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Second, in a world where others are pulling back, we need to leverage our openness and diversity to position our champions within a global flow of ideas, goods and talent. This means dramatically reducing the barriers to talent and trade that hinder growth in areas of competitive advantage: aggressively pursuing the world’s best talent, targeting infrastructure investment to facilitate flow to areas of competitive advantage, and strategically diversifying trade to allow our global champion entrepreneurs and businesses access to the world’s fastest growing markets with focus and speed that outpaces global competition.

Finally, we must disrupt our education system. We need to develop and embrace a flexible, collaborative, lifelong learning model in which government, business and academia work together to provide Canadians with the skills and knowledge they need to succeed throughout their careers. We need to create a global skills training powerhouse and business must take the lead role in education and training competitive workers.

We face difficult choices, and we must make them together. Business leaders, government policymakers and ordinary Canadians need to engage in a serious, national dialogue about Canada’s future and the decisions we must make to achieve it. We’ll need to balance private-sector ingenuity and public-sector leadership and work together to set national priorities and policy. We’ll have to find our courage and overcome our typically Canadian aversion to risk. And we’ll need to be willing to play the long game in a world obsessed with short-term results and quick payoffs.

My question for Canada’s business and government leaders, then, is this: Do we have the courage to make such bold bets?

Frank Vettese is managing partner and chief executive of Deloitte in Canada.