Transcript
Transcript: Reflections by Jim Balsillie
[00:00:00 Texts on screen: Leadership; Policy; Governance; Innovation; Review and Reflection. Produced by the Canada School of Public Service.]
Narrator: Public servants, thought leaders and experts from across Canada are reflecting on the ideas shaping public service: leadership, policy, governance, innovation and beyond. This is the Review and Reflection Series, produced by the Canada School of Public Service.
[00:00:24 Jim Balsillie appears full screen. Text on screen: Jim Balsillie, Retired Chairman and Co-CEO, Research in Motion (Blackberry).]
Taki Sarantakis: Welcome to another edition of our Review and Reflection series at the Canada School of Public Service, where we talk with interesting and luminary Canadians. Today, as always, we have another treat for you. We have a Canadian icon.
And most icons make their name or their iconology in one area. Our guest has actually made his name in at least 3 different areas, and we'll talk about each of those through the course of our conversation. The first is in business, the second is in philanthropy, and the third is in public service, amongst others. Our guest today is Jim Balsillie. Jim, welcome.
Jim Balsillie: Pleasure to be with you, Taki.
Taki Sarantakis: Where were you born, sir?
[00:01:21 Overlaid aerial photo of Seaforth, Ontario.]
Jim Balsillie: I was born in Seaforth, Ontario. My father was in the Air Force at that time. And so, yes, I was born there.
Taki Sarantakis: So, forgive me, where is that? Northern Ontario? Southern Ontario?
Jim Balsillie: No, it's kind of trending towards Lake Huron from London and places like that.
Taki Sarantakis: And what was the population?
Jim Balsillie: I think a couple thousand, but I'm claimed as one of their luminaries on their website still to this day. I think Lloyd Eisler, the figure skater, is also from Seaforth. So, something like that.
Taki Sarantakis: Did you grow up there?
[00:01:59 Overlaid aerial photo of Peterborough, Ontario.]
Jim Balsillie: No, no, we moved around. I grew up in Peterborough.
Taki Sarantakis: Peterborough? Yes. What was roughly the population of Peterborough when you grew up?
Jim Balsillie: About 50,000 to 60,000 people.
Taki Sarantakis: Did it feel like a small town? Did it feel like a cosmopolitan centre? What did it feel like to a young kid?
Jim Balsillie: Well, it's all that you know, so it's everything. And my high school graduating class was 44 people. So, you're a bit of a bigger fish in a smaller pond, which I think is good. It can be good.
Taki Sarantakis: And you said your dad was in the Air Force?
Jim Balsillie: Yes, he was an electrician.
Taki Sarantakis: And did that impact you in any way? Did that help you think about jobs? Did it help you think about math versus English, science versus humanities?
Jim Balsillie: Well, he left the Air Force when I was very young, and he went to work. He worked for corporations thereafter. So no, and my mom was at home. I was always interested in business and definitely played with technology. I was very clever in math. So yes, you start to have a narrative that you can figure things out and that you will figure it out. So, that launched early.
Taki Sarantakis: So, you mentioned two things that I want to touch upon briefly, entrepreneurial and math. Let's start with entrepreneurial.
[00:03:30 Overlaid photo of Warren Buffet. Text on screen: Warren Buffet is one of the most successful investors in history and the longtime CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, known for his disciplined, long-term approach to business.]
Taki Sarantakis: Like Warren Buffett and other people who made their mark in the business world, I read somewhere you had a few side gigs, as we call them today, when you were growing up, including a newspaper route?
[00:03:43 Overlaid photo of newspaper stack.]
Jim Balsillie: Yes, I had multiple newspaper routes when I was a kid. And then when I turned to grade 7, I worked on weekends from there on and also worked in summers. I was a "lifty" in the wintertime at ski lifts, which I did from grade 7 on. And yes, I had just about every bad summer job you could imagine. When people try to compete who had the worst summer jobs, they always have to compete for second place when they're around me.
Taki Sarantakis: The second one is math. Apparently you were pretty good at math.
Jim Balsillie: Yes, yes, I was.
Taki Sarantakis: Tell us about that.
Jim Balsillie: When I was in grade 7, I came first in Ontario for grade 7 and 8 in a math contest. And in the high school math contests. I think it's the – the first one's the Euclid or the Descartes? – and I came in the top 10 in North America in that, in the earlier one. I think it was Euclid at the time? Yes, so I was good at math. Good at logic.
Taki Sarantakis: Then we'll fast forward a little bit. You ended up, I think, at the University of Toronto.
[00:05:01 Overlaid photo of the University of Toronto.]
Taki Sarantakis: And apologies to everybody who's not at the University of Toronto or who is hearing this, but probably the best university in Canada, one of the best universities in the world. And you also were at a particular part of the University of Toronto that's considered prestigious. Talk to us a little bit about that.
Jim Balsillie: Yes, I went to Trinity College.
[00:05:26 Overlaid photo of Trinity College.]
Jim Balsillie: I had a friend whose father used to be Dean of Devonshire, which was the dorm right next to it. And he founded Trent University. So, he told me the merits of Trinity. And yes, so I applied and went there. And it was a formidable bunch of people, so the first thought in my mind is, Dorothy, this is not Kansas anymore. And you start to raise your expectations of yourself.
Taki Sarantakis: And some of those people, like you, became household names. Who were some of them?
[00:06:02 Overlaid photos of Malcolm Gladwell, Nigel Wright and Atom Egoyan.]
Jim Balsillie: Yes, I remember Malcolm Gladwell and I played 10 to 15 games of backgammon a day and kept score. He clobbered me, mopped the floor with me. And Nige Wright, for sure, was there. And Atom Egoyan, the filmmaker. So yes, yes, it was a formidable gang.
And again, I would say, the quality of your peer group, you revisit your expectations of what success looked like and what you should expect of yourself.
Taki Sarantakis: Do you remember any of the professors that particularly marked you in any ways?
