Faster Economic Change is Needed to Meet Social Goals and Prevent Loss of Canadian Talent and Head Offices, Business Leaders say

April 5, 2000

Canada must lead to succeed in the New Economy, say the country’s top business executives in a major policy statement entitled Global Champion or Falling Star? The Choice Canada Must Make.

The statement from the Business Council on National Issues (BCNI) says past policy choices on inflation, deficits and free trade have yielded great benefits. But governments have not yet grasped just how quickly the country must continue to move if Canadians want to improve their quality of life in the years ahead. Many Canadian companies, for their part, have been too conservative in evaluating new opportunities and too defensive in their strategies.

In a global economy driven by rapidly advancing technologies, old virtues like letting market forces work matter more than ever. “What has changed is the speed with which even small disadvantages and momentary lapses of policy can turn champions into chumps,” the statement says.

“Change makes a lot of people uncomfortable — in business just as much as in politics,” adds David P. O’Brien, BCNI Chairman and Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Canadian Pacific Limited. “But the alternative to change is stagnation. Change may be disruptive, but it is better than going nowhere.”

The BCNI is composed of the chief executive officers of 150 of Canada’s leading enterprises. It released its statement today at the CEO Summit 2000, a meeting in Toronto bringing together 250 leading Canadians from business, government, academia, the media and the non-profit sector. The statement reflects the initial findings of the BCNI’s Canada Global Leadership Initiative, a research and consultation project launched in April, 1999.

As detailed in a working paper also released today, Going for Gold: Winning Corporate Strategies and Their Impact on Canada, the BCNI says that Canada could suffer a rapid loss of talented people and key corporate functions including head offices if it fails to adapt to the global pace of change.

In an internal survey, 40 percent of chief executives put the probability that their own jobs would leave Canada within the next ten years at 50/50 or higher. “The question is not whether Canadians and their enterprises can succeed globally, but to what extent they can continue to succeed from a Canadian base,” the statement says.

The BCNI suggests that people, ideas and money are all key ingredients for national success. Canada must invest in education and lifelong learning to give its people the tools they need to grow, but also must encourage them to use those tools within Canada. The country must keep generating new ideas, but become more effective at turning those ideas into innovative products and process. And it must persuade Canadians and foreigners alike to invest in our people and ideas and build growing global businesses from a Canadian base.

Canada can and should aspire to ambitious goals as a society, but cannot achieve such goals through wishful thinking, says BCNI President and Chief Executive Thomas d’Aquino. “The debate Canada needs urgently is not a sterile ideological feud, but rather a constructive discussion about how to make economic means serve social ends, about how to foster the economic growth we need to achieve the goals that all Canadians share.”

The statement was signed on behalf of the BCNI’s Board of Directors by its Executive Committee. In addition to Mr. O’Brien and Mr. d’Aquino, its members include Honorary Chairman A. L. Flood and Vice Chairmen Jacques Bougie, President and Chief Executive Officer, Alcan Aluminium Limited; John E. Cleghorn, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Royal Bank of Canada; Jean C. Monty, President and Chief Executive Officer, BCE Inc.; and James F. Shepard, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Finning International Inc.

A non-partisan and not-for-profit organization, the BCNI is the voice of Canadian chief executives on public policy issues in Canada and globally. Its members head companies representing every major sector of the Canadian economy and are responsible for a significant majority of Canada’s private sector investment, exports, training and research and development. With about 1.3 million employees, member companies administer in excess of $2.1 trillion in assets and have an annual turnover of more than $500 billion.