The Future of Transportation

The Empire Club Presents

David Plouffe, Chief Advisor, Uber & Former Senior Advisor and Campaign Manager For President Obama

September 23, 2015

Welcome Address by Dr. Gordon McIvor, President, Empire Club of Canada

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. From the Arcadian Court in downtown Toronto, welcome, to the 112th season of the Empire Club of Canada. For those of you just joining us through either our webcast or our podcast, welcome, to the meeting, and we are very pleased to have a very distinguished speaker with us today. But, before we get to him, let me introduce you to our head table

Head Table:

Distinguished Guest Speaker:

Mr. David Plouffe, Chief Advisor, Uber; Former Senior Advisor and Campaign Manager for President Barack Obama

Guests:

Mr. Ian Black, General Manager, Uber Canada

Mr. Marc-André Blanchard, Chair and Chief Executive Officer, McCarthy Tétrault

Mr. Paul Fogolin, Director, Government Relations and Communications, Ontario Retirement Communities Association

Mr. Matthew Kelleher, Partner, McCarthy Tétrault

Mr. Andrew Macdonald, Regional General Manager, Uber Central

Dr. Gordon McIvor, Executive Director, National Executive Forum on Public Property; President, Empire Club of Canada

Mr. Tim Smitheman, Manager, Government and Public Relations, Samsung Renewable Energy Inc.

I would also like to acknowledge the presence in our live audience today of special guests, MPP Tim Hudak. Welcome. MPP Michael Harris. Welcome, Michael. And Past President Noble Chummar. Noble, nice to have you with us.

Introduction

Ladies and gentlemen, there are so many subjects that our guest today would have been comfortable speaking on which is perhaps why he is invited regularly to contribute to some of the world’s largest media outlets, such as ABC News and Bloomberg Television. His extensive knowledge on a wide range of issues is no doubt a key factor behind Newsweek naming him one of the new thought leaders of America in 2010 and the Daily Beast signaling him out during that same period as one of the 25 smartest people of the decade. In 2012, GQ Magazine named him the third most powerful person in Washington, putting him in the holy trinity of political influence which most government relations professionals can only dream of.

Mr. Plouffe is widely referred to as the architect of President Barack Obama’s two presidential campaign victories. And after the 2008 campaign, he served inside the White House as Senior Advisor to the President. Many of the people in our audience today and those watching us at home will have read his New York Times bestseller The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barak Obama’s Historic Victory.

So as you can well imagine, especially during this hotly contested election period here in Canada, Mr. Plouffe could well have chosen to address us today on a political issue relating to government and how it gets itself elected in the modern age. But as we stated, Mr. Plouffe is a man of many interests and talents and, as such, decided to join almost exactly one year ago one of the most unusual new companies of our era, one that has started an international conversation around a whole raft of issues.

Uber has in fact become of one of the largest transportation companies on the planet, and yet they hardly own any assets at all. Could that be the future? And if that is the future in the private sector, what will the impact be on the business of government? Are we moving towards a whole new concept of business without any brick and mortar? These are no doubt questions that Mr. Plouffe thinks a great deal about, and they are why we have invited him here today to deal with one of the most important issues of the future of developed economies, such as the one we live in: What is the future of transportation, and how will that impact our daily lives?

So, ladies and gentlemen, it is a great pleasure to welcome to Canada the Chief Advisor to Uber and to its CEO, Travis Kalanick, Mr. David Plouffe.

David Plouffe

Well, thank you, Gordon, for that introduction and your leadership of the Empire Club. And thanks, all of you, for being here. You are generous with your time. You might have showed up because you thought I would reassure you that we will not be electing Donald Trump as President. I can reassure you that we are able to talk about politics later. I want to thank McCarthy for hosting and sponsoring this event, and, yes, it is a privilege to be here and to spend a little time talking about Uber. And I am curious before I start: How many of you have used Uber or a service like it, if you would not mind raising your hand? Okay, well, first of all, thank you, and I will skip the remedial explanation of what we do.

But I would like to take this opportunity to maybe elevate the debate a little bit. I think that a lot of debate about Uber—it is a new technology. Some call it “disruptive.” Some say it is reforming transportation, and, oftentimes, it is viewed through the prism of old vs. new and Uber vs. taxi and the questions, How should we operate? Should we operate? And we are involved in some very important discussions here in Toronto. The city staff has put forward some modern, ridesharing regulation frameworks that will be voted on in city council next Wednesday. And so if any of you have influence there, we would ask you to lift your voices, your prominent voices, to make it clear that modern, ridesharing regulations have a place here in Toronto, in Canada.