Jim Balsillie: Yes. Myron Gordon, capital asset pricing model. He was kind of famous globally in that. They were good, yes, I remember my Harvard profs a little better. At the time, but yes, very, very good profs. And that was the era where the senior tenure profs tended to teach the courses, particularly the first-year courses, the introductory ones. And Peter Russell was a prof of mine in political science.
Taki Sarantakis: He was a prof of mine, too.
Jim Balsillie: Yes. Professor Carr for economics. Yes, they were very formidable profs. It was great. It seemed like that's the way a school should be.
Taki Sarantakis: Yes. And I think when you were there, I think the economics program, as it is today, and the political science program, as it is today, were fused and called political economy. Or had that been after?
Jim Balsillie: I can't remember. I did an economics specialist. I did commerce and economics, so I did two specialist. So, you had to take extra course load. And yes, but there's tremendous interrelationship between finance, management economics, microeconomics, and then macros and aggregation of the micro.
So yes, they're all logical structures and philosophy has logic in it. So I can't remember the actual structure about it. And then you get some of the trade type courses like Accounting, Tax.
Taki Sarantakis: Now accounting, that was, I guess, the next big let's call it milestone in your professional life. You became a chartered accountant. Do you have a favourite accounting joke or a favourite accountant joke?
Jim Balsillie: Well, yes, sure. When an accountant meets an actuary at a party, how do you know which one is the accountant, which one's the actuary?
Taki Sarantakis: Can I tell you mine?
Jim Balsillie: The accountant's the one with the personality.
Taki Sarantakis: Can I tell you mine?
Jim Balsillie: Sure, fire away.
Taki Sarantakis: My favourite accounting joke is, how can you tell if an accountant is extroverted?
Jim Balsillie: How?
Taki Sarantakis: He looks at somebody else's shoes.
So, then you worked for a little while. And then not long after that, I think you ended up, you mentioned it, you ended up at Harvard.
[00:09:08 Overlaid photo of the Harvard Business School.]
Taki Sarantakis: So, how does a little kid from Peterborough and from a place a lot of us haven't heard of end up at Harvard?
Jim Balsillie: Yes, well, you just luck in, and apply. And I was the first hire at Clarkson Gordon into their new entrepreneurial services group, so I was doing stuff there that was interesting, and I was elected president of the Chartered Accountants Students Association, and you had a staff of 6, and there was 5,000 members, all the people that are going through the training. And I was particularly interested – my application was how technology, which was emerging at the time, could be used to rewrite business rules.
Taki Sarantakis: What year roughly was this?
Jim Balsillie: I applied in '86 and then went in in 1987.
Taki Sarantakis: And do you remember any professors that particularly—
Jim Balsillie: Yes, sure. Shoshana Zuboff was one of my profs, self-assessment, career development; Jack Gabarro, power and influence; competitive decision-making with Michael Porter; game theory with Professor Rafa. Yes, for sure. Yes.
And I kind of focused on what I would call the cross-cutting issues, rather than silo-ization issues of better sales, better marketing, better product management. I figured I didn't want to compete on increments on the conventional stuff but rather look for cross-cutting elements. And that was my kind of lens into how I wanted to get what I wanted to get at the business school.
Taki Sarantakis: And were there other Canadians there, anybody we might have heard of? Or any other people that kind of –
Jim Balsillie: Lots of well-known Canadians have gone to the Harvard Business School. Not a lot have been bigger household names, but a couple of us, one guy I know very well – we did our independent study together and we wanted to go into entrepreneurship – Len Blavatnik and I were study partners in second year, and he went off to do the oil thing in Russia.
And then Len's done all kinds of stuff. I knew him when he was poor. He knew me when I was poor. And it's interesting because he went and named the school at Oxford
[00:11:41 Overlaid photo of the Blavatnik School of Government.]
Jim Balsillie: and the Global Affairs School that Ngaire Woods runs. And of course, I did the one here. So, he'd probably be one of them that people know better.
But for the Canadians who really sort of – Eric La Flèche was there. He runs Metro, a couple others. But yes, not a lot.
Taki Sarantakis: So, when you graduated, you did something that I think was unusual. I would imagine most of the people that go to Harvard Business School say, yes, I'm done, and now I can go to a big, huge corporation. I can go to a big, huge global consultancy, and I'm on my way. You, I think, did something different.
Jim Balsillie: Yes, I met a guy named Rick Brock who had an industrial automation business with very fledgling technology products and a contracting business, and he needed a CFO because they were controlled by a conglomerate who wanted to insert their guy. And also the technology products business was having trouble. And so, he needed somebody to get their hands around it.
And for me, it was an 800-person company. And I was really the number 2 in the company. To be an operator at a young age, at that time, I was 29 maybe, I think? 28. And to have that kind of operating role is what I wanted because you become a creature of your environment very quickly. And if you're flying around in fancy hotels and fancy suits, your cost of living gets up and then you're not really able to develop those kinds of skills. So, that's why I took that. Yes.
Taki Sarantakis: So, you didn't become a financial engineer. You didn't become a junk bond salesman. You actually went to an enterprise, and you internalized.
Jim Balsillie: Yes. You know, it's a very different skill, in a sense. I say to people, what's the difference between a $5,000 purchase order and a $5 million purchase order? And the answer is three zeros. It's basically the same.
Or, for a 1,000-store coffee chain, if you're in charge of buying cups, does that mean you can run a coffee store? But if you run a coffee store very well, then you could probably run 10. But can you actually manage the unit economic that is a store? And so, I thought I could, but I'd never done it, and I wanted to see if I could do it. And that's the key is, can you do it?
Taki Sarantakis: Now, shortly thereafter, this is where most Canadians start to hear your name and know after a little while who you are.
[00:14:49 Overlaid image of Research In Motion's logo (RIM).]
Taki Sarantakis: You went to this little company called Research in Motion. How many employees were at Research in Motion?
