that opportunities for growth continued to abound despite the short-term economic challenges around them. Markets might rock. Innovation would continue. New ideas would still be explored. New industries would emerge. Science would advance. Technology would accelerate. Demographics would continue to reshape markets. And enormous opportunities would develop in agriculture, energy, infrastructure, connectivity, healthcare and other sectors. My conclusion was pretty simple: Think growth. Think opportunity. Innovate for the future. Don’t stagnate with the past. That was the entire premise. And you know what - the entire document from 2009 was wildly accurate, defining much of the growth that would occur through the next decade. Go read it here. And so today, for Canada? It's all about growth - because quite simply, Canada has what the world wants. Mark Carney knows this. And so Canada is, right now, having it's 2009 moment. The document I wrote back then had this core idea: Don’t let short-term economic gloom blind you to long-term transformational growth. And it turns out that Where’s the Growth? became much more than a document. It became a keynote.  By 2009, I was criss-crossing North America with variations on the theme — talking to corporate leadership teams, industry associations, investors, governments and economic-development groups about the opportunities hidden beneath all that economic gloom. Heck, I turned the global recession into a massive Jim Carroll opportunity! One of the keynote themes became Moving Beyond the Meltdown: Aligning Yourself for Growth Through Innovation. (While putting this post together, I went digging through the archives and found one of my old Moving Through the Meltdown conference pieces from that era.) The message I was taking onto stages while the economic crisis was actually unfolding. In March 2009, I wrote that I had already spent six months keynoting events across North America focused on innovation and working through challenging economic times. What fascinated me was what I saw from the better CEOs. They acknowledged the crisis. Then they moved on, to focus on growth. At one event, the CEO who spoke before me spent less than a minute discussing the global economic challenges — and then spent almost twenty minutes outlining eight strategies for revenue growth. I started using his story in my keynotes. Why? Because he understood the issue perfectly. Focus relentlessly on growth. The message began showing up everywhere in my work. Heck, I made a lot of money talking about growth when everyone else was talking about the downturn. At the 2009 Yum! Brands Global Leadership Meeting, I was talking about international expansion, changing consumer behaviour, mobile technology, brand innovation and all the new opportunities that were continuing to emerge despite the recession. I wrote afterward: “Here’s the thing: in my keynotes, I focus on growth opportunities.” Because while everyone else was drowning in doom and gloom, organizations willing to innovate quickly could still find entirely new ways to grow. The idea kept going. In 2010, I became the first outside speaker invited to open the Annual General Meeting of the PGA of America. A major section of that keynote? Where’s the growth! My purpose was to put into perspective the trends and innovations that would provide sustained economic recovery over time. Then, in 2011, T. Rowe Price brought me in as the closing keynote speaker for its Annual Investment Symposium. The hangover from the 2008 collapse was still pounding away at everyone’s thinking. My job was to deliver a different message: We were living in a time of unparalleled opportunity and potential for growth. A later T. Rowe Price report summarized my argument around the “paradox of pessimism and reality”: while business people remained pessimistic about the economy, technology and innovation were simultaneously creating massive new opportunities for productivity, efficiency and growth. The audiences changed. The industries changed. The headlines changed. The message didn’t. What is the most important thing we know? This: Short-term volatility does not eliminate long-term opportunity. Which brings us to Canada in 2026. Apparently, Mark Carney Read the Playbook It’s becoming pretty obvious that Prime Minister Mark Carney has read the playbook in my book Dancing in the Rain, released last year. Okay. I have absolutely no evidence that he has actually read it. He probably didn't. But still. The similarities are getting a little ridiculous. The central idea in Dancing in the Rain is that uncertainty should never be allowed to destroy momentum. When uncertainty rises, don’t freeze. Move. When traditional markets become unpredictable, find new ones. When old assumptions stop working, don’t devote all your energy to rebuilding yesterday. Start constructing tomorrow. When everyone else is consumed by the crisis, focus relentlessly on the opportunities emerging because of it. And above all: Don’t wait for the storm to pass. Learn how to dance in it. And then, this weekend, Mark Carney actually stood up to discuss the breakdown in Canada-U.S. trade negotiations and said: “We cannot control the storm blowing in from Washington. We can