What the Canadian Chamber of Commerce and PwC Canada found when they asked 20 chief executives why the country's strongest industries keep stalling short of their potential.
A new Canada competitiveness report released on September 22 argues that the country’s five strongest industries are all held back by the same set of missing pieces: too little processing capacity at home, too little growth capital, too little enabling infrastructure and too slow a pace of decision-making. The study, titled Beyond Potential: Turning Canada’s Advantages into Growth and a Better Life for All, was produced by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce with PwC Canada and is built on PwC research plus interviews with 20 chief executives and business leaders.
The verdict is blunt. Canada holds resources, research and talent the United States and the rest of the world want. What it does not reliably hold is the ability to convert a raw input into a higher-value product and get it to a customer that is not American.
Why the Chamber and PwC Narrowed the Lens to Five Sectors
Studies of Canadian productivity are not new, and the authors concede as much. What the report tries to do differently is stop describing the problem at the level of the whole economy and instead test it sector by sector, in the industries where Canada already has a credible claim to global relevance.
The five examined are artificial intelligence and quantum computing, mining and critical minerals, energy, defence, and agri-food.
“When we look at these challenges and unpack them, many are familiar and long standing,” said Candace Laing, president and chief executive of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce and a member of the prime minister’s advisory committee, in a television interview on Tuesday. The difference, she said, is that the report maps those challenges onto the specific sectors that matter most in the current moment.
Timing is part of the argument. The report lands while Canada–U.S. trade talks remain stalled and Ottawa is under pressure to help Canadian exporters find buyers beyond the American market.
AI and Quantum: An Early Lead Canada Keeps Exporting
Canada was an early global leader in artificial intelligence research and talent. The report finds that advantage has not translated into globally competitive Canadian companies, for two linked reasons: domestic firms struggle to raise the funding needed to grow past the startup stage, and they struggle to turn research into products customers actually buy.
The consequence, in the report’s framing, is that Canada has become a net exporter of AI talent. A number of prominent figures in the global AI industry are Canadian-born or Canadian-trained but are now based elsewhere.
Quantum computing is presented as the second chance. The commercial market is still forming, and the authors argue Canada has an opportunity to avoid repeating the AI pattern — provided growth-stage capital and commercialization support arrive before the window closes. That question of whether public ambition is matched by execution has also shadowed Ottawa’s broader digital transformation push.
Critical Minerals Stuck in a 10-to-15-Year Queue
Canada’s geology is described as extraordinary. The problem is that very few projects are positioned to move quickly, and significant new production can take 10 to 15 years to come online.
Refining those minerals into usable industrial materials largely happens outside Canada, frequently in China — meaning the value-added step, and the margin attached to it, sits offshore.
The fixes the report identifies are practical rather than novel:
- Faster permitting: shortening the review-and-approval timeline that governs whether a project starts at all.
- Enabling infrastructure: new roads, rail and power supply for remote deposits.
- Skilled workers: a larger pool of specialized labour to build and operate the projects.
Laing singled out permitting as the challenge that cuts across every sector. “For any project … in mining or energy, permitting is slow,” she said, pointing to the commitment in the Building Canada Strong Act to a one-year review and approval process as a development the Chamber was pleased to see.
In its key findings, the report notes work is already underway to improve the critical minerals picture, but cautions that the transition “needs to be durable and trusted to matter.”
Energy: One Export Customer, One West Coast LNG Terminal
Canada is among the world’s largest energy producers, yet roughly 85 per cent of its energy exports go to a single customer — the United States. Reaching other buyers is not a marketing problem; it is an infrastructure problem.
The report notes Canada has only one large-scale LNG export terminal on the West Coast. Australia and the United States, by contrast, have already built deep commercial relationships with Asian energy buyers that Canada is still working to establish.
That gap is as much about relationships as pipes and terminals. Long-term energy offtake agreements are typically negotiated years in advance, which means late entrants compete for whatever demand is left uncommitted.
Defence Spending Is About to Triple — and Most of It Could Leave
The report says Canada is on the verge of nearly tripling its defence spending, and warns that without changes to how Ottawa buys equipment, the bulk of that money will flow to foreign prime contractors.
The risk it describes is structural: Canadian firms end up manufacturing components inside someone else’s system, never owning the underlying technology and never selling a complete platform abroad. That keeps domestic suppliers in a subcontractor tier permanently.