Jim Balsillie: There was 8 or 9. Mike was a supplier to the industrial products. I was in charge of it at Sutherland-Schultz where I was before, and it'd gone really well. It grew; it made a lot of money, so there was confidence there. And then RIM was in a financial pickle because they had a couple of contracts where the customers weren't paying them. And I didn't realize how difficult it was. And so, yes, I agreed to mortgage a house and had a couple of young kids and decided to go all in, take a big cut in pay to give it a go.
And then I do remember putting the money in and there was a bookkeeper at the time, and I said, where'd the money go? And he says, oh, it's all gone. It was literally gone for pent-up overdue payables. And it's like, well, okay, this is a one-way door. Like, I'm in. I'm in all the way. And there you go.
Taki Sarantakis: So, this is less than a dozen people. We're going to –
Jim Balsillie: That was '92.
Taki Sarantakis: Yes. So, we're going to go a little bit through the trajectory of RIM and then BlackBerry. But let's just fast forward to one question. At its peak, how many people did BlackBerry, or sorry, RIM employ?
Jim Balsillie: About 15,000 or 16,000.
Taki Sarantakis: 15,000. So, from a dozen to – what's that, a factor of 10,000 or something?
Jim Balsillie: 1,000.
Taki Sarantakis: Yes. Well, you're good at math. I'm not.
Jim Balsillie: Well, you know, 12 to 12,000 is 1,000.
Taki Sarantakis: So, that's pretty amazing. That's a scale up. So, let's talk a little bit about the BlackBerry.
[00:16:33 Overlaid images of BlackBerry's logo; an early model of a BlackBerry device.]
Taki Sarantakis: It is really, really hard for people who didn't live through it to really appreciate the BlackBerry. And I was really fortunate to get a BlackBerry really early in my career. It was because I had to be in touch, I had information that other people didn't have. And I would be on the bus coming to work and people would be coming up to me and going, excuse me, I'm so sorry, can I see that? Can I touch that? Can you really send email? Can you really look at your calendar? Talk to us a little bit about those early days. When did you know you had something?
Jim Balsillie: Well, we were seeding units in September '98, and that was two things going on. Our CFO, Dennis Kavelman, was at an investor conference for Wit Soundview Boutique then, and then some of our sales guys, led by Don McMurtry and Patrick Spence, were at a Microsoft Exchange conference called MEC, and they both sort of showed these units.
And the response was just out of this world. And we hadn't even launched it yet. We were just piloting it. And we'd had a lot of bullying by Bay Street in terms of how they roll. Some things never change. But then the US investors became very, very excited in what we could do, and they started buying the stock because they thought this was hot and the stock just started running. And then we listed on the Nasdaq in January '99.
[00:18:33 Overlaid image of a Nasdaq Composite graph from September 1998 to December 1999, showing the index gradually increasing over the period.]
Jim Balsillie: So, the whole thing just became this momentum structure that just kept going and going and going. There wasn't a big step function. It was just increasingly rolling thunder from kind of September '98 and then we did a big financing for, at that time was a lot, about $250 million US in the fall of '99. Yes, it was going fast.
Taki Sarantakis: And then you mentioned September. I'll talk about another September that's a tragedy, which is September 2001, but the BlackBerry played an interesting role during September 11th, 2001. Talk to us a little bit about that.
Jim Balsillie: Yes, well, we were using these dedicated data networks and they're packet switching, whereas back then the cellular networks, they're circuit switching. So, the circuits were all jammed.
[00:19:39 Overlaid image of a payphone on a subway platform in New York City.]
Jim Balsillie: Of course, everybody's on the phone all the time and nobody is hanging up the phone if they got a line, whereas packets queue up, and so the cell phone networks didn't work on 9/11, but BlackBerry did.
[00:19:53 Overlaid aerial image of the Pentagon after being hit on September 11, 2001.]
Jim Balsillie: And so, it was working in Washington, and when the plane hit the Pentagon, the part where it hit took out their IT servers. But people who were using them and then a couple politicians in the bunker, they could get information to what's going on. And then people in Wall Street and elsewhere, it was working. So, everyone was just like Wow, what is this stuff?
Taki Sarantakis: It was like, wow, this is incredible. It works. Nobody else can communicate, but look at me, I've got this thing on my belt – and back then we used to put it on our belts – and look, it still works.
Jim Balsillie: Yes, it was a big deal.
Taki Sarantakis: One of the things, you mentioned it in a technical sense, but I want to bring it down because not a lot of people, including myself, are very technical. What you said, that's another way of saying that the BlackBerry kind of sipped broadband, is that fair to say? It was –
Jim Balsillie: Well, it wasn't broadband, it was narrowband at the time.
Taki Sarantakis: Narrowband, thank you.
Jim Balsillie: But you queue up packets and you just eventually get your time through. So, it could be fairly busy, but you're queuing up, and you get your spot in the slot, everything's queued up, and your packet just goes through. And the packets are few and they're relatively small. Whereas a circuit, when you turn on the circuit, that's it. Nobody else. If you're out of circuits, you're out of circuits. And somebody keeps talking, that's it. But yes, so that's why everything could get through.
And we had a PIN-type peer-to-peer structure. We ended up putting a chat app on top of it called BBM, but you could go person-to-person without going through a server. So, in the case of the Pentagon, when the servers got taken out, they could still communicate peer-to-peer and away you go.
Taki Sarantakis: Again, revolutionary. And I don't want to give up any trade secrets here, but in the Government of Canada, the PIN was not an unused feature amongst people that had BlackBerrys.
Jim Balsillie: Of course.
Taki Sarantakis: Yes. Now, there were a few people who, when they became even president, and I remember President Obama, but I think also President Bush, when they became president, people were going to take away their BlackBerry for security reasons. And they both kind of said, "Yes, no, figure it out. You are not taking away my BlackBerry."
