Canada Needs a Lasting Inward Focus in a World of Black Swans

With the first half of March now behind us, and a meandering trade war and US tariffs that have been in effect one day—but not the next—the time has come to consider if Canada’s new and long-overdue focus on internal economic strength and resilience should be more permanent.

In recent weeks, Canada has tried to bolster itself against economic challenges. The federal government has announced that it will remove half of the internal trade barriers and establish Canada’s first high-speed rail line—the types of things that businesses and lobby groups, including the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, the Business Council of Canada, and the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, have been calling on Ottawa to implement for years. 

Those calls have been, in large part, made with the goal of strengthening internal trade, but such changes now hold increasingly broad and international importance in a world of unpredictable and highly impactful events.

Is Canada Prepared for Black Swan Events?

In his prescient 2007 book, The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the reluctant philosopher and economist, highlights the increasingly unpredictable nature of our globalized world, arguing that we are no longer in a position to predict and plan and that the only prudent response to this reality is to build “robustness,” insulating ourselves from the negative impacts of unexpected and highly consequential events—events he calls black swans.

The volatile, globalized world Taleb describes, which he calls Extremistan—owing to its tendency to harbour extreme events, looks very much like the one we live in today, where a new world order makes the economic robustness of individual economies essential. Indeed, the return of Donald Trump and his tariffs, Canada’s recent spat with India, as well as the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, are just a few examples of events and scenarios that many economists and policymakers failed to predict but which are now shaping everything around us.


As a result of our inability to predict events that now, in hindsight, may seem predictable to some, the friend-shoring and trade deal-focused approach that has dominated recent years’ geopolitical efforts has shown itself to be highly exposed to black swans. This would be no surprise to Taleb, who has long argued that the more globalized and interconnected our systems become, the more vulnerable they are to unforeseen events.

To reduce our exposure to these black swans—which Taleb suggests are unavoidable but whose consequences are nevertheless mitigatable—Canada will need to recognize that our current focus on internal economic robustness cannot be short-lived. Indeed, it must last beyond US tariffs and trade wars, beyond the current Trump administration, beyond the current political spats and ongoing conflicts, and be more than a transient willingness to look inward.

Thinking Long-Term

While one could not be blamed for thinking that all this too will pass, our current situation isn’t just about trade wars, tariffs or Donald Trump, but instead the nature of our world and our inability to predict the consequences of geopolitical tensions, elections, and globalized economic models vulnerable to the unforeseen. The recent Oval Office exchange between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine, not to mention the latest carve-outs, extensions, caveats and retaliations to Trump’s tariffs, are just the latest reminders of how different the world can feel today if your baseline is yesterday, let alone last week.

And while a measured de-prioritizing of an export and international trade-focused economy will sound like an absurd paradigm shift to many, extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures, especially when this may actually be our new ordinary—long after Trump is gone and in the aftermath of shattered geopolitical norms.

But such a paradigm shift doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive from concrete efforts to continue working with the US, particularly ahead of the 2026 CUSMA review, or from strengthening our economic ties with other allies. Nevertheless, we do need to recognize that we can no longer rely on traditional and outdated expectations about how the global economy should function. 

Calls to Action

While the removal of internal barriers and plans for high-speed rail are positive and long overdue steps in bolstering our domestic economic strength, more will need to be done, and everyone will need to play their role: 

• Businesses and research institutions, including those at our universities, will need to get better at commercializing ideas and developing IP. 
• Our natural resources sector will need to get better at swiftly leveraging untapped critical minerals to support the green economy. 
• And for their part, governments at all levels will need to simplify the regulatory environment while finding new ways of supporting and incentivizing businesses that want to and are able to scale without existential reliance on export markets—namely the US.

These cannot just be the principles of the moment – they will need to be the principles of our future. Recognizing that no country is a silo but that any country can benefit from being robust enough to perform like one will be key to securing long-term prosperity for Canadians in a world of black swans—those large, unpredictable events with severe consequences.

Because while Trump’s return and his tariff-driven approach have been, for many of us, the quintessential black swan, it will not be the last, perhaps not even in the next few days. And in our interconnected world, so vulnerable to the unpredictable, we will need to be resilient enough to face the next one.