But this is about bigger issues than just I think how it is often covered. This is really about, first of all, helping the economy. I think oftentimes it is natural that when we first come into a market, there are early adopters. And people view Uber as something that younger, hipster types are taking to bars, and there are a few drivers helping them do that—and by the way, that is an important use case. We are seeing all over the globe reduction in driving while drinking. In fact, there is a behavioural change going on based on our research with people under 25. If they live in an urban area where ridesharing is available, they do not even think about driving drunk. Why would you if you can just press a button? So that is a huge use case. But what happens is there is a huge unaddressed market. So the for-hire vehicle market, which is traditionally thought to be of taxis and limousines in most cities, here in Toronto it probably grows five times over the four or five years.

So what is clear is there are a lot of people that were looking for a different way get around their city, and there are a lot of people who would like to make a little money helping them do it, and so this is a false debate between Uber and taxi or Uber and public transportation. We become part of an ecosystem. We do not do street hails. Our big proposition is not necessarily in financial districts or outside of 5-star hotels. We serve underserved areas all throughout the GTA here, all throughout the world. And here in Toronto alone, we have 16,000 people as of today driving on Uber platform—all different kinds of people. Some of them are driving 40 hours a week, and that is their main source of income. Most are not. Half of our drivers here in Toronto drive less than ten hours a week. It is not even really a part- time job. It is something people are doing around the rest of their lives to make a little bit of income.

This is something I am passionate about. The reason I joined Uber—there are many reasons but one is to be surrounded by people who are younger and smarter than myself. I find that is always a good thing to do through life. But you will not find too many people, I have found, who can answer on scale, on scale the question that is bedeviling countries all around the world: Even as the economy recovers in most places and the unemployment rate recedes in most places, how do we actually grow incomes in an appreciable way on scale? There are a lot of policy solutions, and we should try all of them, but what is happening with platforms like Uber is people are making, as a family, let us say, $40,000 or $42,000 in their core enterprises. And one of them drives ten or twelve hours a week, and they go from $42,000 to $60,000. To them, that is a small miracle, particularly, when you do it on your terms, when you are not told when to drive. There is no schedule. You have your job and your school and your kids and your aging parents and your social obligations, and then you decide here is when I am going to use Uber.

So that is what this is about from an economic standpoint. And we are at 16,000 drivers today on the platform. If you think about it, if the for-hire vehicle market grows as we think it could, you are going to see a lot more in some of our more mature cities. In Los Angeles, we have 42,000 drivers today on the Uber platform; in Chicago, over 30, and even in smaller communities, whether that is London or Hamilton. You know, you have a few hundred people driving, and even though those cities are not large, global cities like Toronto, in cities like that, there are fewer transportation options. There are fewer cabs, and there is very little public transportation, at least on scale.

All of you have, obviously, built and have grown successful businesses, and you care about the future of this city, so when you talk about that many people who have improved their lives in that way, it is a significant, significant addition. And, of course, economically, all the people in the back of the car are going somewhere. Some of them are just going home, but many of them are going to small businesses. It used to be you had to cite a restaurant or retail establishment based on a public transportation line. That does not have to happen anymore. People are delivered to your doorstep. People are more likely to come in from the suburbs to cities when they do not have to worry about parking, the expense of that, or worry that if I go out of the restaurant at 10:30, will there be a cab there? They know they can press a button while they are paying their cheque, and the car will be there. The extension of public transportation is something that we are very excited about. In a couple of U.S. cities, and in Atlanta and Dallas, Texas, we are in the APT for the public transportation agency. So if someone who is on that subway or train asks for a car before they get to the last stop, they know it is going to be there.

So the economic scale of this I think is bigger than sometimes people imagine it, and, honestly, it is not something that our two founders—one of them proudly is from Canada, from Calgary—had in mind. They were just trying to improve transportation in San Francisco for their friends, but it has grown into something that shows there is a huge, unmet need on the transportation side. But there is also a huge need for people to make more income, and this is an easy way for people to do it on their terms.

