Lisa Davis

Former elected official. Growth accelerator. "Acta non verba" - Actions not Words. STEM, education, innovation. We need more of everything.

[Build Canada @build_canada]

Canadians have built tech empires. But most didn't do it at home. ✈️

@Uber, @Cloudflare, @OpenAI, @AnthropicAI - all co-founded by 🇨🇦's who went on to build their businesses in the 🇺🇸.

Add on foreign nationals who attended Canadian universities, you get @Instacart, @Tesla, @moderna_tx, @NotionHQ. 🎓

Founders of all these companies slipped through our national grasp.

[John Brassard @JohnBrassardCPC]

If you’re not paying attention to what the Carney Liberals are doing to create a surveillance state on its citizens with Bill C-22, you need to watch this! Expert after expert is warning against what this Bill does! The loss of your rights and freedoms happen incrementally. Ask any Eastern European who lived it! #cdnpoli

[tobi lutke @tobi]

These bills, along with C-22 and C-9 constitute a total erosion in Canada’s basic liberties. They interlock into making Canada essentially unviable for those with choices on where to build.

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

https://t.co/vLmiBKTtX3

[Harley Finkelstein @harleyf]

You don’t have to love Elon Musk to recognize what this headline says about us.

A country that spends more time criticizing wealth creation than encouraging it sends a clear message to builders: your success is tolerated, not celebrated.

Canada should be the best place in the world to build ambitious companies. Headlines like this make us look like we’re not quite ready for that.

[Ian Brodie @irbrodie]

The business case, in a nutshell.

A new oil pipeline to the coast could be declared in the national interest today. Fed & prov govt could then sort out how to make it feasible over the summer. Construction cld start Labour Day. That would be building at speeds not seen in a generation.

[David Knight Legg @KnightLegg]

Premier Wab Kinew @WabKinew just called building a data centre “slavery to surveillance capitalism”. Really…

Welcome to Canada, global investors!

- it is an NDP art form to wrap economic illiteracy in the self-righteous language of social action and climate alarmism.

- and to borrow billions in debt, lose jobs and let cities decline into drug dens while picking up transfer grant welfare cheques from Alberta.

Alberta - which just created more jobs than the rest of Canada combined - is about to announce some of the largest digital - and other - infrastructure deals in the nation.

Alberta with its referendum is still attracting more capital than anywhere else in Canada.

Because global capital is less threatened by direct democracy than by bankrupt premiers thinking essential digital infrastructure is “capitalist surveillance”.

[Sean Speer @Sean_Speer]

The Carney government gets it wrong on AI

This week, the Carney government released AI for All, its long-awaited national artificial intelligence strategy.

Although there are some useful aspects to the strategy—including the government’s recognition that Canada suffers too little AI adoption—its central premise is basically wrong.

The document repeatedly frames AI through the lens of “sovereignty,” including the need for greater control over AI infrastructure, data, and advanced models. But sovereignty is a poor organizing principle for Canadian AI policy.

Frontier AI development is increasingly concentrated among a handful of American and Chinese firms with capital budgets that exceed the annual spending of most national governments. The hyperscalers are investing hundreds of billions of dollars in chips, data centres, models, and talent. The notion that Ottawa can engineer a domestically controlled frontier AI ecosystem capable of competing head-to-head with those firms is an unserious starting point for Canadian policy.

University of Toronto economist @Afinetheorem has made the point particularly well. In his view, countries such as Canada face a simple strategic choice: they must find a way to become essential to either the American or Chinese AI stack. Attempting to recreate a fully sovereign stack of our own is neither economically realistic nor technologically plausible.

That insight exposes the main weakness of the government’s approach. The strategy contains pages of discussion about Canadian leadership, sovereignty, and domestic capacity. Yet it says comparatively little about how Canada will position itself within the global AI ecosystem that’s already emerging. There’s little discussion of guaranteed access to frontier models, Canada’s role in AI supply chains, or how Canadian firms can become indispensable partners to the companies building the world’s most advanced systems.

Canada has genuine advantages. We possess abundant energy resources, a strong research base, world-class universities, significant mineral assets, and geographic proximity to the United States. The goal should be to leverage those strengths to attract investment, host infrastructure, develop specialized applications, and deepen our integration into the North American AI economy.

Put simply: Canada’s AI future is more likely to depend on integration than independence. Yet if policymakers become so preoccupied with the political goal of sovereignty, they risk undermining the country’s place in the AI economy around taking shape.