Jim Balsillie: Yes, for sure, and Jeb Bush particularly liked his too, and he had his official portrait with it beside him on his desk. And yes, Obama did too. Yes, lots of people did. It was part of how they did what they did and lived their life the way they needed to.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, we're going to talk about this more in, I think, the third area. But let's just stay on this for a moment because a lot of people didn't call it the BlackBerry. They called it the "CrackBerry", which meant like, oh, wait, I've got to check my BlackBerry. I've got to check my BlackBerry. I've got to check my BlackBerry. Which has features of addiction. But, and this is very important, it seems to me, addiction wasn't the business model like it was, say, if you fast forward another 15 years. Talk to us a little bit.
Jim Balsillie: Yes, I mean, we sold privacy and so everything was encrypted. People used it a lot because they liked it because you could get a competitive advantage, you could connect with people. But that's very, very different than the social media business model where they surveil you and they profile you and they use algorithms to make addiction, principally by triggering negative emotion. There was none of that in our product, ever.
Taki Sarantakis: So, you weren't trying to go, oh, look, Taki uses this 2 hours a day. Let's try and get him to use it 3 hours.
Jim Balsillie: No, we had no window into that. And we were just put on the cell phone bills when people sold it, eventually when it had cellular features on it a couple of years later. So it was a business model based on use of the service. It was a flat fee, and the carriers priced it as carriers know how to price.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, you got to the zenith of the commercial world. It is very rare for a Canadian company, with Canadian co-CEOs,
[00:24:25 Overlaid image of Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie standing together.]
Taki Sarantakis: with Canadian research to take something, not only get to the very top of the global commercial system, but to stay there and to change the rules. Tell us a little bit about some of the things you learned along that arduous journey.
Jim Balsillie: Well, it's demanding, but then it seems normal, but it's extremely demanding. It's just crazy fun because you're just going fast and you're having experiences. You change the world and meet people and still stay in touch with people. That is really a remarkable part of it. But most importantly, I was very fortunate to have some commercialization mentors in the United States, and I was on the US Business Council, where these are public-private structures. And I remember seeing the issues we were encountering in terms of standards, in terms of certifications, in terms of intellectual property and the geo stuff in India and Indonesia and the Middle East and Russia. And we're very fortunate that the US State Department kind of saw us as an American company, so they would go to bat with us.
And yes, that was the tremendous learning for me because it wasn't what I'd been taught in undergrad, that this was an emerging structure.
Taki Sarantakis: So, you weren't – let me just rephrase that slightly – you weren't just selling something, you were also getting a world of data, literally from all over the world. You were learning how Americans think and work, how Europeans think and work.
Jim Balsillie: Oh yes, for sure. Well, many things. One, dozens at any one time of intellectual property files, and the stakes are very, very high. Lots of issues of localization of the servers that countries wanted for security. Tremendous amount of lawful access issues, which telcos had to comply with for national security.
And people get rhetorical about it because, we're good, but somebody else isn't good. But if Chechens have bombed your subway station in Russia, or Iranians want to bomb the Emiratis into the sea, well, the people are trying to look after their societies. And yes, nobody's a saint in it.
And so, you're navigating those issues, crazy geopolitical issues of certification and features. The parliament in Indonesia was having a big issue because people could use the browser to access adult entertainment sites, which were blocked through the traditional things. Many things like that. Yes, it was always, everywhere, all the time.
Taki Sarantakis: I think we've just discovered why – one of the reasons why – you've been so ahead of your time in these issues for the rest of us mortals, whether it's sovereignty, whether it's privacy, whether it is who has access to what, when, under what terms, what do they do in this regulatory regime versus that regulatory regime, what are the rules versus what actually happens. These are very contemporary issues in Canada in 2026, but it sounds like you were dealing with those issues as a co-CEO.
Jim Balsillie: Yes, but they've been convention around the world for 25 years, so it's not that I'm ahead of the world. I'm just explaining how the world is.
Taki Sarantakis: Because you went into the world –
Jim Balsillie: I'm in the world and every other country is navigating these things. So, I was getting messages from somebody who's working on these files in Africa, I believe it's Nigeria today, and they've set all their standards. They've got their sovereign compute established. They're very focused in designing sovereign healthcare data. The world has operated like this for a long time.
So, I did find it strange and low functioning, the resistance to somebody trying to characterize what they're dealing with in the world and those that haven't dealt with the world telling you that, "No, that's not how the world works." But that's kind of a domestic policy malaise. And I had to decide whether I just fold my tent and say, "I'm out," or say, "I shouldn't let these people sell short the future for all the good Canadians that want a better future."
Taki Sarantakis: So, the penultimate thing in this section. It seems to me you also saw a little bit of the future between where the value proposition was going to be. Was it going to be in the device, or was it going to be in the stuff that went into the device, i.e., the software?
[00:29:45 Overlaid image of the BlackBerry logo.
Text on screen: BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) was a messaging service that let BlackBerry users send instant messages, photos, and videos – before apps like WhatsApp existed.
Each BlackBerry had a unique PIN, which users shared to connect and message each other instead of using phone numbers.]
Taki Sarantakis: You talked a little bit about BBM, talked a little bit about PINs. I think, for most of us, we would go, wow, well, the money is obviously in the car. The money is obviously in the chair. The money is obviously in the computer. But you and a few others, I think, saw that differently.
Jim Balsillie: Yes. Well, what was happening was we were a mini monopoly when we came out where you could tie the hardware to the service. But a couple of things happened. One, we came up with a product. Mike wanted to do a product that had a clickable display called the Storm.
[00:30:25 Overlaid image of the BlackBerry Storm.]
Jim Balsillie: And it didn't work. We got 100% returns. And because of that, Verizon went to use Android's new OS with Motorola called Motorola Droid.
[00:30:36 Overlaid image of the Motorola Droid.]
Jim Balsillie: And then AT&T, I think it was BellSouth at that time, they were pushing this iOS iPhone. And so for us, I'd spent about a year and a half with the carriers to get them to put our BBM on third-party devices because we were doing richer media, picture saving, video, all basically social media equivalent at the time.