chart a new course...” I mean, come on. He’s even using the weather metaphor from my book now! Read the Prime Minister’s remarks. Maybe somebody should send him a signed copy. I think I will. Canada, Dancing in the Rain So here's the timeline I want to talk about now. The Canada Investment Summit, to be held next month in Toronto. Because it's all about growth. It's all about Canada dancing, in the rain. Think about what Carney said yesterday: Canada, he said, would build strength at home while diversifying its trading relationships abroad. That is the playbook. There is no question that Canada faces a remarkable period of uncertainty. Our relationship with our largest trading partner has entered territory that would have seemed almost unimaginable only a few years ago. Tariffs. Trade disputes. Supply-chain disruption. Geopolitical fragmentation. Questions about economic sovereignty. Questions about where Canadian companies should sell, where they should invest, and what our relationship with the United States will look like five or ten years from now. The latest Canada-U.S. negotiations collapsed after Washington introduced terms that Carney described as unfair and uneconomic. Reporting on those negotiations indicates that American demands also included constraints on Canada’s ability to pursue future trade arrangements elsewhere. Think about that for a moment. At the very moment when Canada is being reminded of the risks of overwhelming dependence on a single trading relationship, there is pressure to limit our ability to diversify away from it. That should tell us everything we need to know. It would be very easy for Canada to respond by falling into precisely the trap I identified almost two decades ago: Aggressive indecision. Wait for Washington. Wait for the tariff situation to resolve itself. Wait for certainty. Wait for somebody to tell us that things are going back to normal. Wait for health issues to kick in. Except there might not be a normal to go back to. So ask a better question. Where’s the Growth? Apparently, global investors think some of it is right here. On September 14 and 15, Toronto will host the first-ever Canada Investment Summit. The objective is enormous: help catalyze $1 trillion in total investment in Canada over the next five years, bringing public, private and institutional capital into major opportunities involving energy, critical minerals, artificial intelligence, infrastructure and other strategically important sectors. Read the Canada Investment Summit announcement. And the timing is fascinating. Because it's all about growth. The Global Infrastructure Investor Association now ranks Canada as the world’s most attractive market for infrastructure investment, overtaking the United States for the first time. Read the GIIA Spring 2026 survey. Think about the juxtaposition. The US chooses tariff driven decline. Canada chooses growth. On one side, some of the darkest economic and geopolitical headlines Canadians have seen in years. On the other, some of the largest pools of capital in the world are looking at the country and seeing something very different. Opportunity. That is Dancing in the Rain at a national scale. Behind the Headlines Is the Real Story This is the part people often miss. We become so consumed by today’s headline that we lose sight of the structural trend underneath it. Look beyond the immediate noise and an entirely different picture emerges. Behind the tariff headlines is a massive reinvention of global trade. Behind the energy debate is a massive infrastructure build. Behind AI is a massive demand for electricity, data centres and compute. Behind geopolitical fragmentation is a massive search for safe jurisdictions, reliable resources and dependable trading partners. Behind uncertainty is opportunity. The trick is being able to see it. That is exactly what Where’s the Growth? was about. That thing I wrote in 2009. Transformational Growth Never Stopped For years, I have used the phrase transformational growth to describe the really big opportunities. Incremental growth is selling a little more of what you already sell. Transformational growth is different. It happens when industries are reinvented. Entirely new markets emerge. Old infrastructure has to be replaced. Technology rewrites the economics of established industries. Science creates industries that did not previously exist. Energy systems are rebuilt. Supply chains are reconfigured. New geopolitical realities force entirely new investment decisions. That’s where enormous amounts of economic value are created. Look at Canada today. Artificial intelligence is producing extraordinary demand for electricity, computing infrastructure and data centres. Electrification requires massive investment in generation, transmission and grid modernization. Western economies urgently need diversified supplies of critical minerals. Global companies are reconsidering supply chains designed for a geopolitical era that is rapidly disappearing. Energy security is becoming economic security. Defence investment is accelerating. Food security matters. Infrastructure is back at the centre of national economic strategy. And RBC has put a number around the opportunity. Its current research