March 2026 | midagent | John Pope Big Tech is compounding Canada's cost-of-living crisis. Let's start with a simple question that nobody in a position of authority seems to have bothered asking for years: If it costs Amazon roughly the same amount to list, store, process, and ship a $50 blender as it does a $500 blender — same box, same warehouse shelf, same driver, same delivery van — why does Amazon charge ten times more for the second transaction? The answer, of course, is

Unless you've been living off-grid somewhere sensible, you've probably heard that artificial intelligence is coming for white-collar jobs. You've probably also heard reassuring counter-arguments about how ATMs created more bank tellers, and how the printing press didn't destroy writing as a profession. Both sides have a point. Neither side is telling you what to actually do about it. Let's start with what actually happened last week. Jack Dorsey's Very Honest Memo On February

March 2026 | midagent | John Pope We have the talent, the vision and the capital; now we need collective action. There is a deceptively simple framework at the heart of every prosperous society. Innovation drives productivity. Productivity drives growth. Growth drives living standards. Repeat for a generation, and you get a country where people live longer, eat better, work less brutally, and have more choices about how to spend their time. Break the chain anywhere, and the c

March 2026 | midagent | John Pope Foreign surveillance codified and reduced to vapour. Somewhere deep in the bowels of Shared Services Canada there is a document that most Canadians will never read, and like Lord Voldermort, most senior public servants would prefer not to discuss or name it in public. It is a government evaluation covering the period from 2018 to 2024, and it contains a finding that deserves to be read aloud in the next Cabinet meeting on digital sovereignty.

March 2026 | midagent | John Pope Canada's investment engine for the world. The number twelve deserves more attention than it gets in Canadian economic policy discussions. For every dollar managed by Canada's Maple Eight pension funds, more than 75 cents are invested outside Canada. When you strip out fixed income — mostly government bonds — Canadian exposure drops to just 12 cents of every dollar invested. Yahoo Finance Twelve cents. These are the funds that manage the retir

March 2026 | midagent | John Pope Canadian owned AI applications enable national sovereignty and economic security. Let's begin with a statement that doesn't get made often enough in Canadian policy circles, because the temptation to critique is always stronger than the impulse to give credit: Canada's AI strategy is genuinely impressive. Not impressive in the way that government press releases describe things as "impressive". Impressive in a measurable, internationally recog