Canada

Please join ITIF as it launches the Centre for Canadian Innovation and Competitiveness, an Ottawa-based ITIF affiliate focused on tackling these issues. This event will feature an expert panel discussion on a new report from the Centre examining the how and why of Canada’s performance on key measures of productivity, innovation, and competitiveness.

The word “innovation” appears a total of 97 times and “productivity” 63 times in Canada’s 2024 federal budget, and many measures targeted towards innovation and productivity reflect that focus. However, some of the funds being disbursed are tangential at best to actually addressing Canada’s declining productivity and supporting Canada’s innovation ecosystem.

The changes two bills are making to reduce market concentration in the Canadian economy pose grave risks to the future of the innovation that is essential to keeping Canada’s innovation economy from declining even more.

By changing the tax credit to be quasi-incremental, unifying the rates between small and large businesses, and simplifying the filing process, the government will be able to incentivize private R&D spending more effectively.

Instead of promoting and supporting Canadian content, the Online Streaming Act passes costs on to consumers. The government needs to modernize the way it thinks about supporting Canadian content and leverage technological innovation instead of fighting it.

If the proposed the proposed Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA) is implemented as is, Canada may not be able to fully realize the economic benefits that AI will bring.

The Canadian government must ensure that policy, legislative and regulatory approaches support competition and innovation as much as possible. Unfortunately, Bills C-56 and C-59 promise to do exactly the opposite.

As Daniel Castro writes for RealClearMarkets, Canada's major technology policy initiatives over the past year have been discriminatory policies targeting the tech sector, especially foreign companies.

Canada’s levels of business R&D are far off the pace in technologically advanced, globally traded sectors of the economy.

Instead of enacting counterproductive tax grabs from U.S. digital firms, Canada and others should wait for the OECD to complete its Base Erosion Profits Shifting (BEPS) plan.