Last fall, I was presenting at a conference for domestic payment schemes. These are organizations from around the world that, like Interac, were built to enable payments and move money safely within their own borders. At the event, there was much discussion about how some countries gradually ceded control of their everyday payment infrastructure to global networks. What was once a domestic capability for these countries is now, effectively, foreign-owned. Many of the delegates wanted to understand how Canada avoided that fate. How did we build something trusted, resilient, and uniquely our own? And what would it take for other countries to do the same?
I’ve been thinking a lot about those conversations since. Because I think they point to something urgent and important about Canada’s place in the world.
We’re living through a period of profound instability. The assumptions that underpinned decades of international cooperation — that we all benefit when rules are followed, that institutions are respected, and that partnerships built over generations based on mutual respect would hold — are being tested in ways most of us couldn’t have imagined even a few years ago. When Prime Minister Carney stood at Davos earlier this year and described a rupture in the world order, he was naming something that leaders, businesses, and citizens around the world were already feeling.
What struck me most about the response to that speech wasn’t what Canadians thought of it. We know who we are and what we’ve built. What was exciting was watching the rest of the world wake up to it. In a world full of volatility, there’s a real and growing hunger for something more stable, more reliable. For someone countries and institutions can actually trust.
When I think about what makes Canada trustworthy — not just likeable or decent, but genuinely trustworthy — it starts with stability. Our institutions, our democracy, our legal frameworks, our financial system have held strong throughout the years. Not always perfectly, and certainly not without challenges, but they’ve held. When our political process has been tested, it has followed its own rules. When our institutions have been pressured, they’ve bent without breaking.
And then there are our national values. When other countries look at Canada, they see a country that values science, education, inclusivity, and the rule of law. We’ve always known this about ourselves, perhaps too well to fully appreciate it. But what’s shifting now is that the rest of the world is taking notice. The flag patches on our backpacks have always been a bit of a running joke, but they point to something real — a global recognition that Canada stands for something. And right now, standing for something may be our competitive advantage.
The question, then, is how do we turn that reputation into something tangible? How do we move from being respected to being relied upon? I think we’ve undervalued trust as a strategic asset for a long time. It has felt, in the best possible way, like a given — so steady and familiar, we stopped seeing it for what it is. That’s changing now. I think this could be a true zeitgeist moment for Canada, one we can’t afford to let pass.
Interac is, for me, proof of what’s possible when trust is built intentionally over time. Most Canadians still don’t know that Interac is 100% Canadian. It’s so woven into the fabric of daily life — the tap at the gas station, sending an Interac e-Transfer transaction to pay the dog-sitter, the login to CRA — that people assume it must be universal. It has the feel of infrastructure that has simply always been there. That invisibility is, in a strange way, the highest compliment. It means the trust is complete. You don’t think about the systems you trust most… you just use them.
But that same invisibility also means we’ve never really had to champion what we built. We’ve never had to explain to the world that Canada chose, deliberately and strategically, to maintain a domestic payments network, one owned not just by the big banks but by credit unions and the local institutions that serve communities in every corner of this country. We built something inclusive by design. We built something that works for everyone. And we did it so quietly that most of the people who rely on it every day don’t even realize it’s Canadian.
The delegates at that conference for domestic payment schemes realized it. A growing number of countries, watching their own financial infrastructure drift into foreign hands, are realizing it. The world is coming to Canada to understand how we got here.
Which, of course, leaves one more question: what do we do with this moment? The Prime Minister’s Davos speech pointed to the possibility of middle powers stepping into the vacuum left by a fracturing world order, not by building walls, but by offering something better. A coalition of countries that still believe in stability, shared values, and the idea that rules matter. Canada, he argued, has a role to play in convening that coalition.
I think he’s right. And I think the path from vision to reality runs directly through the kind of institutional trust Canada has spent decades building — in our democracy, in our financial systems, in the values embedded in the way we do business.
As Canadians, we’re not naturally inclined to shout about any of this. I’d say it’s time to behave a little less Canadian on that front. The world is looking for stability. It’s looking for values it can recognize and respect. It’s looking, more than anything, for someone it can trust. We’ve built that, quietly, over a very long time. Now is the moment to share it.