[😘 XXX @CoinGrowths]

This highlights a growing crisis in modern education: the collapse of institutional decorum and mutual respect. A graduation ceremony is not a personal talent show or a TikTok stage; it is a formal academic rite of passage designed to honor collective achievement and tradition.

[Andrew Leach 🇨🇦 @andrew_leach]

If I had to pick one graph to summarize what's happening in Alberta to someone outside of the province, I think I'd pick this one. Look at 2005-2015 vs 2015-2026 in terms of real weekly avg earnings.

[Libs of TikTok @libsoftiktok]

Wow. 1,000 University of California professors signed an open letter to the Board of Regents demanding they bring back standardized testing after it was removed during covid for equity.

They reveal that many STEM students are BELOW Middle School level in Math!

“The SAT mathematics requirement is not an obstacle to equity; rather, it is a prerequisite for it. Failing to measure preparation gaps does not remove barriers; it moves them into the classroom, where they become harder to overcome.”

[Lorrie Goldstein @sunlorrie]

EDITORIAL: Trade war shrinking Canada’s economy
The latest economic data from Statistics Canada -- our economy contracted in three of the last four quarters -- is a reminder that Canadian prosperity depends on our economic relationship with the U.S.
https://t.co/oKqOui1EAw

[The Vigilant Fox 🦊 @VigilantFox]

Bill Maher asks how Mississippi is kicking California’s ass in education, and Texas is “blowing them away” in green energy for “way less money.”

“Did you know that a black fourth grader in Mississippi is two and a half times as likely to be proficient in math and reading as one in California? Mississippi is kicking our ass in education and for way less money. We’re 37th in fourth-grade reading, they’re ninth.”

“Texas is kicking our ass in green energy. The average time to get solar panels connected there is three to four months. About 1,000 days faster than it took me. Remember when I was trying to get my solar hooked up? It would have been quicker to build a windmill.”

“Texas has passed California in solar and blows away California when it comes to wind and energy storage. How does a state with no pro-climate policies produce better climate results than a state where here, even though we have so much better bumper stickers on our Priuses?”

“I’ll tell you why. Because you’re allowed to build there because every third person in Texas isn’t someone whose job it is to make sure nothing gets done.”

“Democrats, these are your issues: education, race, the environment.”

“And I say this with love: you’re losing to the Waffle House, car-on-the-lawn states.”

[Rob Anderson @FreeAlbertaRob]

There has never been a Minister in our nation’s history to have inflicted so much damage to our economy and national unity.

His legacy is one of complete and utter disgrace.

[National Post @nationalpost]

Reforming Parliament seat distribution could help douse Western separatist flames: report https://t.co/qcuYaz2HI1

[Matt Lieberman @social_brains]

I signed it. The data are clear. Standardized tests are the best predictor of college success and the least biased indicator we have. Getting rid of them was incredibly foolish.

[Neetu Arnold @neetu_arnold]

University of California STEM professors want standardized tests back due to severe math deficiencies among students:

“We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle school mathematics”

“The current admissions metric, based primarily on GPA & essays, can no longer reliably distinguish readiness for university-level STEM majors in an era of severe grade inflation & AI assisted application essays”

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

In 2026, residents of every major city should understand this simple truth:

Crime and squalor are choices.

Policies exist that can both be compassionate but put the rights and quality of life of the tax paying and law abiding above everything and everyone else.

It’s not as crazy as it sounds.

[tobi lutke @tobi]

CPP underperforms passive indexing. It should have 5 employees, ideally all on vacation most of the time.

[Martin Pelletier @MPelletierCIO]

TD report on CANADA's BRAIN DRAIN is really interesting.

Canada is quietly losing its top talent to the United States in what economists call a silent brain drain. While Canada does a strong job educating highly skilled workers in STEM, engineering, and entrepreneurship, it struggles to keep them due to higher taxes that kick in at much lower income levels, limited opportunities to scale companies, weaker commercialization of ideas, and much better pay and growth potential south of the border.
-> Talent leaves mainly through temporary US work visas rather than permanent moves
-> Outflows are heavily concentrated among the highest skilled, especially in tech and advanced degrees
-> Onward migration is worst among immigrants and top university graduates
-> Canada has a missing middle of medium sized firms, relying instead on many tiny businesses and a few large ones
-> Personal tax rates often exceed 50 percent in major provinces and apply at much lower thresholds than in the US
-> Complex corporate tax rules push entrepreneurs toward tax planning instead of growth

All of this weakens productivity, innovation, and domestic returns on education, making Canada a feeder system for the US economy
REPORT: https://t.co/fA0VzaJDSm