And yes, it was open BBM 2.0 or SMS 2.0, whatever you want to call it. And also nestled into that, mobile wallets for your credentials at the time. And then we had a new CEO. We just reported a quarter of $5.2 billion on a $20 billion year, but we were making well over a billion. All our profits were on the services, about $1.1 billion a quarter.
And then Mike and the new CEO didn't want to do that. They cancelled that plan because it would kill hardware. But what I felt, I said [the] hardware is already dead. But what it did do is killed the services because you wouldn't buy a phone that could only talk to somebody else with the same kind of phone. And so, that was all of our profit. And at the time we had more profit on our services than Facebook had revenue, and we had far more users than WhatsApp.
So, I felt that had killed the business model, it killed the company. And that was early 2012. So, I resigned from the board and sold my shares. And they were very excited with a new OS and BB10 and thought that was going to be, as they would call it, their Jesus phone.
Taki Sarantakis: And that's a little bit of the classic innovator's dilemma where the thing that made you the thing, which in BlackBerry's case was the physical BlackBerry, kind of stopped some people from seeing what was the next thing. Now, the last question –
Jim Balsillie: Business models change. That's the one thing is business models can change and you have to shift and structure your business models.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, the last question on BlackBerry before we go on to the next section of our 3-part conversation here.
What did it mean that BlackBerry was a Canadian corporation? What did it mean that BlackBerry – or sorry, Research in Motion – was headquartered in Kitchener-Waterloo? What did it mean that you went on Team Canada trips with the Prime Minister and things like that?
[00:33:23 Overlaid image of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien arriving during a Team Canada mission.]
Jim Balsillie: Well, I thought it was very, very helpful that Jean Chrétien wanted to help sell Canadian products. And he's a friend to this day. Yes. And it's kind of how the world should work. You kind of bat for your team. And so, the idea that you help your own companies was great, and necessary, and constructive.
And for us, most people thought we were an American company. And that was helpful too. And when you get the geopolitical bullying, to have the US State Department with you was very, very effective because these are public-private structures.
And Ottawa had been captured by a naive and sentimental conception of neoliberalism; that it's a rules-based international order, not understanding that power always was there and power always is there. And when there's power, there will be leverage. And so, you have to think in terms of power, or you're going to miss the plot.
Taki Sarantakis: So, that's a little bit in our third, or maybe in our second too, but let's now move on to our second thing that you are really known for, which is starting to seed and to build institutions. Let's talk about your first one, popularly known as CG, the Centre for Innovation –
[00:35:00 Overlaid image of the Centre for International Governance Innovation.
Text on screen: CIGI is an independent, non-partisan think tank focused on global governance and the impact of emerging technologies like AI on society.]
Jim Balsillie: International Governance Innovation.
Taki Sarantakis: International Governance Innovation. Why did you put a bunch of your money behind that?
Jim Balsillie: Well, I have certainly no regrets doing it. I believe that we need to have this capacity on the global stage. Paul Martin was Finance Minister at the time, and he offered to support it with me because he was trying to do the L20,
[00:35:28 Overlaid image of the flags of countries in the L20. Text on screen: The L20 was an early proposal for a group of leading economies that became the G20, where the world's largest economies coordinate global policy.]
Jim Balsillie: which came to the G20, and he was bothered that he would always have to go to US think tanks because we don't have a tradition of think tanks in Canada. We tend to have these small pay-to-play shops. And so, that was the genesis.
And for me, it did its different things, and I was very busy, so I wasn't as involved in it. But when I retired, I tried to turn it and encourage a tighter aperture to these contemporary economic structural realities because while it seems narrow, it's in fact the mediation structure of security, prosperity, and social wellbeing. But at the time, it was a looser conception of what it could do. But that's how I got into it, Paul Martin, yes.
Taki Sarantakis: So, you liked that so much, you started funding and seeding and creating a few others. Tell us about a few of them. Well, maybe one at a time.
Jim Balsillie: The other thing is I was asked by Ban Ki-moon to be on the UN High Panel for Sustainability as a private sector representative for Rio+20, which is all fine. And I led the group writing Chapter 4 on reforming economics and understood the fusion between the scarcity of natural capital and economic structures, and disclosure was a biggie, and standards were a biggie, and they're still the discussions to this day.
But part of it is I got a chance to go on an icebreaker through the Northwest Passage, and there were a bunch of political thinkers there and policy thinkers and senior civil servants, which was great. And we went by King William Island, and there was a Russian flagship – not Russian, but a flagged ship, maybe tourism, I don't know – but the people from the government were lamenting that we don't have a plan to search for the Franklin ships.
[00:37:26 Overlaid image of an archival illustration of the "Franklin Ships". Text on screen: The Franklin Expedition was a failed 19th century Arctic voyage whose ships, the HMS Erebus and Terror, were lost for over 150 years.]
Jim Balsillie: And so I said, what do you need? And they said, we need a vessel. And so, that started the Arctic Research Foundation.
[00:37:34 Overlaid image of an icebreaker ship in frozen Arctic waters. Text on screen: The Arctic Research Foundation is a Canadian organization that supports scientific research and exploration in the Arctic.]
Jim Balsillie: And it's been a lot of funding over the last 15 years, 16 years. And we have several vessels, several terrestrial stations, maybe 4 or 5 vessels. We're just buying another one. And then a dozen or so science stations on land in the Arctic.
Taki Sarantakis: So, that's number 2. What was your third?
[00:37:59 Overlaid image of the Council of Canadian Innovators (CCI) logo. Text on screen: The Council of Canadian Innovators is a business council that represents high-growth Canadian technology companies.]
Jim Balsillie: I would say Council of Canadian Innovators. What really, really bothers me is that we have a lot of people in Canada who have never commercialized ideas on the global stage, and they articulate that we have a lazy business class, but that we have this brilliant policy class that's got it all right. And these folks aren't smart enough to open up their wallets and let the cheques fly in.
Taki Sarantakis: And I think I read an article where you were quoted, I think it was in The Globe and Mail, where there was a Clerk of the Privy Council –
Jim Balsillie: Former Clerk.
