Let’s face it: Canada is going through a rough patch. More people are living here than ever before at a time when it’s harder to live here than ever before. Housing is expensive, food is expensive, everything is expensive. Our underfunded, overloaded public infrastructure is collapsing like a body in organ failure. And every time you pick up a call from your mom, you have no idea if it’s going to be her or an AI-powered scambot on the other end of the line. And we thought the pandemic was dystopian.

The most important people in Canada right now are the ones stepping in to patch up these institutional potholes—and they’re doing so in utterly surprising ways. For example, Tiff Macklem, a career-long central banker, is the guy determining the fate of the housing market. Our immigration minister, Marc Miller, is radically curbing the $20-billion international education industry. A teenager named Sophia Mathur wants to fight climate change in the court system, while the savviest businessman in the country has turned out to be none other than Deadpool. There are buttoned-up money managers financing electric vehicles, city builders creating sports stadiums, and a furniture-store magnate building 4,000 residential units. The following pages contain more than 100 innovators, tycoons, influencers and rabble-rousers, all determined to turn the Canadian nightmare back into the Canadian dream—whatever that looks like to them.