Giles Gherson - Opening Remarks, 136th Annual Dinner

Wow! That was amazing! Jully, Simone and Maestro! What a supreme showcase of Toronto’s incredible talent!

Good evening, everyone! 

Welcome to our 136th Annual Dinner, Dare to Lead.

You guys might be thinking… wasn’t that the title of last year’s dinner… and the year before?

And it’s true, because for all of us in the room, that’s our north star. 

Last year, “Dare to Lead” was maybe a throat-clearing plea, in the face of a newly restored America First administration in the White House.

Those early volleys of executive orders signalled big change, for sure, but who knew how much, exactly?

Well… now we know.

For Toronto and Canada, Game Changing change. 

The stability and predictability of the Post-War order that we helped architect – and most assuredly benefited from – has shattered. 

The pieces are lying all around us.

• A year of flashpoints and tension. 
• Damaging tariffs. 
• Threats of more to come – Supreme Court ruling notwithstanding.
• A devastated steel industry.
• A reeling auto sector. 
• And uncertainty over the future of our core trade and security frameworks, in particular CUSMA, itself built on NAFTA, and the Canada-US FTA nearly 40 years ago. 

At last year’s Annual Dinner, I hoped that we would remember 2025 for what Canadians did, not what President Trump said. So, what did we do? 

A veteran Premier and a newly minted Prime Minister have, indeed, dared to lead, and they haven’t looked back. 

Our governments are putting us on a different flight path than the one we’ve grown comfortable with - maybe, too comfortable, and certainly, far too dependant for far too long on outdated assumptions of everlasting U.S. goodwill.

In recent decades, we hoped for the best and planned for…the best: the path of least resistance, but not a durable strategy. 

Tonight, “Dare to lead” is an imperative. A clarion call. It’s urgent. It is real.

All of you in this room are leaders, you lead everyday. 

And here’s the thing: we’ve come to recognize that now is the time to leave ‘same old, same old’ behind. Our country’s future needs different solutions.

If ever there was a moment, an inflection point, when leadership really mattered, it’s now. Leadership in our businesses, our governments, our communities to set a bolder course, to lay the foundations for a less vulnerable, stronger, more dynamic and prosperous country.

The dare is simple: It’s about confronting hard truths, challenging the status quo, acting with guts. 

That’s the leadership we are all called upon to deliver.

We’re vulnerable today because we put off the hard work when times were easy. We got out of the habit of the heavy lift, the ambitious nation-building. 

We could’ve dared to take proper advantage of the many free trade agreements we’ve signed, with the US first and foremost, but also Mexico, Korea, Japan.

We could have played to win. We should have. But we didn’t! We played it safe.

So, while it’s tempting to blame others for our economic woes the truth is, we can’t.  

As former Prime Minister Harper recently put it: “Our national conversation must be mature enough to acknowledge that many of the difficulties we now face as a country cannot be blamed on Donald Trump.”

How to turn it around? 

By becoming a super competitive economy. 

That’s the truth behind the seismic challenge that Prime Minister Carney laid out months ago.

We’ve had a decade of chronic underinvestment that has taken a corrosive toll on our economy. 

We need to unleash that wave of capital. 

In under a year: the Major Projects office, Build Canada Homes, and the Defence Investment Agency. Provincially, equally big moves with massive energy, transit and transportation investments. 

All needed, but not enough.

Reigniting competitiveness will require finally unleashing our private sector to expand and modernize Canada’s productive capacity.

Canada must regulate for growth, tax for growth, and innovate for growth.

With erratic and, frankly, investment-deterring policy dysfunction on the rise in the U.S., global capital is seeking stable, reliable places to invest. That could be us.

So, if we chart a course for economic resurgence, we can seize this moment where the world’s attention is on us.

But we’ll need to change today’s unflattering narrative about our ability to execute. 

Because, though we may be attractive, we’ve become too high maintenance. 

From 2006 to 2020, Canada dropped down the World Bank’s ‘Ease of Doing Business’ rankings, from 4th… all the way to 23rd. Woah. 

We need to turn that around. We need to turn heads. We need to be investable. 

So, what’s missing?

• Warp speed on technology adoption – not just automation. Agentic and Industrial AI, advanced robotics, operational technology. 
• Regulations that do their job protecting Canadians, yes, absolutely, but that are agile, up-to-date, simpler to administer—and with standards far more aligned with our key trading partners.
• And a return to a competitive tax system that rewards risk and motivates business ambition and drives growth. 

This is what the Toronto Region Board of Trade is focused on, it’s what drives our Business Council of Toronto. This must be our collective enterprise in 2026. 

That’s what’s needed if we’re going to roll back decades of overdependence on the U.S., be more self-reliant, and diversify our trade. That’s the reset needed for a more balanced, mature, realistic relationship with our closest ally and partner.

Unleashing our competitiveness – that’s how our economy achieves escape velocity. 

A lot has been accomplished in the past 12 months, but there’s so much more to do. 

And it starts right here, in Canada’s economic centre, with Toronto’s ambitious business leaders. 

It’s our Dare to Lead Challenge. 

And let me tell you, it can’t be done without you.

Thank you.