In terms of the mobility challenges, every city in the world is dealing with too much congestion—Toronto is a good example of that—and a trend of urbanization the likes of which the planet has never seen. People are coming to cities with the velocity that has never happened in the history of humankind. Millennials, in particular, want to be in urban areas. Well, unless you are some cities in China, maybe Dubai, there is not much more space to build public transportation. There is really not much more time, or money or space to build new freeways or even add lanes. So the math is the math. You have more people coming into already congested cities, so what are we going to do about that? We have to make sure that we reduce personal car use. Maybe that is the family with two cars going down to one. Maybe it is a young person deciding never to purchase a car. With my generation, you know, you turn 16, and you have got your license. You saved up money to buy a car. I still like to drive. The younger people today have less of an interest in that. They want to travel a lot and not be tied down, so it fits the way they want to live.

So the core proposition of the Uber products today is that someone is not driving their own car. Cars today around the world are utilized 4% of the time, by the way. The most underutilized asset in the world is our vehicles, and there are 1.2 people per car. Think about that. The average Uber car—even if someone is driving just three or four hours a day—is putting 16, 18 people into it.

But where this goes from here is what we are really excited about—and, again, this is not where we started, but we are learning as we go—is that we have something called “Uber Pool” that we experimented with here during the Pan Am Games. It is in L.A., San Francisco, Paris and New York and a couple of cities in China. And what that means is, if you order an UberX today—for those of you who have done that—someone shows up in a Toyota Prius. Well, you can opt in those cities as you could during the Pan Am Games, so if I am going from here to the back of the room, and this gentleman in the red tie is going in the same direction, roughly, we can choose to share the ride. Carpooling, what the world has talked about since 1973 and the first big OPEC oil shock, has never worked on scale. Well, it is working. It is half-price transportation which means the Uber ride, which is already less expensive than many transportation options, becomes available to just about every income spectrum, and that is important because we know—I have probably consumed more political research over the last ten years than anyone in the world sadly—is that the average person, no matter where they live, would say, “I’m struggling with money. I don’t feel secure enough economically. I’m also struggling with time.” Time is almost as big a pressure as money, and transportation is too expensive and takes too long for too many people. So when you can bring it to the masses, inexpensive transportation, whether they are going from home to work or home to the subway line, it is a huge deal. So half-price transportation below UberX. The drivers are making more money because they are on our perpetual trip. Someone is always in the car but then you have the added benefit of congestion reduction because then you really begin to bend the curve when you are doing carpooling on scale. And, like most things at Uber, we experiment. We did not know if this would work, and, in the beginning, it did not work that well when we launched it in San Francisco last year. Now, in San Francisco, 50% of the people who choose to use an Uber asked to carpool. Why do they do it? They do it largely because it is inexpensive. But they also do it because they feel like they are making a contribution to the environment, to the climate, to congestion.

That will not work everywhere. It has to be dense urban areas with a lot of driver supply, but it will work here, in Toronto, which is a major global city, and carpooling on scale is going to make transportation potentially transform the way cities move. Los Angeles is probably one of the historic cities about congestion. If 15% of the people in L.A. carpooled, there would never be another traffic backup. Now, 15% is a lot, but it is not so crazy, and we just announced yesterday in Chengdu, China, which is Uber’s largest city now, something called “Uber Commute,” which means you can choose to be an Uber driver just on your commute. So you are going in to work, and you decide, “I’m going to pick up somebody from the neighbourhood,” and then you are going home, and you drive somebody home. So these are not even our traditional, 10-hour a week Uber drivers. These are just people, right? So again, trying to bring technology and efficiency to something that really has bedeviled communities: How can we have less cars with one person in it driving back and forth every day to reduce the nightmare at rush hour?

So from a mobility option, we think we can help reduce congestion, help reduce the number of cars on the road, and we are still young, so lots of people have not even heard about Uber, much less used it. But amongst Uber users, 8% or 9% of our users in the U.S. said they had given up a car, beginning to scale in terms of behaviour change.

And then we just become part of the ecosystem, so some people—and for those of you that do this, we are very grateful—choose to use us to get around your city as your primary option, but most do not. Most people may still drive themselves occasionally, or they will take us into town and take a taxi home, or they will use public transportation, or they will bike. But we become part of that solution, so I think about some of the biggest problems facing the world—and listen, we are a business. We are trying to be a successful business. We have a bottom line. We are not a non-profit, but, as we get deeper into this, we see that some of the central challenges facing large cities in the world—more mobility options, less congestion, less emissions, more economic opportunity—are things that we can address. We can be part of the solution set, and so that is what this debate is really about, and we are hoping that the Toronto City Council can send a strong signal next week that they are going to embrace modern ridesharing regulations. About 60 states and cities in the U.S. have passed new laws over the last year to do so. Mexico City is the biggest global city to do so. The Philippines was the first country to do so. There is momentum there because I think people are starting to see it is bigger than just this Uber-taxi debate. There is a lot of benefit here to cities if we approach this right.

