Updated and revised: November 6, 2025

State of the Canadian economy / L’état de l’économie canadienne

On Monday, November 3, 2025, Tiff Macklem, Governor of the Bank of Canada, will participate in a fireside chat at The Logic Summit.

The host is with the Logic Summit, organized by The Logic online publication (https://thelogic.co/), “Canada’s Business and Tech Newsroom.”

You can see the event page for this year: https://thelogic.co/summit-2025/ and for last year’s summit: https://thelogic.co/summit-2024/.

The Speakers pages for both years include representatives from some relevant technologies and organizations. For example, this year’s speaker’s list (https://thelogic.co/summit-2025/#summit-speakers) includes a rep from the Canadian Web3 Council and a rep from a new think-tank called the Canadian Shield Institute (https://canadianshieldinstitute.ca/).

The video above is discussion with Tiff Macklem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiff_Macklem), Governor of the Bank of Canada.

The Bank of Canada website incidentally has sections for Research and Publications, etc. There is a Search function at the top, and, for example, you can search “digital currency” to see years of articles on that particular topic. Although digital currency was not discussed directly in the interview, AI was discussed.

Searching for the term “Digital ID,” I found this article: “A Dual Vision for the Canadian Payments System” (June 27, 2014) (https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2014/06/dual-vision-canadian-payments-system/). Quote from Reference 16:

Consideration could also be given to the recommendation from the Task Force for the Payments System Review that a centralized digital ID initiative should be further explored as a catalyst to spur innovations such as mobile payments and to leverage e-commerce and the full capabilities of the digital economy. See Task Force for the Payments System Review, “The Way We Pay: Transforming the Canadian Payments System” (July 2011) [emphasis mine]

.

I can find references to this document “The Way We Pay” in other policy documents online (using startpage.com) but I will have to do another search for the actual document.

In any case, I did not catch Governor Macklem discussing these topics directly in the interview

Notes about this discussion:

• Blame is put on the tariffs for the poor state of the Canadian economy.
• The references to “Liberation Day” and April refer to US President Trump’s tariffs. Quote: ““April 2 is liberation day for our country because we’re finally going to be taking in money,” Trump said…” (https://financialpost.com/news/trump-liberation-day-could-help-canada).
• “how bad things could get” is the kind of phrasing used by the host.
• Key quote by the Governor, from the YouTube transcript:

18:34 Um well, this really comes back to where I started. This is this what we’re seeing now. It’s not a normal business cycle. Uh you know, a normal business cycle, growth goes down, then growth actually typically comes above its longer term trend. Um you fill in the hole and then you get back to the trend. This is more like growth goes down. Yeah, growth will come back up, but the level is is lower. I mean, to put that in words, look, we had a very we had, you know, we’ve had entirely open trading relationship with our biggest trading partner. That is over. It is fractured and that is destroying some capacity in this country. It’s destroying it’s destroyed some productive capacity. (emphasis mine)

• Another point:

27:27 Um we do spend a lot of time looking at the economy. we can help with the diagnosis, but when it comes to the specific uh policies, uh you know, I’m going to leave that to our elected governments.

• He talks about tackling interprovincial trade barriers and thinking globally as part of the solution for Canada’s economic trouble.
• The Governor is asked to talk about AI at the end of the discussion and the pushing of AI is the most important part of this interview in my view:

30:49 you know, I feel like I usually feel like when I talk to people, I know more about monetary policy than most other people in the room, but on AI, I’m not sure that that uh is the case here today. Um, look, I I think, you know, we’ve talked a lot about uh we need to
improve our productivity growth. We need to grow our economy. Uh, productivity growth is what underpins rising standard of living. It’s what pays higher wages and what’s makes your companies more competitive. Uh, so that that is the imperative and AI has the potential to to be a big part of that. Uh, so that I mean that is something we need to lean into. Um you know you you talked about Peter Howitt so his Nobel prize is on sort of formalizing the shiterian [sic] idea of creative destruction. Uh AI you know transformative technologies can destroy businesses as well as create new ones. They can they can eliminate jobs as well as creating new jobs. That can be uh a painful adjustment for the economy. Um so you know as you think about that you know you don’t want to you don’t want to eliminate the topline potential but you got to think about how are we going to as a country uh manage through the disruption as well and you know the reality is if you don’t allow any disruption it’s going to be hard to get the top line. So you can’t you can’t block you can’t block the disruption you but you do have to figure out how to ensure that u you know the the losers um can move on get some retraining find another opportunity um so I mean the you know last thing I’ll say on AI is that you know we also have to look at you know longer run uh there’s potential for big payoff it should be disinflationary meaning the economy can grow faster uh without causing inflation. In the short run though, and you’re already seeing this, it it there will be some bottlenecks. I mean, there’s being a huge increase in demand for power um particularly in the US that is is
causing uh that is causing bottlenecks. Um so you will see pressures in some places. So we need to look at both the the demand and supply uh and and you know, our job is to try to keep the
overall economy in balance. So that’s that’s what we’re looking at. [emphasis mine]

He is promoting AI. He refers to the idea of Creative Destruction. So it’s not a coincidence that he mentions Peter Howitt, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Howitt_(economist) the Nobel Prize winning Canadian economist more than once in the video. It would be worth looking into Howitt’s research on the theory of creative destruction.

Quote from Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Howitt_(economist)

In 2025, Howitt and Aghion were jointly awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences “for the theory of sustained growth through creative destruction.”

Wikipedia describes Creative Destruction in this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction and it cites sources for the particular paper by Howitt and Aghion.

The Governor basically says:

AI can destroy businesses and jobs but it can create new businesses and jobs.

He claims you CAN’T BLOCK THE DISRUPTION but you have to ensure you look after the losers. “Losers” have to be given support.

He refers to the increase in demand for power which relates to AI.

He says if you DON’T ALLOW DISRUPTION, it will be hard to get back up economically.

AI is something “we need to lean into.”

By the way, Evan Solomon (former CBC broadcaster) is currently the federal “Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evan_Solomon).

My thought is that AI is a non sequitur (unrelated conclusion) as far as “solutions” to economic problems. The reason AI is being promoted is that it is part of an old Agenda of Technocracy or Fabian scientific management of the world. In that respect, one of the other areas covered by the Speakers pages is “global governance.”

AI was a concept promoted by H. G. Wells (“The World Brain”) and by Teilhard de Chardin (colleague of Julian Huxley, one of the promoters of Transhumanism), and is referred to as a form of salvation in top European bureaucrat and banker, Jacques Attali’s book, A Brief History of the Future.

The media is talking about the enormous energy required for the use of AI and the psychiatric impact it is having on a personal level (AI psychosis) as some people replace relationships with AI chatbots. I have heard very strong arguments that the use of Artificial Intelligence is weakening the ability of people to do research, think critically, write properly and make coherent arguments. It is being pushed in spite of its destructive effects on human capacities. The fact that law companies were using it from the start is very troubling and maybe speaks to some kind of disconnect between the humanities and the logic taught in computer science and mathematics (minimal in both the humanities and sciences). I doubt that our lives will improve with AI. Its real purpose is control and surveillance.