Taki Sarantakis: Former Clerk of the Privy Council, who said something like, we, government, have done everything brilliantly. I'm paraphrasing. We've done this brilliantly, we've done that brilliantly, we've done this third thing brilliantly. The reason why we can't do A, B, and C is because of the business sector in Canada.
Jim Balsillie: Yes, they're complacent. Yes. And it's very lazy thinking, very lazy economics, very flawed policy conception, and not attuned to what successful ones around the world are doing. So, I was approached by the editor of the Globe and Mail. They were relaunching the business section, and I wrote a, I think about a 5,000-word piece on,
[00:39:24 Overlaid image of the Globe and Mail article written by Jim Balsillie. Text on screen: Canadians can innovate, but we're not equipped to win.]
Jim Balsillie: We can compete but will not win with our current approaches. And they've all really stood the test of time, what I said.
Taki Sarantakis: And this is like 2015?
Jim Balsillie: That's correct. It was May 2015. And I was working on this. I was chairing SDTC, the cleantech organization. And so, I put this out there and it was really to say, this is ridiculous how this is being approached.
And there's a very good piece in The Globe today, by Natalie Raffoul and Neil Desai, saying we give away all our best stuff. That's what I was saying then, and we still do it today. And then I got quite a bit of feedback from people to say help. John Ruffalo was running Omer's Ventures. They had a bunch of their tech companies, you know, D2L, Shopify, many like that, and all their founders and CEOs. And so he said, will you come and talk to them?
So, I explained to them, and I showed all these politicians and governor generals and educators, everybody on the public sector who had never done a day of what they do, telling them that they're lazy. And then I explained what these other firms are doing in Europe that I'd encountered, and the US, and all these other things.
So, then they were pretty riled up, and then they said, will you help us? And I said, well, I'm not really looking for more work. And I was talking to my wife, and she said, you know, if you rile people up, and don't help them, you're kind of a jerk. And so, that started the Council of Canadian Innovators. I said, okay, I'm chair of that with John Ruffalo. And it's advocating only for Canadian companies for Canada's benefit.
Taki Sarantakis: Now we're bleeding heavily into our third section, but let's stop the bleeding for a moment. Any other institutions you want to mention here?
Jim Balsillie: Sure. Well, one of the things I – and I've been dealing with this, and I'll be testifying a bit on this to the Defence Industrial Strategy is there's very sophisticated legal frameworks of plumbing that go between, like Trump has launched a new group at the US Patent Office for Standard Essential Patents for their SMEs to go globally. And then when he quit 66 organizations last month, he stayed 3 and doubled downed them:
[00:42:04 Overlaid image of the globe interconnecting with satellites orbiting it. Text on screen: Organizations like the ITU, IEC and ISO set global technical standards that shape how technologies are used worldwide.]
Jim Balsillie: ITU, IEC, and ISO, because they're all standard setting.
Taki Sarantakis: These are global institutions.
Jim Balsillie: Global institutions to basically – and there was many other things they did to jackhammer US standards and IP into global value chains, and they operate as an entity.
So, he bullies, but there's a method to the madness. That's why their economy has gone so fast, inequal as it is. So, when I used to do RIM stuff around the world, I would encounter all these CIO councils where CIOs architected what they want, architected their standards, architected their procurement, and they'll move as a kind of a pack, and they're very coherent. The Germans, the Dutch –
Taki Sarantakis: The Chinese.
Jim Balsillie: I never presented in China, but certainly America, there's two of them; the Research Board and the CIO Strategy Exchange. And I thought I never saw anything like that in Canada. And I'm saying, where do you do this? And there was no place for this. So that was starting the CIO Strategy Exchange that we morphed to the Digital Governance Council because the digital issues were much beyond the CIO at that time. And again, it's architecting very front-footed what you want in your approaches. So, that was another.
Taki Sarantakis: Let's talk about one last one really quickly.
Jim Balsillie: Centre for Digital Rights?
[00:43:35 Overlaid image of the Centre for Digital Rights' logo. Text on screen: The Centre for Digital Rights focuses on protecting rights and freedoms in the digital age.]
Taki Sarantakis: Yes.
Jim Balsillie: Yes, well, part of it is that –
Taki Sarantakis: What's a digital right? Like, don't we just have rights?
Jim Balsillie: Well, the digital era has really hijacked most of traditional rights but in a novel way. But you never thought you'd need freedom of agency, but it's taken away your agency. Who would have ever thought their identity would be hijacked and through pornification and misinformation, the right to knowledge, to know what's real and not real, so on and so forth. The body politic has been hijacked.
But, pretty simply, the CIO Strategy Council, Digital Governance Council, that's what the CIOs want. CCI, that's what the companies want, and CG, there's a church and state, I'm chair, but they run it and do their programs. But I wanted a place where there was issues that I could do what I wanted.
And so, I was very active with Shoshana Zuboff on the government's effort to privatize government to Google in our largest city. And then thereafter it's moved to issues like funding the BC litigation for political parties. So, it's where I get to do what I want to do.
Taki Sarantakis: So, let's move into our third and final area, which is policy. And you're playing a lot in policy today. You have been playing a lot in policy, probably as our viewers have seen by now, over the last 10 years. But I think recently in the last 3, 4, 5 years, you've kind of come to the forefront in terms of Globe and Mail, giving speeches, testifying in Parliament.
Now, for me, public policy is an outcome of the interplay between ideas, institutions, and interests. And if you don't look at each of those things together – sometimes interests are more important, sometimes ideas are more important, sometimes institutions are – but that kind of dance between those three things is what really matters. And you play, and have played, on all three of those.
Let's talk about some of the policy issues. You are a well-known critic of what I think maybe provincial, but for sure federal government policy has been, let's call it over the last decade.
Jim Balsillie: For 30 years.
Taki Sarantakis: 30 years! Okay. Tell us what are some of the things that bother you in terms of you see this and people in Ottawa see that.
