On Juno News, host Marc Patrone pressed Ian Lee about a book. Lee is an associate professor at Carleton University’s Sprott School of Business. He wrote the book with Larry O’Brien, the former mayor of Ottawa and the founder of Calian Technologies. The title is Trapped: In the Shadow of Trump’s America. And How We Escape. Listeners who came for a theory of annexation got a different diagnosis. Lee’s claim is that Ottawa and the provinces spent about sixty years lowering the country’s ability to produce. Donald Trump, he said, walked into a weakness they had already built.
This piece has one idea. Federal and provincial governments steadily destroyed Canadian productivity over decades. They did it with internal trade walls, with rules that stall mines and roads, and with a habit of leaving resources in the ground and calling that virtue. The result was not a sovereign economy. It was a less productive one, more dependent on a single customer. Trump, in Lee’s account, exploited that. He did not invent it.
Lee is a partisan of the argument, not a neutral bureau. He said he backed O’Brien’s mayoral campaign. He said the book is not a brief against free trade, not a brief for Trump, and not a book about Justin Trudeau alone. Treat the numbers he cites as his case until you open the tables. The direction of the case is the thing that has to be answered. Productivity fell relative to the United States. Governments were holding the tools.
The diagnosis he wants, and the one he rejects
Lee and O’Brien, he said, came to the book because their view of the last several years had converged. They do not agree with Trump, he said, and they do not agree with nearly anything Trump is doing. They also do not agree with the Canadian line that Trump caused the country’s economic trouble. That line, Lee said, is false, and they knew it was false before the latest tariff round.
His list of what Trump did not create is the spine of the hour. Trump did not create interprovincial trade barriers that Lee put at $200 billion, built “over very long decades” by premiers. Public estimates of those barriers are not one number. A Canadian Federation of Independent Business report has put the gain from removing them at up to $200 billion a year. An International Monetary Fund study has described non-geographic internal barriers as equivalent to a tariff of about 21 percent. Other work, including research associated with economist Trevor Tombe, has put the hit to GDP in a range of a few percent to several percent. The figures differ. None of them says the walls are imaginary, and none of them says Washington drafted them. Premiers did, over decades, in the name of local protection.
Trump did not, Lee said, create the bet on one customer. He said about 70 percent of Canadian exports go to the United States, a dependence he contrasted with Germany, France, Italy, and Japan. Mexico, he said, is the other country in that club. The free-trade agreement negotiated under Brian Mulroney and Ronald Reagan, and NAFTA under Bill Clinton, were not the mistake. Lee was explicit. He is not anti-free-trade. He does not want the agreements ripped up. The mistake was signing them and then refusing to diversify at the same time. Other large economies, he said, do not send 70 percent of exports to one buyer. Canada chose a narrower life, and then called the narrowness a special relationship.
How a government lowers productivity without passing a law called “lower productivity”
Productivity is output per person, or per hour. It falls when people and machines produce less than they could, or when the rules make the productive project wait so long that it is never built. Lee’s interview is a tour of those waits.
He said Statistics Canada trend data show productivity down “very dramatically” over many years, and much lower today relative to the United States. He said the OECD ranks Canada poorly on regulation, a thicket he called excessive by the standard of peer countries. He said the C.D. Howe Institute, “staffed by a ton of former retired Bank of Canada economists,” documented a trillion dollars of capital flight under policies hostile to the economy. That trillion is his citation, not a figure re-audited here. If it is even directionally right, it is the market’s verdict on the rules. Capital leaves when the return after delay, tax, and political risk is better somewhere else. A productivity story that ignores the leaving capital is a story about moods. This one is about cash.
The mine clock is the cleanest example. Lee said Canada has the slowest record in the world for opening a new mine, 21 years from the start of development to the finish, and that no country matches that. Separate estimates have put Canada’s average near 20 years, against about 14 in Australia. “No country in the world” is his superlative. The range is enough. A generation between a discovery and a pour means the discovery does not raise today’s productivity. It raises a file. The file employs lawyers, consultants, and panels. It does not employ the mill. Federal and provincial reviews stack. Each layer can say it is only being careful. The sum is a country that talks about critical minerals and then takes two decades to let a pit exist.