So we are excited about being a partnership here. I will add, you know, that it is interesting that Beck Taxi, which is a prominent player in the taxi industry, reported that last year was their best year ever. So again, when the market is growing, the pie grows. When more people decide to get around their cities by not driving their own cars, public transportation will benefit. Taxis will benefit. Ridesharing companies, like Uber, will benefit, and I do think that Toronto is a global city. I think that if Toronto moves forward here on regulations, it will not just impact the rest of this country, which is so very important, but I think it will also send a global signal and help us forward here on our march.

So we are excited about what we are working on here. We are experimenting with other products, as you know. I do not know if any of you tried UberEATS. Who has tried UberEATS? Okay, so I highly recommend it. Now, this is a great product. Who knew by the way? I did not know that people wanted food, sandwiches, salads, on demand in five minutes, but it turns out they do. People want everything. I think today’s offering for us is from Dundas Park Kitchen. He has a great chicken stew, but there is a lot we can do with this platform. If you build a matrix, so to speak, if people want food in five minutes in their busy day, we can do that. We have experimented with other sorts of delivery of goods.

So we are going to continue to innovate. I think the core innovation though is about how do we offer a ride in three to four minutes to as many people on the planet as possible? Ideally, how do we offer that ride in a way that people are sharing the ride to bring costs and emissions down? And how do we help answer the question that every city is facing which is How are we going to survive the population explosion that’s going to happen in a situation where we are already so stressed and challenged from a mobility standpoint?

So I want to thank you for your time today, and we are going to have some time, Gordon. Everyone has got a hard stop. You have got to get back to your offices, so I appreciate you staying here, and we can talk more about Uber or politics or whatever you would like. Thank you

Questions & Answers

Q: You alluded to this partly, but why did you join Uber, other than to be surrounded by young and brilliant people? Was there something else?

DP: Well, that is part of it. I think that as you get along in life, the ability to learn new things and be challenged is important—and to get out of the comfort zone a little bit, so I have been in politics and government a very long time, and while there are some similarities to what I am doing now, I am learning a lot every day from a lot of smart people. So that was from a sort of personal standpoint.

My family and I were really desperate to get out of Washington, D.C., and we were probably going to go back to Chicago, but this was such an interesting opportunity, and my wife used to live in San Francisco, so, from a personal standpoint, it made a lot of sense. But I do believe in the mission. I will tell you that, when I am sitting in government meetings, particularly, in the White House or when I am talking to governors, there are a lot of good ideas out there in education and workforce development and tax credits for childcare. A lot of things we need to do, but it is sometimes discouraging that, on scale, there are not enough answers about how to get more income in more people’s pockets, right? And, you can say, well, ideally someone would not have to drive a car for eight hours to go up $10,000 or $12,000, but, right now, for them to do it on their own terms, it could not be more important to them. I think the numbers are 40% of people in America say they could not sustain an unexpected bill of $1,000. That is where a lot of people are. So for people to have the ability quickly to earn some income, either in a steady way or an episodic way is a big thing. So I am very, very passionate about that.

Q: What do you make of the City Hall debate on September the 30th?

DP: It is an important debate. I think that the staff has put forward some solid recommendations. These would be not exactly all the details but a framework for modern ridesharing regulations, and that is what is required because most transportation regulations—whether they be here in Toronto or in Germany or most places in the U.S. or Australia—pick your country—were written a long time ago, pre-GPS, pre-smartphone, and in some cases, pre-cellular technology. That is not going to be a terribly satisfying discussion on how we fit this new technology-based platform into old regulations. So you have to modernize. Now, that does not mean that we do not want to be regulated. That is a misperception about us. We are in rooms every day around the world to get regulated, but with modern, smart, forward-looking, economically positive regulations that have in them as a matter of law what kind of safety regime we need to follow. They would concern insurance, vehicle inspections, and so on so that the public knows that this is done in a smart and safe way but in a way that enables this to be available, both on the rider side and the driver side to as many people. So that is what is at stake, and, again, I think that it is important for Toronto that this be successful. But I think the message it will send throughout the country and the world will be very significant.

Q: We will have the Mayor of Montreal here in a few weeks. I wish she was here to hear to the answer to this. Can taxis and Uber peacefully co-exist?