Eliot Pence, founder and chief executive of Dominion Dynamics, told the report’s authors that every NATO country has a company capable of leading a major defence program except Canada.
Agri-Food and What Murad Al-Katib Calls the Commodity Mindset
Canada is a farming powerhouse, but much of what it ships leaves the country raw or only partly processed. The opportunity the report identifies is in selling ingredients and processed foods rather than bulk commodities — and in clearing the rail and port bottlenecks that have already pushed international customers toward competitors.
Murad Al-Katib, president and chief executive of AGT Foods, said in the report that Canada is stuck in a commodity mindset. The future, in his view, is not simply shipping raw bulk overseas; it is exporting ingredients alongside finished and refined products, which command higher prices.
The Checklist the Report Hands Governments and Industry
Rather than framing its recommendations as a strategy document, the authors propose treating the gaps as a checklist that governments and businesses work through together. Six items recur across all five sectors.
| Permitting | Faster review and approval so projects can start within a commercially useful timeframe |
| Capital | Better access to funding, particularly at the growth stage where Canadian firms stall |
| Infrastructure | Roads, rail, power and export terminals serving remote and northern projects |
| Skills | Specialized workers to build, operate and scale |
| Commercialization | Turning domestic research into products that are sold internationally |
| Co-ordination | Stronger alignment across governments and between government and industry |
‘There’s a Door Open and It Won’t Stay Open’
The urgency in the report comes less from the analysis than from the executives quoted in it.
François Poirier, president and chief executive of TC Energy, is quoted saying Canada has the skills and the fundamentals to compete internationally. What worries him is whether the country can move fast enough to respond to market competition.
One business leader told the authors that if Canada is still holding investment summits in 2030 instead of putting shovels in the ground on northern infrastructure, roads and routes, it will have missed the mark — a pointed line given how much recent policy energy has gone into summit-stage conversations about the confidence to build.
Laing framed the closing window in similar terms. “These five areas have missing components, again, familiar challenges, but if we miss these pieces, we could miss the very opportunity Canada has right now. There’s a door open and it won’t stay open. We have to act urgently to move through it,” she said.
She also acknowledged movement in the right direction: “We’re on our way and we’re seeing some progress, but we hope to continue that momentum in the policy changes and speed we need to really achieve our full potential.”
A Second Report Reaching the Same Conclusion
The Chamber–PwC findings are not an outlier. A separate report published a week earlier by Export Development Canada reached broadly similar conclusions.
The Crown corporation estimated Canada could add close to $100 billion to its economy over the next decade by moving into processing, refining and advanced materials instead of exporting raw resources alone. It identified agri-food, critical minerals, defence and aerospace as the sectors with the most to gain.
Two independent analyses converging on the same diagnosis within a week gives the argument more weight than either would carry alone — and raises the stakes for the legislative agenda Parliament is working through this fall, which includes the major-projects measures now moving through the government’s fall parliamentary program.
Why This Canada Competitiveness Report Matters to Business Readers
For executives, investors and founders, the practical takeaway is that the constraint is rarely demand for what Canada produces. It is the missing middle — the refining plant, the growth round, the rail spur, the procurement rule — that determines whether that demand is captured domestically or handed to a competitor.
The report’s sector-by-sector structure also gives businesses a way to locate themselves in the argument. A quantum startup’s funding gap and a Nunavut mine’s permitting timeline look unrelated until they are placed side by side as variations on the same delay.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who produced the report?
The Canadian Chamber of Commerce and PwC Canada, drawing on PwC research and interviews with 20 CEOs and business leaders.
Which sectors were examined?
Artificial intelligence and quantum computing, mining and critical minerals, energy, defence, and agri-food.
What does “net exporter of AI talent” mean here?
The report uses it to describe a pattern in which Canada trains AI researchers who then build their careers and companies outside the country, because domestic firms struggle to secure growth-stage funding and commercialize research.
How long does new mining production take in Canada, according to the report?
Significant new production can take 10 to 15 years, which is why the authors treat permitting speed and enabling infrastructure as urgent rather than long-term issues.
Has Ottawa responded to the permitting concern?
Laing pointed to the commitment in the Building Canada Strong Act to a one-year review and approval process. Any further government response to this specific report was not mentioned.