The road is the example with no metal in it at all. Lee said Canadians have talked for 35 years about building a road to the Ring of Fire in northern Ontario, and that the road is still unbuilt. A road is not a theory of growth. It is the thing that turns a mineral deposit into a shift. Thirty-five years of talk is a provincial and federal failure you can locate on a map. Productivity did not “disappoint.” The governments did not pour the gravel.
The port is the example at the other end of the shipment. Lee said the Port of Vancouver ranks 398th out of 400 ports in the world on an independent efficiency list, and that it is a mess a new government still has to clean up. If the rank is as he states, the country’s main Pacific gate is a tax on every ton that needs it. A miner who survives 21 years of permits then meets a dock that does not work. The wage bill, the delay, and the lost cargo are not in a speech about values. They are in the productivity statistics he says Statistics Canada already published.
Resources left in the ground, and the customer that remained
If you will not build the pipe, the mine, the LNG berth, or the road, you cannot sell to the buyers who want the tons. Lee listed potash, uranium, timber, oil, gas, fish, and canola. He said Germans, Japanese, and Koreans have asked for them. You sell what the existing pipes and habits already carry. Those run south.
That is Lee’s sharpest causal claim. Restricting resource development did not make Canada more independent. It made Canada more dependent on the United States. He blamed a former environment minister for the line that resources should be left in the ground. The name on the tape is slurred. The only fit is Steven Guilbeault. This article does not have a clean verbatim of that sentence from Guilbeault himself. Lee treated the line as climate virtue used as a development ban. The side effect, in his telling, was a narrower set of buyers.
He named the instruments. A “no pipeline” bill. A tanker ban. Energy East and Northern Gateway, projects that died. He said the country has “trillions, literally trillions” of resources, not only oil and gas. Potash, he said, where Canada is at or near the top of the world. Uranium for reactor fuel. Timber. Fish and seafood. Canola. The mistake, repeated over decades and brought to a high-water mark in the last ten or eleven years, was to wrap those tons in restrictions and then act surprised that one customer had the leverage.
The climate chapter is where he expects to be called dirty, and he answered in advance. Natural Resources Canada, he said, tables an annual energy report to Parliament. A graph in it, famous to him, shows greenhouse-gas emissions per person falling every year from 1990 to the present, under Progressive Conservative, Liberal, and Conservative governments, from Mulroney through Jean Chrétien to Trudeau. Absolute emissions rose, he said, because population rose, and because about 70 percent of Canada’s energy still comes from oil and gas. More people use more energy. He rejected the charge that this is an attack on immigrants. “Everybody uses energy. Everybody.” The metric he wants is the same one used for income. Per person, not the raw total. He also said Canadian mining and oil-and-gas rules are among the strictest in the world. His conclusion is not that emissions do not matter. It is that the regulatory machine was used, in a chapter of the book, to stymie resource projects rather than to chase the per-person line that was already falling.
You can reject his reading of the motive and still keep the productivity fact. A rule that stops a pipe does not need a secret motive to lower output per person. It only needs to stop the pipe. The irony he wants heard is narrower. The same governments that warned against dependence on the United States wrote the rules that left that dependence in place. Diversification was a speech. The permits were the policy.
The Laurentian habit, and why he will not blame one prime minister
Lee borrowed John Ibbitson’s phrase, the Laurentian elites. He means the political people in Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal. They are, he said, largely small-l liberal. They believed the economy should be closed, restricted, and kept off its resource base. He insisted the book is not a party pamphlet. The high-water mark, in his telling, was the last decade of the Trudeau government. The record he claims to document starts sixty years earlier. That span is the point. A decade can be blamed on a face. Sixty years of provincial tariffs, slow mines, and resource reluctance is a governing class. It is federal and provincial. It is Liberal and Conservative. It did the same kind of harm at different speeds.