DP: Oh, of course. First of all, there is some competition. Some of you have probably done this. You might have taken a taxi three years ago, and now you take an Uber. But, you know, on scale, the decision most of our customers use is perhaps not to drive their own car and order an Uber. As that for-hire vehicle market expands, there is still going to be a healthy place for taxis. Now, they will not have a monopoly anymore, and so that is where I think a lot of the rhetoric coming from the taxi owners is. For a lot of the taxi owners this is an all- or-nothing proposition and here in Toronto, as I said, Beck said it was their best year ever last year as we were scaling.

You go to Chicago; you go to Michigan Avenue. There are taxis everywhere, and they have people in them. Same thing with Manhattan. New York is a great example. For those of you that have been to New York, Manhattan, the central business district, the Empire State Building, listen: It is very easy to get a Yellow Cab—maybe not when it is raining and not in all parts of Manhattan, but 95% of taxi trips in New York City happen in Manhattan. But the rest of the city, the other boroughs—Staten Island, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens—are very underserved, and so 35% of Uber trips happen in those areas and that is the same thing here in the GTA. Our big value prop is underserved areas. Some of those are low-income areas. Sometimes they are suburban areas. Sometimes they can just be the fate of urban planning where there is almost a transportation desert that arose because of the way public transportation was designed, so, yes, they can co-exist, and in fact, as more people make the decision to reduce their own use of their own car, much less buy one, I think all sectors that are involved in moving people around cities can thrive. But it will not be a monopoly.

Q: What do you think about the Canadian federal election?

DP: Well, I learned a long time ago not to lecture anyone on their own politics. I would say that, well, it is fascinating. We are obviously having a very fascinating election in America. Some might call it a “spectacle,” but it will sort itself out. I find this fascinating simply because to have at this point—and you have still got a few weeks—three parties so closely in the 30-30-30 range—and it is not moving much—is just a fascinating election. The data then to really understand who still at this date can move is fascinating, and I think there was a lot of attention in the Obama campaign on our use of data technology. I think way too much. At the end of the day, if Barack Obama was not an effective candidate, none of that would have mattered at all, okay? First principles are: Are you a compelling leader? Do you have a compelling message in the right time? Sometimes you can be both of those things, and it is just not your moment.

That being said, in an election like this, really knowing as much about those people and how they make their decisions and the best way to reach them is fascinating. So I will be watching it very carefully just to see whether it stays locked in—in that really, really tight margin—or does one or two of the parties begin to open up a little bit of breathing room? I do not know. It is fascinating.

I will say about politics generally: Something is happening around the world. I mean you see Trump in America. You see Bernie Sanders in America. You see some of the extremist parties even in places like Scandinavia— Le Pen in France. The Labour election just happened in the U.K. There is a lot of dissatisfaction out there.

In America, we call them “landslides” when one party wins a dominant victory. They do not happen that often, but the two big examples in our country were in 1974 during Watergate and Richard Nixon had to resign and in 1994 after Bill Clinton’s first term; the Republicans won everything there was to win.

What is fascinating is that in all our last five elections, we have had four landslides—2006, 2008, big Democrat; 2010, big Republican; 2012, lean Democratic but not as big; 2014, big Republican. So the voters could not be shouting out more loudly that, hey, guess what? Not satisfied. Some of that is because of the recession and economy, but a lot of it is because they just do not feel like they are getting the answers, the cooperation, the solutions they need.

I also think what you are seeing is a little bit different here, particularly, with the advent of you have got three major contenders, but, certainly, in America—and I think you see this in other parts of the world: The sort of bases of the political parties are pulling further and further apart, right? So even in America where I think any fair assessment of the last seven years would be progressives, and they have really been able to accomplish a lot of what they wanted to accomplish for decades, you still have some saying we have not gone far enough. You have Republicans saying, “Mitt Romney and John McCain were moderate sell-outs. We need someone more conservative.” So that is such an interesting dynamic. I happen to think it is a very toxic one and will make it harder for actual progress to be made because it makes it harder for somebody to reach out their hand because just the sheer act of reaching out their hand is a traitorous act.

But there is a lot going on, and I do think that the issue of income growth that we talked about in relation to our platform is real out there, right, and so people see markets coming back, even with the turbulence of the last few months—broadly, directionally, positive, profits coming back. But they are feeling like they are still kind of running on a treadmill, and they are feeling a little bit more secure that they are going to have a job, but it is not necessarily one of aspiration. I think there are a lot of things going on out there. That was not a quick answer, but I do think that it is just fascinating to see a race.

