Ben Harrison from Sagard (left), Talia Abramovitz from Deloitte Ventures, Emily Athanasopoulos from Interac, and Andre Zybul from BMO speak at a Source Canada panel. Photo by Connor Dudgeon Photo, courtesy of Source Canada
This is our last newsletter of the year, so I decided to review what we published in 2025 and see whether anything held together now that it’s in the rearview mirror.
Not to rank stories or turn it into a retrospective. Definitely not a ‘wrap.’ None of us needs another wrap in our lives. Getting a LinkedIn wrap was my wrapped shark-jump moment.
I wanted to see whether any ideas kept resurfacing, even when we were writing about different sectors, technologies, and parts of the country.
One of the places I started was my colleague Jennifer Kervin’s article from this week on why buying Canadian tech remains harder than it should be.
On the surface, it’s a story about procurement and the need to buy Canadian in an increasingly uncertain and hostile geopolitical environment. [Cough] Trump [cough].
It also captures a recurring theme: it’s far easier to agree on a path forward than to make it happen.
Buying Canadian has gained broad acceptance. Turning that agreement into something routine is something we’ll continue to watch for in 2026.
What started to line up once the noise faded
Looking back across the year, the most consistent thing wasn’t a single policy position or technology trend. It was how often progress ran into systems that weren’t designed to absorb it.
That showed up clearly in Levven’s innovation journey of rewiring the building industry. Smart wiring was a part of the story, but the deeper factor was how building codes, standards, and procurement norms shape what innovation is even allowed to look like in practice. The technology worked. The system just wasn’t built for it yet.
The same dynamic surfaced in How innovation efforts create, constrain, or destroy value. This piece made the distinction between having ideas and having the organizational structures to carry them. Value was lost as incentives, workflows, and decision rights quietly pulled in different directions.
We ran into it again in stories about AI adoption. In CIOs confront the system barriers slowing down AI adoption in Canada, governance, accountability, and the difficulty of integrating new tools into legacy environments without breaking everything else.
Different sectors. Similar friction.
Systems show up even when the story isn’t “about systems”
What made this more noticeable in hindsight is that these weren’t stories about systems in the abstract. They were stories about healthcare, AI, nonprofits, energy transitions, and leadership that kept circling back to the same practical constraint.
Why Calgary’s innovation economy feels different this time looks at how progress takes shape when conditions line up. The story follows the role of capital, institutions, and coordination in creating momentum that’s steady rather than flashy.
In the nonprofit space, both When impact meets integrity: Not-for-profits rethink data and AI and Why digital maturity is now a survival issue for Canada’s nonprofits landed on a similar point. Ethical intent was already there. What mattered was whether organizations had the internal capacity, governance, and discipline to use technology responsibly without overwhelming themselves.
Even the sovereignty conversation followed that pattern. In Microsoft’s $19 billion Canadian AI investment stokes digital sovereignty debate, the headline was about scale. The substance was about control, dependency, and how infrastructure decisions lock in future options long before anyone feels the consequences.
Why the “buy Canadian” question fits naturally here
Seen against that backdrop, Jennifer’s article reflects the same broader challenge showing up elsewhere this year.
Buying Canadian is an operational test as much as a values statement. Procurement rules, risk frameworks, and long-standing vendor relationships don’t shift just because the geopolitical context has.
That’s consistent with what showed up elsewhere this year. Whether the topic was AI policy tools, healthcare modernization, or innovation inside organizations, agreement arrived faster than the systems needed to act on it.
The real lesson isn about how change actually happens. Momentum builds, habits harden, and turning broad agreement into routine work is often the hardest part.
So what does this mean for you, exactly?
Once you start noticing how change actually moves, a few things become easier to read in real time:
Systems tend to carry forward the assumptions they were built on
Agreement often arrives well before the capacity to act on it
Risk frameworks favour continuity, even when circumstances change
Infrastructure decisions quietly shape what’s possible later
Most progress slows down in process, not principle
Most people already agree that supporting local business, whether down the street or across the country, is a good thing. The harder task now is shaping the conditions so that doing so feels normal, not like a tradeoff.
Watercooler links
Some light reading for when the year is winding down but your curiosity hasn’t quite clocked out yet.
Calgary’s diversification story turns out to be less about reinvention and more about managing what already exists. Yedlin talks candidly about the limits, tradeoffs, and slow work involved when a city tries to evolve without pretending its past isn’t still shaping decisions.
Dominance in tech doesn’t always age well. This piece walks through how OpenAI’s current position depends on timing, partnerships, and regulatory context, and why early platform power can be more fragile than it looks.
This is AI doing one specific thing very well. The focus is on precision diagnostics and how narrowing the problem makes the technology more useful, not more ambitious.
Autonomous vehicles run into city politics faster than technical limits. Toronto’s cautious approach shows how regulation, public trust, and municipal process shape what deployment actually looks like.
Canada’s sovereignty challenge lies in building domestic capacity within a global system. The article focuses on governance, infrastructure, and coordination rather than abstract independence.
From the Digital Journal Insight Forum
The Insight Forum is Digital Journal's thought leadership platform, offering experts a dedicated space to share their perspectives with our audience across Canada, the U.S. and abroad. Members publish monthly articles showcasing industry insights and what they’re learning and seeing in their space.
A technical look at how subsurface modelling underpins risk assessment, regulatory approval, and long-term confidence in carbon capture and storage projects.
An exploration of how decision-making skills shape leadership effectiveness in environments defined by uncertainty and incomplete information.
A straightforward overview of the most common cyber threats organizations face and how they typically unfold.
Final shots
One thing this year highlighted is that agreement is rarely the whole story.
Whether the subject was innovation, AI adoption, healthcare systems, or buying Canadian, the harder questions showed up after people nodded along. They show up in process and follow-through. Around who decides, how risk is defined, and what existing structures quietly reward or resist.
Those details shape outcomes. And they tend to surface only after the enthusiasm settles and the real work begins.
That’s it for this newsletter in 2025. We’ll be back in your inbox on January 2.
I mean, I plan to be skiing on a mountain that day, but you’ll hear from one of us on January 2.