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The database of upcoming builders is at the bottom of this page.

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Note: If you’re interested in taking on one of the builders below and have questions / want to jump on a quick call. Feel free to reach out to me on Discord! - Ben

Canada is a country of builders. From railways to snowmobiles, insulin to IMAX, Canadians have had a transformative impact on our country and the world.

We want to celebrate Canadian success. As part of this, we are going to promote stories from Canadian history of individuals that have had a transformative impact on the country and the world.

We'll host the stories on our website buildcanada.com with a byline for the author and a link to the social media. We will also promote them when first posted on social media and the newsletter. The list and definition will be managed in discord and will share a full calendar of upcoming stories.

Criteria for Inclusion

• We are looking for people who have made an outsized (top 0.001%) impact in their fields with an emphasis on fields that lead to economic growth: business, science, technology, and explorers.
• They need to be doing work that is 0 to 1 and positive sum. e.g. we do not include sports stars or ******politicians unless we can argue they did something to actively push their field forward.
• No to any entertainment, arts, literature etc. unless we can argue they did something to actively push their field forward and had a major economic impact.
• They don’t need to be born in Canada or die in Canada but they have to have done the work they are most famous for in Canada or be explicit about how Canada helped them to do their best work. **Or, if they pre-date Confederation, they must have done work here that made a decisive contribution to building the country.
• Ideally the most impactful work is more than 20 years old so we are focussing on lesser known figures and certain they really did impressive things

Editorial Guidelines

• Max 500 words
• Focus on primary contributions not personal life and we prefer stories to biographies.
• It should be a narrative rather than a collection of facts but should include
  • Where are they from
  • What were their rough dates
  • What was their greatest contribution to Canada and/or the world
  • How they show the spirit to build canada:
    • What did they build or push forward?
    • Why did it matter economically?
    • How did Canada play a role in making it possible?
• We need to reserve the right to make any changes to put it up on the site and to write the headlines so we can make sure it’s in the right brand voice.
• It cannot look like ChatGPT. Feel free to use LLMs to help in generating and writing but you must:
  • Fact check everything. A basic check on Wikipedia works. One trick is to first compile a list of facts you know to be true and then ask an LLM to draft based only on those cited facts.
  • You must modify the language so that it reflects your voice. If we can tell in reading it that an LLM wrote it then it’s no good.

Process