I’m betting my future on Resource Tech.
This isn’t just an idea; it’s part of my core strategic focus: building new frontiers where technology and natural resources meet.
For all our innovation efforts, we’ve been overlooking the obvious: Canada is a resource superpower in a world that desperately needs resources. This essay is my invitation to rethink where our economic strength can grow.
Innovation. It’s Canada’s favourite buzzword carrying the weight of our hopes for a more prosperous, competitive, and respected place on the world stage. And yet, for all our strategic plans, white papers, and aspirations to build the next Silicon Valley North, the results have been modest at best. Our GDP growth is sluggish. Productivity is declining. Despite the talent, the talk, and the will, something just isn’t working.
It’s not for lack of intent. But I have a theory: Canada is suffering from an identity crisis. We look outward for validation, constantly measuring ourselves against the success stories of others. We chase biotech, AI, clean tech not because they’re wrong, but because we believe we need to catch up, to prove we belong. We rarely pause to ask: what do we already have that the world desperately needs? It’s almost that as a nation we suffer a form of codependency and it’s stunting our collective growth.
Canada’s real wealth isn’t built on mimicry. It’s built into the ground. Beneath our feet lies one of the most astonishing arrays of natural assets on the planet. Oil, timber, and fresh water sit alongside gold, silver, copper, uranium, potash, nickel, and rare earth elements, resources essential to the future of global technology, energy, and food security. We are a resource superpower hiding in plain sight.
Yet despite this quiet abundance, Canada has been slow to recognize and strategically mobilize its advantage. Regulatory bottlenecks, underinvestment in processing, and a lack of national coordination mean we continue to export raw opportunity instead of refined leadership. In a world hurtling toward resource scarcity and climate crisis, this isn’t just a missed opportunity it’s a national error.
In my early 20s, I was a bush pilot in Northern Ontario. I saw firsthand the vastness of this country the raw, untamed potential most Canadians never experience. We live crowded in cities, disconnected from the land that defines us. We don’t fully understand what we have or more importantly, what we could become with it.
So, here’s a big idea: Let’s stop trying to become someone else’s version of success. Let’s become the most advanced resource-centric economy on Earth. But not in the old way not simply as extractors, but as stewards, innovators, and global leaders of a new era in sustainable resource technology. Let’s use our natural wealth to reinforce our national values.
This is where Canada’s innovation energy needs to focus like a magnifying glass: not to follow trends, but to amplify our inherent strengths. Resource Tech isn’t a single invention it’s a national capability. It’s the fusion of AI, robotics, Indigenous knowledge, clean energy, and advanced processing. It’s how become the global leader in sustainable lithium extraction. In AI-managed forestry. In oceanic carbon capture. In precision agriculture and net-zero mining. These are not pipe dreams they are entirely within reach, waiting only for political will, capital alignment, and national purpose. That is Resource Tech. It’s the future of innovation, shaped by who we are and what we have.
This isn’t a return to the old resource economy. It’s a reinvention for a world that desperately needs smart, stable, climate-conscious suppliers. And among all resource-rich nations, Canada is unique: a free, democratic, socially just society capable of showing how resource leadership and sustainability can coexist. Let’s use that vision to amplify the extraordinary work Canadians have already done and level it up on a bold, national scale. Let’s be clear: we are a nation of 41 million with some of the greatest wealth in the world within our borders. If we can’t turn this into prosperity for all, then there is something profoundly wrong with us.
Let’s make Resource Tech not just a priority, but part of our identity. Let’s tie it to sovereign wealth funds that secure long-term prosperity. Let’s make it our collective moonshot grounded not in hype, but in the raw, undeniable truth of who we already are.
Canada doesn’t need to become something else. Let’s stop exporting potential and start exporting leadership. Let’s build a Canada that mines with ethics, farms with precision, protects with foresight—and prospers with purpose. This isn’t about becoming someone else. It’s about finally becoming ourselves.
I’m already building into this next frontier; working with flying robotics, aircraft platforms, AI vision, and an explorer’s mindset. My focus spans innovative mining, wildfire mitigation, and carbon sequestration, all through a Resource Tech lens. There are challenges to address and huge opportunities to create. Canada’s future won’t be built by imitation. It will be built by awakening the possibilities already beneath our feet and within our creative capacity to invent.