Premiers belong in the dock with Ottawa. Interprovincial barriers are not a federal accident. They are provincial products: rules that keep out a neighboring province’s workers, goods, and firms, and call it local stewardship. Lee said those barriers emerged over decades by the premiers. A federation that tariffs itself has already cut productivity before a foreign president picks up a pen. The foreign president can see the cut. He does not have to invent it.
Supply management is his moral exhibit, and it is also a productivity exhibit, which is the only reason it belongs here. Lee said it has sat at the top of the U.S. trade representative’s irritant list, a list he said every president has sent to Congress since Ronald Reagan, and that anyone can download. Past presidents, including Barack Obama, disliked the list and declined to blow up the relationship over it. Trump, Lee said, uses the same list and adds punishment. Lee’s own judgment is harsher than a trade-talking point. He has written on supply management. He said OECD work shows it doubles the price of milk, dairy, and poultry and exploits lower-income Canadians, for the sake of about 8,000 dairy farmers. He called it the most immoral law Parliament has passed in fifty years. That is rhetoric. The mechanism is not. A legal quota that raises the price of a staple is a tax on wages and a shelter for a small sector. Shelters feel kind inside the barn. They show up as lower real income, which is what weak productivity feels like at a kitchen table.
What Trump did with the weakness
Lee’s account of Trump is colder than the annexation talk the host raised. He and O’Brien, he said, have debated the endgame. He does not believe Trump wants to take the country, or to seize Alberta, in order to obtain resources. Americans, he said, have been buying those resources for 250 years. The claim that invasion is required to get the oil is “factually false.” The oil already moves. So does the potash. So, in his list, does LNG.
What Trump did, Lee said, was notice the self-inflicted limp and use it. “He saw our weaknesses and he mercilessly exploited the weaknesses that we had done to ourselves.” The weaknesses were declining productivity, protectionism, and excessive regulation. The book’s first half, he said, is the diagnosis, with Statistics Canada and OECD numbers. The last third is solutions, meant to remove the weaknesses so Canada can resist pressure instead of discovering, in a tariff fight, that it has one buyer and a slow port. The host said the book offers five solutions. Lee did not list them in this interview. What he did say is the test for any solution. It has to undo the barriers, the delays, and the resource bans. A solution that leaves those in place is a communiqué.
Carney, in Lee’s view, has started the undo. Lee applauded reversals of the last decade’s policies and said the reversals are the evidence that the old policies were harmful. If they had been harmless, a new prime minister would not be walking them back. Lee does not think the walk-back is enough, or fast enough. Pipelines and resource plants take years even after a government changes its mind. “Even with” a turn in policy, he said, the build is slow. Direction is not throughput. A country can be praised for facing the right way and still lose another decade to the clock it built.
Europe will not refund the lost decades
Lee said he wants diversification, including toward Europe’s roughly 450 to 500 million people. He then argued that Europe cannot replace the American customer, because Europe is in its own productivity decline. He quoted Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, from a January Reuters interview: Europe’s economy is in a “profound existential crisis.” He pointed to the Draghi report on the European Commission’s website, by Mario Draghi, former Italian prime minister and former ECB president, trained at MIT, and a figure Lee linked to Mark Carney. The report, he said, is full of charts on falling innovation, competitiveness, and productivity, and on the threat to Europe’s autos, electronics, and machine tools from what commentators call China Shock 2.0.
His point is not that a European contract is worthless. Any new buyer is better than a speech about new buyers. His point is that a pivot which assumes Europe will absorb the trade Canada never diversified will fail, because Europe is putting up its own protection to avoid being hollowed out the way parts of the American industrial belt were. He tied that earlier shock to the politics that produced Trump in 2016. You do not have to accept every link in that chain to accept the narrower warning. A partner with Draghi’s problems is not a replacement for a customer who takes 70 percent of your exports. Diversification is a port, a pipe, a mine, and a customer who can pay. It is not a flight to a continent that is filing the same complaint about its own output per hour.
