🤝 Meet Vass Bednar. She’s the Managing Director of The Canadian SHIELD Institute, a new think tank focussed on securing economic sovereignty. She is also the co-author of The Big Fix: How Companies Capture Markets and Harm Canadians, which was a finalist for the Writer Trust’s Best Policy Book of 2025 Award.
You may have read Vass in The Walrus, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, The Financial Post, The National Post, Policy Options, Betakit, Tech Policy Press, CIGI, The Public Policy Forum, Toronto Today, The Line, Exponential View, or The Hub, or heard her on CBC, BNN, CTV, TVO’s The Agenda, Canadaland or Newstalk 1010. A wonk’s wonk, we wanted to know how one of our favourite policy nerds is making sense of this moment.
You run a think tank, which is maybe a job many people aren't too familiar with. Can you explain the basics of what you do?
No. JK!
I’m in the business of scoping policy problems and proactively designing solutions.
I set a research agenda in conversation with my team and my board so that we can prioritize areas where we can have impact. That means I get to design projects across a range of scopes - sometimes we just want to explore a thumbnail of something. I also take on media commentary to help make sense of public policy. Basically, I get to be constantly immersed in the trends and debates of the day so that we can hone in on opportunities to point out how and when we can make smarter decisions for Canada. I’m also a voracious reader in my “spare” time. You need to read widely to think well, and writing is thinking. I think.
A typical week is a mix of deep work with my team, external speaking to evangelize and socialize policy opportunities, sporadic expert commentary in the media, and informal chats with leaders across a range of sectors.
When I’m really lucky, I get some writing time for myself, too. I write our newsletter, The National Interest, which is my weekly treat. Side note: treat culture is such a neat economic trend.
Our newsletter explores the full spectrum of Canada’s economic and digital sovereignty challenges, from infrastructure and industrial strategy to algorithmic governance and consumer protection. Each issue connects big-picture questions about national capacity and control to the practical systems people interact with every day. Recent topics range widely: how the federal budget overlooked the digital economy; why e-commerce and online shopping habits have become sovereignty issues; the risks posed by “counterfeit people” in an age of synthetic media; the tension between overusing the term “sovereign” and identifying where it truly matters; and how algorithmic powerhouses like TikTok influence Canadian autonomy. Together, these pieces map an emerging landscape where technology, markets and policy collide — and where Canada needs better tools to protect our agency.
The Carney government was elected largely on a promise to strengthen Canada's sovereignty and respond to the threat of U.S. aggression. We're around 6 months in now. How do you think they're doing?
I think that everyone is figuring this out as we go. I’m a little nervous about sovereignty-washing, like with the recent Nokia announcement. Like, what do we mean when we toss that word around? I agreed with the Globe and Mail’s warning that it is subject to ‘semantic satiation.’ Plus I love alliteration. I mean, I adore alliteration.
Some of SHIELD’s work is restorative — where can we reclaim sovereignty where we lost it or never had it in the first place? And as we all discover where we lack sovereignty or it appears that we gave it away — we can’t divorce that from the geopolitics of the time: economies were opening and becoming more interdependent, and people were super jazzed about that. But guess what? Times change.
This moment — as stressful as it is — is a real opportunity for a rethink of the country. Strengthening Canada is going to be a relentlessly incremental process where we need to make sure that almost everything we do is in service of a more resilient country. And while Trump may be the boogeyman right now, it’s not clear whether the US poses the biggest sovereignty threat, or if we should be focussed on the subjugation by the Magnificent Seven more specifically. And I think because of the trade war, the Carney government has been constrained in terms of taking on Big Tech. Ironically, this is pretty much the perfect moment to do so.
When basically all the plumbing of the internet runs through the U.S., and the internet is so embedded in our economy, how sovereign can a country like Canada really be? Does a country have to go the China route and build a parallel internet to have digital sovereignty?
Fundamentally, sovereignty is about governance and control. Due to much of the digital chapter in CUSMA (which I encourage people to read, perhaps with a stiff drink) it’s pretty much impossible for Canada to effectively govern our digital economy. If we aren’t going to be able to change that in CUSMA, then we need to think more seriously about building strategic alternatives, and yes that includes a better internet - both in terms of infrastructure, but also the conditions for online commerce and information sharing (I am fun at parties). There’s this myth that online environments are a ‘free’ or ‘perfect’ market, or at least a policy afterthought. But these are highly regulated and moderated markets, just the rules are set by de facto private regulators (in their own interests).
And on network sovereignty, I always turn to the work of Andrew Clement.
Do you think there is a trade-off between sovereignty and affordability? Would it be a good idea to open some sectors of our economy, like airlines for example, to more foreign competition if it meant lower prices? Or is this a false choice?
I think it’s a false choice. We should be thinking more about corporate ownership structures and sovereignty. Federally, we are still dancing around the competition issues that characterise the country. It’s really not limited to airlines, banking, and telecom. But those are federally regulated industries, and we’re a very polite country and so we don’t dip into issues that might be ‘provincial.’ The Bank of Canada just did this again last week.
Storytime: During our mini book tour, we were at an (independent) bar in Edmonton after a lecture. And we were hungry. There was something on the menu called “focaccia” which is fun to say, and hard to spell. But the description sounded like pizza. So we asked our server, and she confirmed that it’s basically pizza. Turns out the restaurant was under a restrictive covenant from a major pizza company (P*p* J*h*’s) that did not allow them to sell pizza. A lot of our competition problems are focaccia problems: nefarious behaviours that f*ck up markets, and that firms of any size can engage in - so it’s not an abuse of dominance, it’s just exploitative corporate behaviour.
You're appointed Canada's sovereignty czar with the power to enact one (and only one) policy without regard for political consequences. What do you do?
All policy decisions have trade-offs! And I don’t think we should design policy without pissing anyone off. That’s actually not good policy, it’s more akin to customer service. It’s highly likely that good decisions make certain stakeholders mad. That’s not necessarily problematic. You may actually be doing something right if you annoy the right people.
More seriously, it would be fun to make policy decisions without any consequences, backlash or criticism.
I think that in this imagined universe I’d stop any federal government funding from going to non-Canadian firms. For instance, many are relieved that there were long-overdue reforms to SR&ED promised in the budget. SHRED is a major federal tax incentive program administered by the CRA that provides over $3B in tax incentives annually to encourage businesses to conduct research and development in Canada. But right now, SHRED money could still flow to Amazon or Huawei. Should tax dollars incentivize foreign multinationals? What does ‘Buy Canadian’ mean when it comes to tax dollars, beyond procurement reform?
Back to the real world: what's the most important thing the federal government could realistically do on the issue of economic sovereignty right now?
Oh god, I feel like that’s all I write about: tangible, meaningful policy actions.
I worry that we are too comfortable tinkering around the edges of the economy. And less comfortable really tackling our deficiencies. I crave more challenging policy conversations, I think Canada needs to scream the quiet part out loud more often.
Others have raised this, but it would be straightforward to stop the value leakage that comes from not having an intellectual property strategy. Budget 2025 was an asset manager’s budget: invest in the assets Canada has. But it presumes value will trickle down. We need a better strategy to capture and keep value here.
Finally, and I know I’m trying to sneak in a bazillion things here, but I think it would be hot to bring back savings bonds, with a distinctly sovereign focus. Commission different artists for their look, make them part of digital money. We killed savings bonds in 2017, but they are making a comeback in other jurisdictions. We don’t have a way for retail investors to support the government’s long-term investments. And when I was looking at the data, savings rates are up.