Canada is thinking big again.

This week, Prime Minister Mark Carney is bringing some of the world’s largest investors to Toronto for the first Canada Investment Summit. The ambition is extraordinary: catalyse $1 trillion in investment in Canada over the next five years.

As a Canadian, I love that vision and ambition. But there is another piece of nation-building infrastructure we need to talk about. Talent.

We can attract the capital. We can approve the mines, energy projects, transportation corridors, AI infrastructure, advanced manufacturing facilities, and other nation-building projects. But someone still has to build them, operate them, maintain them, manage them and continually improve them. And those people will need skills that cannot be produced overnight.

Canada rightly takes pride in having one of the most educated workforces in the world. But education alone is not enough. We also need to help Canadians, beginning much earlier in their lives, to discover where their talents, interests and aspirations connect with the opportunities our changing economy is creating.

That is the argument at the heart of The Missing Bridge. For too many young Canadians, we have built a strong education system on one side and a rapidly changing labour market on the other, without building an equally strong bridge between them.

The Canada Investment Summit is about attracting financial capital. Our next great nation-building challenge is developing and mobilizing human capital. Every major project Canada can finance should therefore come with a parallel talent strategy:

• Who will do this work?

• Where will they come from?

• How will young Canadians learn that these opportunities exist?

• What education, training and career development will help them get there?

• And how do we ensure that Canadians who are displaced by economic and technological change can find their way to the new opportunities being created?

Capital without talent cannot build a nation. To become the strongest economy in the G7, we need to invest just as deliberately in helping Canadians find their path to meaningful, productive work as we do in attracting the billions of dollars that will create those opportunities.

The investment strategy and the talent strategy must be built together. That is the bridge Canada is still missing. Building physical infrastructure is critical, but it is not more critical than building the infrastructure needed to get the right talent to the right place at the right time.

AI Acknowledgement: I conceived and wrote this post, with creative and editorial assistance from my partner, ChatGPT.