Jim Balsillie: Well, the job of public policy, in the broadest sense of the word, is to put wind at the back of the values that you seek, not put wind in the face. And so, the policy architecture in Ottawa and in Bay Street and the provinces is rooted in 1970s thinking. But when you go to an intangible economy, it's a rentier economy, not a production economy. And that means it's absolute advantage, where you can be landlord 10 out of 10 times and it doesn't fit normal comparative advantage models. It leads to strategic behaviour.
So, all Trump has done is just do exactly what Biden has done but turned up the volume a little bit more and put brutish words to it. But Biden kept everything Trump did and then added the Line 5 stuff; cancelling the Keystone –
Taki Sarantakis: So, let's pause and go back because a lot of –
Jim Balsillie: Cancelling the lumber stuff; Buy America. Biden did no favours to Canada, nor should he. That's not his job.
Taki Sarantakis: Let's go back a little bit because a lot of our viewers, you kind of lost them at intangibles, you lost them at rents, you lost them at— So let's go back. What is an intangible?
Jim Balsillie: Well, an intangible is a negative right where you have value in an asset based on legal frameworks that change all the time.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, you're wearing a lovely jacket.
Jim Balsillie: Well, thank you very much.
Taki Sarantakis: You're welcome very much. Tell us the difference between the tangible part of the jacket and the intangible part of the jacket.
Jim Balsillie: Well, the person who makes this jacket maybe gets $50, but then the person who sells it, you don't want to know how much they get for it, but it's a lot more than that. And so, the design of this jacket is a negative right.
So, you have the right to stop somebody from copying that design. And in the '70s, that was a very small part of the economy. But now it's become a dominant part of how the wealth is created in economy. And if you don't play in that, then you're just playing in a low-value-added developing economy space.
Taki Sarantakis: But it's a little bit more than that too, though, isn't it? Because if I make that jacket and you buy that jacket, the person who has physically made that jacket, they can't sell it to somebody else.
Jim Balsillie: No. And it's generally in our disintermediated supply and production chains, that was generally outsourced to low-cost economies, and so they would get subsistence wages, and then the person who owned the design would get enormous rent on the design, and they get it each time the jacket's sold.
And so, what happens is the people who owned intangible assets, the capital of intangible assets, got increasing returns, [and] very, very wealthy. And those that did the work got less and less and less. So, that broke the relationship between labour and capital, and our policy apparatus just focused on the labour part of the work, particularly through branch plants, not on owning the capital that brought the wealth and the security.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, every announcement in Ottawa of every time a dollar goes somewhere, it's always, "And this will create 17 jobs." "And this will create 200 jobs." "And we're bringing a global company X here and they're bringing 78 jobs with them". Talk to us about why that is the right or the wrong metric.
Jim Balsillie: Well, first of all, it's not true. And second of all, it's gaslighting. And third of all, even if it was interim valuable, those are all going there. They're all going away. So, if you've seen the announcements last week,
[00:50:29 Overlaid image of a Business section news article, dated February 20, 2026.
Text on screen: Toyota Canada signs deal to bring humanoid robot workers to Woodstock assembly plant.]
Jim Balsillie: Toyota's putting in robots to take out workers in Southern Ontario, and pretty soon all these Amazon warehouses will be pretty much lights out. And so –
Taki Sarantakis: Dark factories.
Jim Balsillie: – the government policy, rather than focusing on Canadian innovators, they focused on these branch plants. And then they called, if they were going to put $5 billion in here, they go, look, I brought $5 billion of investment. Well, $4 billion of that is their machinery or their technology. And so, that's not an investment where they come and write a cheque in here and you get the spillovers. That's them bringing their technology here, so it's a sale for their companies.
So, it's all funny math. It was all not properly construed. And what it meant is we were taking the developing economy strategy where we were doing a small value add for a shrinking number of people, with no sovereign control, none of the wealth effects on the tax base, none of the supply chains. And we wonder why we've had an erosion over this past 25 years.
Taki Sarantakis: Talk to us a little bit about the differences as you see them between, let's call it research, innovation, and commercialization?
Jim Balsillie: Well, innovation for the purposes of economy is the commercialization of ideas, so they're synonymous, but our policy discourse conflates the invention research with the innovation. It's not innovation until you get money, and so we had a –
Taki Sarantakis: Say that again, because I think this is a big point. You just said it's not innovation until you get money. That would surprise a lot of people.
Jim Balsillie: Well, because that's commercialization. That's collecting cheques. And everybody's friendly until money's involved. And every country thinks the billion dollars is better in their pocket, to pay for their hospitals and social programs and railways, than ours. And yet we had a naive conception for the policy community that this is a shared destiny.
So, we had foreign firms getting our IP from our research overwhelmingly. We still to this day have no strategy to capture the benefits from the billions we invest in research every day. We have no strategies to make our data an asset, even though it's a factor of production. And these are security things, also. So, we wonder why our productivity erodes.
Taki Sarantakis: But that's on purpose, right? For many, many years, you said probably 3 decades, maybe a little bit more, or maybe not. Actually, if we go back 3 decades, it's like, we will invest in research, we will invest in idea generation, and then the market will take care of everything else. That's a fallacy according to you.
Jim Balsillie: Yes, of course, it's a complete fallacy of this. The joke I say is America talks Jeffersonian but rules Hamiltonian. We talk Hamiltonian but rule Jeffersonian. And then we get these peers – so we're true neoliberal – and then when our stuff doesn't commercialize, they say, well, look at our research, it's all peer cited. They go, "Oh, we have—" and they manufacture another myth. "We have weak receptors." And in fact, no, there's nothing to be received.
Taki Sarantakis: Back to the lazy business community.
Jim Balsillie: Yes, there's nothing to receive. They never filed the IP, or it's all gone by the pre-structured relationships with big global companies. And no other country in the world gives away their ideas, or gives away their data, or orients their economic development strategy to foreign branch plants, save and except developing countries, because that's a step in the development ladder. But no developed country does that. So, we've taken a pole position, and gave it away.
