The Innovation Nation — Part III: Don't Follow the Leader. Leapfrog.

April 2026 John Pope · Founder · Ottawa, Canada

It's not about whether Canada wins or loses. It's about which game we choose to play.

Most of us played both games as children, probably without appreciating that one of them is a catastrophically bad strategy for nations, businesses, and anyone who aspires to be more than runner up or bridesmaid.

Follow the Leader is the game where everyone does exactly what the person at the front of the line does. Step where they step. Wave your arms how they wave theirs. The leader has all the fun. Everyone else performs compliance. It is an excellent game for teaching children to pay attention. It is a terrible model for building competitive advantage, because the only way to win is to eventually become the leader — and to do that, you have to get past everyone already ahead of you in line, one position at a time, while they keep moving.

Leapfrog is different. You do not fight your way up the queue. You skip the queue entirely. You vault over the person in front, plant yourself ahead of where they stand, and reset the game from a new position. The logic is non-linear. You do not win by being marginally better at what everyone else is doing. You win by doing something different, at the exact moment when doing something different is worth more than doing the same thing better.

The most important industrial policy decision of the early twenty-first century — one whose consequences are still compounding — was made by a country that chose leapfrog when everyone expected it to play follow the leader.

How China Won a Game It Wasn't Playing

In the early 2000s, the consensus view of China's industrial trajectory was essentially a follow-the-leader story: China would climb the manufacturing value chain as Japan and South Korea had done before it, moving from low-cost assembly to higher-value production, decade by patient decade. The script was written. Everyone knew their position in the line.

China read the script and decided to ignore it.

Instead of competing with Germany for dominance in internal combustion engine manufacturing — a race that would have taken generations and ended in second place — China identified the generation of technology that would displace the incumbent, and bet the national industrial policy on owning it before the incumbent knew what was happening. The bet was green energy: solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and critically, the entire supply chain of materials and manufacturing required to produce them at scale. Battery chemistry. Rare earth processing. Lithium refining. Power electronics. The full stack, from the ground up.

The results are not subtle. China controls approximately 80 per cent of global solar panel manufacturing capacity. It accounts for roughly 75 per cent of global lithium-ion battery production. And in 2023, it overtook Germany as the world's largest auto exporter — in electric vehicles.

China did not become the world's largest automaker by building better combustion engines. It became the world's largest automaker by deciding that combustion engines were the wrong game, and that the right game — electric vehicles and the energy storage ecosystem they require — was wide open for whoever showed up first with the manufacturing capacity and the supply chain depth to serve it at scale.

This was not an accident. It was not the emergent result of market forces. It was a deliberate, nationally coordinated industrial policy decision made at a moment when the dominant technologies were still dominant, the incumbents were still comfortably ahead, and the future was, to most observers, still speculative. China bet on the future while everyone else was still winning the present. The leapfrog worked because it was executed before the leader knew the game had changed.

China did not fight its way up the queue. It identified the next queue — the one that would matter most — and positioned itself at the front before the queue existed.

Canada Has Already Started Playing

Here is something that does not get said clearly enough in Canadian public discourse: Canada has already made several of the same category of bets. Not timidly. Not apologetically. With genuine strategic ambition that deserves to be named as such.

The pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy, launched in 2017, was the first national AI strategy of any country in the world. Not the United States. Not China. Canada. The Vector Institute in Toronto, Mila in Montréal, and AMII in Edmonton form a research ecosystem that has produced more AI breakthroughs per capita than any comparable geography on earth. Geoffrey Hinton trained at the University of Toronto. Yoshua Bengio leads Mila. The foundational intellectual architecture of the AI age was substantially built in Canada, often with Canadian public funding.

Canada has committed to becoming a global leader in Small Modular Reactor technology — next-generation nuclear power deployable at a fraction of the cost and scale of conventional reactors. Ontario Power Generation's Darlington new nuclear project is the most advanced SMR program in the Western world. At a moment when the global energy transition requires clean baseload power that intermittent renewables cannot reliably provide, Canada is positioning itself as the jurisdiction that builds and exports the solution.

Canada has made substantial commitments in battery storage technology, critical mineral processing, and the clean hydrogen supply chain — all core components of the energy economy that will define industrial competitiveness for the next half century. The Volkswagen and Stellantis battery gigafactories under construction in Ontario are not just manufacturing investments. They are anchors for supply chain ecosystems that will attract decades of downstream investment in the technologies that feed them and the technologies they enable.

And Canada has the most important competitive advantage in the resource-intensive future economy: the raw materials.

The Ground Beneath Our Feet

There is a reason that the transition to a clean energy economy is simultaneously a story about Canadian natural resources. The metals and minerals required to build solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicle batteries, semiconductor chips, and advanced manufacturing equipment are not evenly distributed across the earth's surface. They are concentrated in a small number of geologies. Canada's geology is exceptional.