What “destroyed” has to mean, if the word is going to stay
“Destroyed” is a large verb. Lee’s evidence, as he stated it on this program, is relative and cumulative, not a claim that Canada produces nothing. Productivity is lower than it was on the trend he cites, and lower than the United States. Capital left. Projects that would have raised output per person were delayed into irrelevance or banned. Internal trade was treated as a privilege premiers could tax. A staple food was cartelized. The main Pacific port, on his ranking, barely functions by world standards. That is not rubble. It is a long confiscation of the next unit of output. Over decades, a confiscation compounds. The compounding is the destruction. A single budget does not do it. A federal rule, a provincial barrier, and a generation of delay do it together, which is why blaming one leader feels satisfying and explains too little.
The investor version of the same fact is plain. A dollar of resource in the ground is not a dollar of productivity until someone can permit it, build it, move it, and sell it to more than one buyer. Governments that stretch that path to 21 years, or to 35 years for a road, have chosen a lower path for output per person. They can call the choice climate, consultation, or caution. The productivity statistics do not grade the press release. They grade the tons. Lee’s book, on his own description, grades the tons with public data and then asks for the obstacles to be removed. Agreement with every adjective he used is not required. Agreement that the obstacles are public, federal and provincial, and old, is the argument.
The close
Ian Lee told Juno News that Canada is trapped in the shadow of Trump’s America because Canadian governments spent sixty years building the trap. Interprovincial barriers. A resource sector told, at the high-water mark, to leave wealth in the ground. Regulation the OECD, in his telling, ranks as a poor record. A mine that takes about two decades. A road to the Ring of Fire still unbuilt after 35 years. A port he ranks near the bottom of the world. A trillion in capital flight, if the C.D. Howe work he cites holds up. A customer concentration other large economies do not share. Trump, he said, saw it and used it. He did not lay the barriers, write the tanker ban, or fail to pour the road.
The idea is the long authorship. Federal and provincial governments steadily destroyed Canadian productivity, not in one dramatic year, but by making the productive act slower, narrower, and more captive to a single buyer. Carney’s reversals, which Lee welcomes and calls incomplete, are a confession that the last decade’s version of this habit was costly. They are not a refund of the earlier decades. Europe, on the Draghi evidence Lee waved at the camera, is not the refund either. The escape he described is domestic. Take down the internal walls. Let the resources move. Cut the years off the permit. Make the port work. Until that happens, the productivity numbers will keep recording decisions that were already made, in Ottawa and in the provincial capitals, long before the current argument about Trump.
A note on sources and limits
This account follows Ian Lee’s October 2026 interview with Marc Patrone on Juno News about the book he co-wrote with Larry O’Brien. Lee is an associate professor at the Sprott School of Business at Carleton University. O’Brien, whose full name is Lawrence Robert O’Brien, is a former mayor of Ottawa and the founder of Calian Technologies. The book’s title, as published by the authors, is Trapped: In the Shadow of Trump’s America. And How We Escape. Claims about a $200 billion barrier cost, a trillion dollars of capital flight, a 21-year mine timeline, and a Port of Vancouver rank of 398 out of 400 are Lee’s. So are the claims of 70 percent export dependence, emissions per person since 1990, and supply management’s price effect. He draws them from Statistics Canada, the OECD, the C.D. Howe Institute, Natural Resources Canada, and the U.S. trade representative’s irritant list. Public work on internal trade barriers uses a range of estimates. Those include a CFIB figure of up to $200 billion a year and an IMF tariff-equivalent near 21 percent. Other mine-timeline comparisons put Canada near 20 years and Australia near 14. The five solutions mentioned by the host were not itemized in this interview. Lee’s reading of motive, including the use of climate rules to stop development, is his. The Guilbeault identification is from the audio, not from a verified quotation. This is not a prediction of GDP, not investment advice, and not a claim that any one government, or any one statistic, explains the whole decline.