Taki Sarantakis: So, but we've done it as a feature, not a bug. It's not like we are actually, oh my God, we didn't expect this to happen.
Jim Balsillie: Well, it's because it's rooted in the 1970s production economy where, when you open up a branch plant, you bring technology with you, you bring management with you, you develop a supply chain, you charge taxes based on the work done, you export the produced goods. The research is co-located with the production.
But, not to pick on anyone, but what's Facebook's supply chain in Canada? Or any other big company? And I'm not trying to pick on Facebook. Microsoft Canada's headquarters is in Ireland, the wealth effect's abroad, the senior management's abroad. These are simply cheap dev shops or sales shops to pull the rents and the IP and the data out of the country. So, the spillovers, the economic spillovers work exactly opposite.
But we still, to this day, use a toolkit from a time that was then, and what's happened very pronounced is all these chickens are coming home to roost. And if you've seen the manufacturing jobs collapsing in Ontario, that was highly, highly predictable. And I was trying to articulate to say this is going to blow up.
Now there's some humility, but it's kind of like somebody who smokes 2 packs of cigarettes a day and turned 55 and said, okay, maybe I should think about it.
Taki Sarantakis: It seems to me that another way of saying what you just said – and correct me if I'm wrong, please correct me if I'm wrong – it seems to me one of the ways of understanding what you just said is we missed the shift from multinational corporations to international corporations. We still work under a mindset that there are multinational corporations, whereas actually the big corporations, they're no longer multinational, they're international. Is that correct?
Jim Balsillie: I would say it a little differently, that macro policy is really designed on a theory of the micro firm. And when the structure of the micro firm changes, your macro policies have to adjust. Yes, there's a place for stable banking and stable interest rates, of course.
But if it's in fact all about capturing the capital of these rents, which are now 90% of the value of the Standard & Poor's 500, and our strategy is to give away those rents or to be neutral on those rents and everyone else is going to be predatory, it's because they didn't understand the theory of the firm. They thought a foreign firm is as good as a Canadian firm because if you're making bricks or an oil upgrade or a pulp and paper mill, well, that's just jobs and supply chain. But if in fact, it's about getting this enormous amount of rent and control and wealth effects, and none of the spillovers stay domestic, then your macro strategies have to understand how that works at the firm, and they have to change.
And this was a heavy heartbeat of change, really picking up pace around 2000, and it's just accelerated ever since. But if you're just thinking jobs, you're missing where all of the true spillovers come from.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, you're also a very high and strong proponent for privacy. You mentioned Professor Zuboff, who was one of your professors back at Harvard. She wrote, I would think, the book on this, Surveillance Capitalism.
[00:58:30 Overlaid image of Shoshana Zuboff's book.
Text on screen: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight For a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.]
Taki Sarantakis: You also had a very public interface/interaction role with Google Sidewalks,
[00:58:43 Overlaid image of an Opinion section news article, dated October 5, 2018.
Text on screen: Sidewalk Toronto has only one beneficiary, and it is not Toronto.]
Taki Sarantakis: where you talked a lot about issues of privacy. Why is privacy so important to you?
Jim Balsillie: Well, many people have worked on this file for a long period of time, and they've focused on the human rights of it very legitimately. And in the digital sphere, the violation has gone up more and more. I really focused on the economics of it, that we're taking ourselves out of the economic engine.
And the government wanted Google to privatize government in Toronto. And we have some of the top smart city companies in the world who were completely driven out of it. And then Google would just take all the value and knock these companies out of business. And somehow this was supposed to be good for Canada. It made no sense. In fact, it was subversive at every level.
And then you had 3 levels of government with it. You had many parts of Bay Street on it. You had the most powerful corporation in the world. And the rest of the world thought Canada had lost its marbles. And it had. And so, do you let the bullies win – and there was a tremendous – good people in civil society that were emerging, people I never met who all were voicing their own concerns. And we decided to push back.
Taki Sarantakis: Our last topic. Talk to me a little bit about a word that is easily rolling off the tongues of Canadians and policymakers and our elected officials these days, but really it's fair to say we weren't talking about it that much a little while ago, and that's the S-word, sovereignty. Why were you talking about sovereignty before a lot of us were talking about sovereignty?
Jim Balsillie: Well, because that's how the world works. We don't go to the Olympics and say, "It's a kumbaya, we're all in this together." We're happy to go to the Olympics, but everybody is fighting for the same gold. And we want the gold, not them. Yet for some reason we thought giving the gold away to the other countries was going to make us okay. And it's a particular form of self-subversion and perpetuated by people, I might add, who were not out there fighting for global purchase orders and not understanding that all these other companies are hand in glove with their countries.
Taki Sarantakis: Including the Americans.
Jim Balsillie: Nobody more. And what the US government and the Canadian government had in common is they were both focused on supporting American companies. And our firms were progressing in spite of the public policy, not because of it. And then they say, oh, you're not scaling. There must be no fire in the belly. It's remarkable.
Taki Sarantakis: Wrap us up here. You don't need this platform to talk to anybody, but this is a platform that is mostly watched by public servants.
Jim Balsillie: Good.
Taki Sarantakis: What do you want public servants to know? What you think they need to know to do their jobs in 2026 and beyond?
Jim Balsillie: Yes, the most important thing for the public servants, the path to learning is acknowledging what you don't know. There is a monster blind spot that is half the global – there's half the global economy, macroprudential stability, stable payments, whatever, good governance. But this whole other element of frameworks, you have to learn what you don't know and understand the war going on and the predatory behaviour there so that we can get in there and get our fair share of the prosperity, security, and social wellbeing.
Taki Sarantakis: Jim Balsillie, thank you so much for taking some time out of your day to share with us a little bit of your insights, a little bit of your energy. And a little bit of your experiences.
Jim Balsillie: Pleasure's all mine, Taki. Anytime.
[01:02:44 The CSPS animated logo appears onscreen. Text on screen: canada.ca/school.]
[01:02:50 The Government of Canada wordmark appears.]