Canada ranks in the top five globally for production of nickel, cobalt, lithium, uranium, copper, and potash. More than 60 critical minerals have been identified in Canada's geology, most of them required for clean energy technology. Canada holds the world's second-largest proven uranium reserves.

Canada produces nickel for EV batteries. Cobalt for energy storage. Lithium for the cells that power everything from electric vehicles to grid-scale storage. Uranium for the nuclear reactors — including the SMRs Canada is building — that will provide the clean baseload power the grid requires. Copper for the transmission infrastructure that connects all of it. Potash for the agricultural productivity that will feed a growing world.

The country that controls the raw materials for the energy transition, and also has the technological capacity to process, refine, and manufacture them into finished products, does not need to compete for market position in the future economy. It is already in the future economy. It just needs to decide to act like it.

This is the leapfrog opportunity. Not to become a better version of what Canada has been — a reliable supplier of raw commodities extracted and exported for value-added processing elsewhere — but to integrate vertically across the entire value chain: from the mine to the refinery, from the refinery to the manufacturer, from the manufacturer to the technology developer, from the technology developer to the sovereign AI infrastructure that orchestrates the intelligence across all of it.

Canada does not have to choose between being a resource economy and being a technology economy. Those two things are the same economy — the one that will dominate the next fifty years. We are already sitting on it.

What the OECD Gets Wrong

The OECD projects that Canada will rank last among advanced member economies in real GDP per capita growth over the next four decades. This projection is well-modelled, carefully sourced, and based on an extrapolation of current trends: low business investment, weak productivity growth, declining ICT adoption relative to peers, and a commodity export dependency that does not generate the value-added returns of manufacturing and technology economies.

The projection is probably correct about the Canada it is modelling.

It is not modelling the Canada that leapfrogs.

The OECD model assumes that Canada will continue to play follow the leader in the digital economy — adopting foreign platforms, paying foreign platform taxes, training foreign AI models on Canadian data, and watching the productivity dividend of the AI age accrue to the infrastructure owners rather than to the economy that generated the underlying value. It assumes Canada will continue to export raw critical minerals for processing elsewhere, continue to host research institutes whose IP migrates to foreign corporations, and continue to grow its population without building the high-value industries that make high-skilled immigration productivity-enhancing rather than productivity-diluting.

These are the assumptions of follow the leader. They are reasonable assumptions, given the evidence of the past two decades. They are not assumptions about what Canada is capable of choosing to do.

A Superpower With Principle

The China analogy is instructive but imperfect. China's industrial policy success was achieved through state-directed capital allocation at a scale and speed that required the suppression of market signals and the subordination of individual rights to national economic objectives. That is not the model Canada should emulate, and it is not the model Canada needs.

Canada has something China does not: institutions that encode trust. Rule of law. Property rights. An independent judiciary. Democratic accountability. A reputation for fair dealing that makes Canadian partnerships attractive to nations that are specifically trying to reduce their exposure to authoritarian infrastructure dependencies. The G-Middle nations — the UK, Germany, Japan, Australia, South Korea — are not looking for another hegemon to depend on. They are looking for a trustworthy partner with the resources, the technology, and the governance to build shared infrastructure that serves their interests rather than extracting from them.

That description fits Canada precisely. And it fits Canada at a moment when the demand for exactly that kind of partner has never been higher.

The leapfrog available to Canada is not merely an economic one. It is a geopolitical one. A Canada that integrates its critical mineral advantage with its AI research capacity, its clean energy technology leadership, its sovereign digital infrastructure, and its reputation for institutional integrity is not competing with the United States or China for dominance in the old economy. It is defining the terms of a new one — an economy built on open standards rather than proprietary lock-in, on distributed sovereignty rather than concentrated dependency, and on the permanent compounding of national wealth rather than its extraction and export.

The OECD predicts we will finish last. That prediction is a model of a Canada that keeps playing follow the leader — that stays in the queue, steps where the person in front steps, and waits its turn for a position it will never quite reach.

The other Canada — the one that decides collectively, with national purpose, to vault over the existing order and plant itself at the front of the next queue — does not look anything like the OECD's projection.

That Canada is a country that owns the raw materials the future economy runs on, the AI infrastructure that orchestrates it, the clean energy technology that powers it, and the governance institutions that make all of it trustworthy to every allied nation that wants a third path between American dependency and Chinese coercion.

That Canada is not last among advanced economies.

That Canada is a potential superpower with principle. And we are closer to realizing that outcome than we think.

The only question is whether we choose the game we are capable of winning — or keep playing the one we were never going to.