I think the French election, which is a ways off, could be also interesting like that where you have three parties and candidates, probably pretty close to each other, and then how does that unfold? So we will be watching with bated breath, and I appreciate you not asking me a direct Trump question. Thank you.

Q: Uber in twenty years when you are older, and I am very old? What is it going to look like? Have you reached almost the market share that you think is possible, or is it going to keep going? Might it be a much bigger enterprise in twenty years?

DP: Well, I think crystal balls these days two years out are almost impossible, much less twenty, given the pace of change. Where will virtual reality be by then end of the decade? Some suggest we will not have televisions or computers anymore, and we will be immersed in that world. So I do not know.

I know that the core value proposition of how we can help build the cities of the future and provide more mobility options will be at the core. We are in 61 countries now and 335 cities. But think about that. There are thousands and thousands or more cities where our model would work. Thousands. What is interesting is we find that it works in smaller communities as well because there may be even more of a dire need there, so there are a lot more countries.

Our goal really is to provide to as many people who live on this planet a ride within three or four minutes at the press of a button. And what is interesting is the model works everywhere. China, obviously, has huge mobility challenges and a huge need for more economic growth, wage growth.

It is interesting: You look at a country like Cairo. Cairo has obviously had a very tough time, and people were concerned the economy would not recover for a long time, and it is very troubled, but, we, I think, have over 10,000 drivers now in Cairo, people who were in desperate need. Some of these are former accountants and doctors who are looking for that.

Saudi Arabia is an interesting use case because 90% of our ridership in Saudi Arabia is women because they have limited mobility options. So we are excited because while there is distinction to every place— whether that is from a regulatory standpoint or from the public infrastructure standpoint or the use case—it works everywhere. So we have a lot more cities to enter. The truth is even though we are probably in this room well known and well covered, even here, in Toronto, I would hazard to guess half the people who live in the GTA do not know what Uber is. In San Francisco, we still have 20% or 25% that do not. In some of our major cities, we still have 20,000 or 25,000 people a week downloading the app because they have never heard about it, so we have a lot of room to grow in our existing cities. We are experimenting with some other ways to use the platform, but what we are really excited about is that there are still a lot more cities for us to enter, and a lot of them have more limited mobility solutions, so there is even a bigger use case in terms of what we can bring.

Note of Appreciation from Marc-André Blanchard, Chair and CEO, McCarthy Tétrault

Thank you, Gord. On behalf of McCarthy Tétrault, our firm, you will allow me one sentence about selling our firm: We have been recognized by the Financial Times as the most innovative law firm in Canada and one of the three most innovative in North America. So you will understand that we are very, very proud to be sponsoring this lunch. We think it is very much aligned with our innovative strategy.

The future of transportation is a central issue for our communities and our businesses, and the focus on this issue right now is imperative. I want to thank all of you for joining us and embracing change, rather than fearing it; for approaching every challenge as an opportunity; and for believing that innovation drives the economy and makes Canada a leader.

David, it is a privilege for me to thank you. I have been a very big fan of yours. I read your book. I think then that not only was it a fantastic book or narrative of his successful election campaign, but I must say to all of us in the room that are into business or community leadership or anything like that, it is a must-read. It was a book about, obviously, crisis management but, above all, it was a book about pursuing a vision, innovation, values, strategy, brand, team work, leadership, resilience, and flawless execution and, obviously, change.

But the core of what David said today evokes the same alignment and discipline and audacity in the same way. So thanks again for sharing your insight and vision and assisting us in elevating the debate. And thank you to Uber for leading this discussion and showing us a glimpse of the future and providing some opportunities for economic growth for all of us. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Concluding Remarks by Dr. Gordon McIvor

Thank you, Marc-André. I would also like to thank our generous sponsors, McCarthy Tétrault, for sponsoring our event today. I would also like to thank the National Post, which is our print media sponsor. Ladies and gentlemen, please, follow us on Twitter at @Empire_Club and visit us online at www.empireclub.org, and you can also follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. Please, join us again soon. We have a really interesting fall lined up. Starting next week, we are going to have the premier of Alberta giving her first major address outside of that province on Alberta’s future on October 2nd, at the Hilton Hotel. We have our own premier coming to the Empire Club the following week, October 5th, and she may actually be talking a little bit about that last question that you spoke to, David. And another big event will happen on December 8th—mark your calendars: We are going to have the governor of the Bank of Canada talking about the future of Canada’s economy next year.

Thank you for your attendance today, ladies and gentlemen, and this meeting is now formally adjourned. Thank you.