Arlene Dickinson

Arlene Dickinson is a visionary entrepreneur and leader with a remarkable track record of success. She is the Founder and General Partner of District Ventures Capital, a venture capital fund that invests in innovative companies in the food & beverage and health & wellness sectors. Under her leadership, District Ventures Capital has become a leading force in the industry, with a portfolio of ground-breaking companies that are transforming the way we live and eat.

Dickinson is also the Co-Managing Partner of Believeco:Partners, an independent Canadian-based owner, operator, and builder of the foremost marketing, communications, and engagement agencies in North America. It was Dickinson’s vision that brought this platform to life resulting in the creation of a powerhouse marketing consolidator.

Beyond her business ventures, Dickinson is a sought-after speaker, three-time best-selling author, and philanthropist. She is widely recognized for her role as a Venture Capitalist on the hit television series, Dragons’ Den, where she currently has starred for over 15 seasons.

Dickinson's leadership and entrepreneurial prowess have earned her numerous accolades over the years, including induction into the Southern Alberta Business Hall of Fame, the Marketing Hall of Legends, recognition as one of Canada's Most Powerful Women Top 100 Hall of Fame, and the prestigious Queen Elizabeth Diamond and Platinum Jubilee Awards. Dickinson served as an Honorary Captain of the Royal Canadian Navy for over 10 years visiting our troops overseas numerous times.

“But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.”
— Viktor E. Frankl

#TeamCanada 🇨🇦 Managing General Partner at District Ventures Capital

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Everyone wants Carney to take them on his trade missions. Including Poilievre. I think differently.
As an entrepreneur and business owner, here’s how I see it. With  every door Carney opens, with every deal he strikes, it’s up to us to walk through that door. To build the relationships and to create the commerce.

The PM’s job is to remove hurdles for us. Our job is to act once they’re gone.

I get trade missions and for sure they do work. But not on the PM’s plane. That’s the difference.

I’ve said before that there needs to be serious private sector engagement with the PMO and I stand by that. But that engagement doesn’t mean being on his plane. It means government collaborating with business for input.  It means ensuring we know which doors are opening and when. It means better communication, not entourages.

Are there exceptions? Of course there are. Some deals like defence, major infrastructure, highly regulated industries do require business leaders at the table during government to government negotiations. That’s very real.

Some leaders do bring business delegations on every trip. Different countries, very different contexts, different styles. I’m not at all saying that delegations are never useful. I’m saying most of us shouldn’t wait for an invite to one to start moving. The majority of us literally need to get on our own flights and head to markets that are opening up.

I’ve done it and I know it works.  We don’t need anyone’s permission to get going and to create our own deals. That’s how entrepreneurs work.  Where there’s challenges we see opportunities. We don’t wait for someone to tell us to act when opportunity happens. We just do. 

Carney is moving quickly because he needs to. The deals around the world are being struck. The doors are opening. It’s our job as entrepreneurs and as business leaders to move in after he’s opened the door and not to wait for an invitation to the tarmac. 

❤️🇨🇦

Canada, the world is open to us right now. We need to remember that we are an extremely valuable partner to so many nations who both want to partner with us and believe in a mutually beneficial relationship. Let’s go!! ❤️🇨🇦

🖖Mark Bossert

There’s so many headlines on food costs right now, and so much blame being thrown around. Most of it’s political and a lot of it isn’t factual.
I spend my days in the food and ag sector, and have a perspective on food inflation not in those headlines.

For example, the 12.3% jump in restaurant meal prices reported looks alarming. But Jan’s yoy comparison is inflated because it’s being measured against last year’s GST break, when there was no tax on dining out. You can debate whether that policy was smart, but the stat is misleading.This distortion eases after Feb & the numbers should normalize.

Our weak loonie and retaliatory tariffs made imports more expensive. Just like tariffs make things more expensive for Americans, the same is true when we impose counter-tariffs and it hits our prices here. Most of the counter-tariffs were dropped in Sept, but supply chain effects take 6 months or longer to reach consumers. Beef & coffee are up double digits globally due to drought and poor growing conditions but we get hit harder than other G7 nations because we import far more of our food, especially in winter.

