Ambitious Canada Part 3: You Can't Copy the US

An analogy: if you are a startup trying to succeed in a market dominated by IBM, the worst thing you can do is copy them. The incumbent has superior scale, capital, and market power. Your only path to victory is to be different – to be more more nimble, and to play by a set of rules they can’t or won’t follow.

Now, let’s apply this to our country. We are the startup. The United States is IBM.

Why do many of the ideas from Canada’s most prominent business leaders boil down to: “Let’s just do a version of US-light”? Ugh.

Winning in the shadow of a giant isn’t just about avoiding imitation; it’s about pursuing strategies others fundamentally cannot execute. We must build our strategy around things Canada can do that are impossible for the US to even consider.

The Emptiness of Imitation

This isn’t a theoretical problem. I’ve witnessed this intellectual surrender up close.

Ask your vocal Canadian tech leaders if they were ever part of a Whatsapp group called “DOGE Canada”. Many of the most prominent names in our industry were part of this collective. The title of their group was not sarcastic: with a straight face, these folks proposed creating a Canadian version of the US’s now disgraced DOGE project.

Around the same time, when the current US President talked about annexing Canada, prominent people in our tech community privately suggested that we should just give in.

Think about that. An abandonment of our sovereignty, tossed around as a path forward. Generations of people literally fought and died to build this country, to create something distinct from the American experiment, and our modern builders were like: ‘hey let’s consider it’.

‘America-Lite’ Is a Losing Game

This isn’t just about a lack of patriotism. It’s a path to failure.

We will never have the scale, capital, or ruthless culture of the United States. We cannot win by being a less-funded, more polite version of them. Every time we base our strategy on emulating their policies, we accept our role as the minor league team. We reinforce our own dependency.

A watered-down version of American hyper-capitalism won’t save us. A slightly less dysfunctional version of their politics won’t inspire anyone.

Common. We have to be better than this.

Our path forward cannot be about trying to be more like “them”. It has to be found by looking within—by understanding our unique strengths and having the courage to build something the world has never seen before.

We need our own model.