Drake made Canada mainstream.
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Canada has a well-worn script for its most talented people. They head to Los Angeles or New York or the Bay Area, succeed brilliantly, and blend so seamlessly into American life that the world forgets where they came from.
There are so many examples I could list. We invented the smartphone and watched others own the category. We trained the pioneers of modern AI and watched the industry scale elsewhere. Exporting talent is practically a national industry.
Which is why the two Canadians I think about most are the ones who ran the script in reverse. They did not export themselves. They exported Canada.
Drake
Start with Drake. Long before the Kendrick Lamar feud made him a global headline, he did something culturally radical for a Canadian artist. He made Toronto the centre instead of the periphery.
He put the CN Tower on an album cover, injected the city’s slang and sound into mainstream music, built OVO into a cultural export, and planted himself courtside at Raptors games as the franchise’s official global ambassador. Say “the Six†almost anywhere on earth and people know exactly which city you mean. That did not happen by accident. It happened because one artist refused to move south and assimilate quietly.
The establishment was not always comfortable with it. When Drake’s sideline antics during the 2019 playoffs ruffled the league, longtime Toronto Star writer, Curtis Rush, asked whether the rapper had become a liability, and the sports marketing expert he consulted, Blake Lawrence, called him “one of the most valuable assets that any sports team has right now.â€
The Globe and Mail observed that “Drake sees in Toronto something that Toronto sometimes doesn’t see in itself.†That last clause should sting a little. Our most effective global ambassador succeeded partly by ignoring our national instinct for self-deprecation.
Tobi Lütke
Then there is Tobi Lütke. The Shopify founder had every reason to follow the standard path, sell early or relocate to Silicon Valley, and he did neither. He scaled a global commerce platform from Ottawa, took blunt public stances on remote work and performance culture, and kept the headquarters, the jobs, and the ambition in Canada.
In a country where promising companies routinely exit at the first serious offer, refusing to sell was its own act of impoliteness. He was not building in a vacuum.
One Forbes article noted how the collapse of BlackBerry scattered elite talent into a wave of startups and produced an entrepreneurial spirit he called “totally unlike the polite, reserved Canadian stereotype.†Shopify became the proof that the wave could crest at global scale. Lütke took the raw material of Canadian tech and showed it did not have to leave home to win.
Both Drake and Lütke rejected Canadian smallness, the reflex that says our cities are minor markets, our companies are acquisition targets, and our culture is a regional dialect of America’s. Both understood that you can love this country loudly, brand it aggressively, and build from it without apology. And both were criticized for exactly that confidence before being celebrated for it.
A Critical Lesson
There is a lesson here for how we think about our talent more broadly. We spend enormous energy mourning the people who leave. We spend almost none studying the people who stayed and made the world come to them.
Every founder deciding between Ottawa and Austin, every artist told the real industry is south of the border, every executive advised to tone down the hometown pride is running the same calculation Drake and Lütke once ran.
Canada cannot order anyone to stay. What we can do is make staying a serious bet, with capital that shows up early, institutions that back ambition instead of managing it, and a culture that stops treating global confidence as bad manners. The next Drake and the next Lütke are already here. The question is whether we give them a reason to make Canada the centre, or one more reason to become somebody else’s success story.