identifies a potential $1.8 trillion investment opportunity over the next decade across oil and gas, electricity, metals and minerals, agriculture and food processing, defence and space. Read the RBC analysis. This isn’t simply economic growth. It’s economic reinvention. And it is exactly the type of transformational growth I was trying to get people to think about during the last great economic crisis. Canada Has What the Next Economy Needs The Canadian government has started using a simple phrase: Canada has what the world wants. Strip away the political branding and there is a serious strategic argument underneath it. The next economy needs enormous amounts of energy. Canada has it. AI requires enormous amounts of reliable electricity. Canada has it - tremendous hydroelectric resources, nuclear expertise and the opportunity to expand generation significantly. Advanced manufacturing requires critical minerals. Canada has them. Companies redesigning supply chains want stable, rules-based jurisdictions. Canada is one. Global investors want large-scale infrastructure opportunities. We have plenty. Companies seeking access to multiple markets want global trade relationships. Canada already has 16 free trade agreements across 51 countries, providing preferential access to about 1.5 billion consumers representing roughly two-thirds of global GDP. And an increasingly fragmented world needs reliable partners. Canada is one. None of these things guarantee success. But taken together, they give us some remarkable raw material. A Trillion-Dollar Summit Isn’t a Trillion Dollars This is where optimism needs to meet execution. Canada doesn’t win simply because investors suddenly think we look attractive. A summit is not a result. A ranking is not a guarantee. A trillion-dollar ambition is not a trillion dollars invested. Projects need to get approved. Infrastructure needs to actually get built. Capital announcements must become capital investment. Electricity generation has to keep up with demand. Internal trade barriers must continue falling. Productivity needs to improve. So with all this, regulatory certainty matters Speed matters. And global capital will happily move somewhere else if Canada spends too much time admiring its opportunity rather than acting on it. RBC makes essentially the same point in its $1.8 trillion analysis: Canada does not lack capital. Its challenges are execution, predictability and risk tolerance. Which takes me right back to the phrase I used in 2008: Aggressive indecision. Doing nothing often feels safe when the future is uncertain. It rarely is. In Dancing in the Rain, I came back to something I had observed throughout all those recession-era keynotes. The winners act. They move. They build. They experiment. They invest. They create momentum before clarity arrives. Because clarity is often the result of movement, not the prerequisite for it. So, Where’s the Growth? Almost two decades ago, as one of the darkest economic periods of my career was beginning, I put that question on the front of a document. Where’s the Growth? My answer then was: It’s everywhere — if you’re prepared to look beyond the volatility. I think the same answer applies today. Except this time, Canada has an extraordinary opportunity to become one of the places where a disproportionate amount of that growth actually happens. The world needs energy. We have it. The world needs critical minerals. We have them. AI needs electricity, data centres and computing infrastructure. We can build them. Global capital wants investable infrastructure. We have plenty to build. An increasingly fractured world needs stable and dependable trading partners. We are one. And perhaps the disruption of our traditional relationship with the United States will ultimately force Canada to do something it should have done much more aggressively a long time ago: Think bigger about the rest of the world. Back during the last meltdown, my message on stage was simple: Think growth. Think opportunity. Innovate for the future. Don’t stagnate with the past. That advice was never really about one recession. It was about what leaders should do whenever uncertainty causes everyone else to stop moving. Which brings us right back to 2026. Canada has a storm. Canada also has an opportunity. The most important question is not: How do we wait this out? It is the question I first asked all those years ago: Where’s the growth? We now have a pretty good answer: Right here. Maybe Mark Carney really did read my book. Probably not. But either way, Canada seems to be discovering the same lesson. The storm is real. So is the opportunity inside it. And if we move with enough ambition, enough speed and enough confidence, Canada might not simply weather this particular storm. We might win because we finally learned how to dance in the rain. Because Carney is. Oh, and Mark, if you are reading this, I've got a copy of the book on the way to you. Maybe you can write the Foreword for a future edition.

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Source: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/08/why-canada-wins-i-asked-wheres-the-growth-in-2009-mark-carney-seems-to-have-read-the-playbook-in-2026-and-my-book/