But what nobody likes to talk about is our structural issue.

Canada is a top 10 food exporter. We grow massive amounts of wheat, canola, beef, and pork. But over the last 15–20 years, we’ve gutted our food processing industry. The mid sized processors, packers, and canners that turned raw ingredients into finished products are largely gone. 

We’re great at exporting raw commodities, then buying them back as finished products, at a markup, in USD, fully exposed to tariffs & currency swings!  Make it make sense. 

When tech became the sexy investment space  with huge multiples, food became boring. We remain complacent about food supply and food security. This erosion started around 2008, way before COVID.  The US grow AND process domestically. They produce far more fresh food yearround. They’re significantly more insulated from food inflation. They still have it, just not as bad.

This isn’t mainly a carbon tax problem or a grocer margin problem as being said. Those are convenient talking points. The real issue is decades of underinvestment in food processing and greenhouse capacity.

Economists expect grocery inflation to cool thru ‘26  as tariff & currency effects work thru. But the processing gap is structural and won’t fix itself. As long as we don’t address the root problem we’ll be vulnerable to the swings.

Maybe it’s time we care a little less about high return profiles and start investing a lot more in the food security of our nation.

Please keep buying Canadian. Support existing manufacturers & processors. But just as importantly support building Canada. Demand major investment in greenhouses, processing plants, and canning facilities. Support the manufacturers we still have & build the ones we’ve lost.

We can’t eat raw grains. If we want less food inflation, we have to make the food here not just grow ingredients.
❤️🇨🇦

Silence can look a lot like agreement but we need to understand that it’s not. You can’t help but see what’s happening related to this, out there in the zeitgeist. 

People are genuinely afraid to speak. Not because we don’t see what’s happening or because we don’t know something is wrong. But because we look around, see everyone else staying quiet, and conclude that it’s our thinking that must be the problem. So we go along and the silence grows. And with it, our inadvertent complicity.

This isn’t a weakness we should be ashamed of. It actually has a name (it’s called pluralistic ignorance). The whole thing is about everyone privately disagreeing with what’s happening but assuming that the quiet around them represents consensus from everyone else. So nobody speaks because who wants to be that person raising their hand when you think everyone else is on the other side of you? The silence starts to feel like the majority’s opinion. It isn’t. What it is though is collective fear that looks a lot like agreement.

This is exactly what unchecked authoritarian power counts on. Our desire to not raise our hands or speak out when the majority aren’t.
Rule of law only holds its legitimacy when it exists to protect people. When law becomes used to protect people in power from accountability rather than protect people from power, the moral obligation to obey it changes. And so does the dire cost to society of staying silent.

History is completely unambiguous on this. The moments we as a human race look back on with shame are rarely the moments people spoke up. They’re the moments people went along and normalized the abnormal. Told themselves it wasn’t their place to push back or disageee. Or they waited for someone else to go first.

Nobody is coming first and that’s the thing that’s so unsettling. We really do need heroes to be first and loud and I think our heroes are us. Everyday people who are using our voices even though we feel alone doing so. I know I’ve felt that when I’ve used my voice to say that something doesn’t feel right and I know how hard it can feel to find the courage to say something and then have trolls and bots and, yes, real people disagreeing with me and putting me down. 

But our voices, especially when it feels inconvenient, professionally risky, or socially uncomfortable, are not a small thing. I believe it’s the most important expression of free agency that  we have. 

And when people who have been on one side of the argument change their views to the other side and speak up, we can’t then trash them and shame them. We have to meet them there. They found the courage to say what they actually believe not what they were coerced into defending. That deserves respect, not a social media pile on.  

Silence in the face of wrong isn’t neutrality. It’s a choice. And authoritarian power knows exactly what our silence is worth.
❤️🇨🇦

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