How do you change a culture? It’s an urgent question because of the moment we’re in. 

Prime Minister Mark Carney could write a dozen industrial strategies, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith could send pipelines in every direction and Ontario Premier Doug Ford could subsidize an assembly plant for each of the big automobile companies and the economy still wouldn’t be any more resilient than it is today. 

It would be the same even if TMX Group chief executive John McKenzie’s dream of a tax overhaul came true, the Business Council of Canada got its wish of preserving the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement in amber, and the Canadian Federation of Independent Business successfully lobbies the provinces to erase all the barriers to internal trade.

Why wouldn’t any of these off-the-shelf policy solutions turn the economy around? Because Canadian society lacks the boldness required to amplify such top-down attempts at economic re-engineering. 

Shift Canada, a charity with a mission to stoke the country’s fading entrepreneurial embers, this week published a “bold ambition” index, which it created with the help of Nanos Research, a polling firm. Nanos asked about 1,000 adults a set of questions to get at whether Canadians were more open to riskier bets than they were a year ago, and whether the “entrepreneurial environment” supported risk-taking. The responses were mashed together to create a scale where a score of 50 implies no change, a score higher than 50 implies a bolder attitude and a score lower than 50 implies meekness. 

Nanos’s statistical math came up with a score of 51.5, which the study described as “relatively weak.” Something is blocking the rage we feel over Trump’s abuse of Canadian sovereignty from fuelling the fire in our bellies. Boldness in Canada “is still somewhat aspirational,” AJ Tibando, the charity’s CEO, said at an event in Toronto on Tuesday.  

The thesis of Tibando and her backers at Shift Canada is that culture dictates ambition, not tax rates and trade agreements. I’m starting to agree. The Industrial Revolution happened in Europe because a relatively open culture allowed ideas and inventions to spread faster than the Catholic Church and other entrenched interests could shut them down; please read Nobel laureate Joel Mokyr’s A Culture of Growth before if you think it was all about the invisible hand and comparative advantage.  

Denmark taxes personal income at a significantly higher rate than Canada, yet it still generates more economic output per person than we do, and Danish households tend to have more disposable income. I think there’s plenty of evidence to contemplate whether the reason Canada muddles along is because Canadians have been conditioned over decades to shy away from taking the risks and doing the work required to make the leap from good enough to great. 

Some of the economists who read this column will by this point have stopped reading this edition. They will accuse me of woo-woo thinking and have gone back to modelling total factor productivity, or what creating an internal market would do for gross domestic product. “Economists agree about many things—contrary to popular opinion—but the majority agree about culture only in the sense that they no longer give it much thought,” economic historian Eric Jones wrote in 2006, a moment when a notoriously arrogant profession was enjoying the sunset of the Great Moderation, an extended period of steady-to-strong economic growth that appeared to be correlated with Western governments’ embrace of inflation targeting, balanced budgets, lower taxes and free trade.

The masterminds of the Great Moderation would soon guide the global economy into an epic financial crisis and what was then the worst downturn since the Great Depression. It’s fair to say that inflation targeting is the only policy that has survived that spectacular failure of policymaking, although the consensus around leaving central banks alone to manage cost pressures is less sturdy than it was. The current reality is the return of great power rivalry and so-called K-shaped economies that trap wealth at the top of the income distribution. 

Mokyr’s Nobel prize suggests cultural arguments are pushing their way into the mainstream of economics. But apart from Shift Canada, there’s not a lot of evidence that Canadian decision-makers are willing to test their potted assumptions about what drives economic growth. Carney’s most visible response to the productivity crisis was to bundle a number of existing tax incentives to create the “productivity super deduction.” A newer argument that the Council of Canadian Innovators has successfully placed on the policy agenda over the past decade is that Canada’s struggles reflect an unserious approach to intellectual property. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said this week that this is something he would correct. 

But none of these policies will work if Canada’s deeply rooted risk aversion remains a psychological barrier. Peter Luik, president of Dare Foods, told me on stage at Farm Credit Canada’s Future of Food conference earlier this month that he would be a “completely irresponsible business person to make an investment” with the future of the Canada-U.S. trade relationship up in the air. Would an aging society like ours use a cut in capital gains taxes to fund local startups, or would it plow the money into an exchange-traded fund that tracks the S&P 500? Would a more sophisticated approach to patents inspire a new wave of entrepreneurs, or would legacy players use them to restrict competition? 

These questions are moot if we can confidently say that a critical mass of Canadians are primed to shoot the moon. Shift Canada’s research suggests we lack that critical mass. That brings us back to where we started: How do you change a culture? If we don’t answer that question, none of the solutions that we’ve put on the table are going to work.