CCI Atlantic Hill Day: What We Heard in Ottawa

By Karen Moores
CCI Senior Advisor, Atlantic Canada

Last week, on the heels of the launch of Building with Atlantic Ambition at Home and Around the World, CCI hosted the inaugural Atlantic Innovators Day on the Hill: a full day of meetings with Ministers, Members of Parliament, Senators, Deputy Ministers, senior staff, and public servants.

As our first-ever regionally focused Day on the Hill, we wanted this day to highlight the momentum in Atlantic Canada and make our meetings a chance to share with officials the talent, technologies, and policy ideas originating from our members. As the government continues to make major decisions and investments on policy priorities directly impacting this region - procurement, defence, artificial intelligence access to global markets, export diversification, and digital modernization, as well as oceans and maritime technologies - we wanted to ensure our Atlantic members were the room.

Atlantic Canadian innovators have been building for this moment for decades. Defence innovation, working globally, and modernizing access to exports have been part of our economic survival. Now, they are providing the region’s innovators with new opportunities to scale at home and abroad.

Our Atlantic Innovators Day on the Hill was as much about sharing who our innovators are and the domestic and global impact they are already making as it was about driving the need for change. We heard members powerfully share their stories all day of globally-impactful work in advancing artificial intelligence in education, health care, and defence, digitizing governments to help solve our productivity challenge, and leading in risk, defence, oceans technologies while creating the software tools that help build and protect our nation.

"We came to Ottawa to showcase Atlantic Canada’s top innovators from one of the fastest growing regions in Canada and one of the fastest growing markets. This region is already leading at home, and around the world, and has the talent, technologies and infrastructure to power up solutions for productivity and prosperity. We want officials from all departments and across all levels of government to know the momentum, power and potential for Atlantic Canada, but we need to get the right policy conditions for that to happen," said Anne Whelan, Founder and CEO of Seafair.

While on the Hill, we also listened and heard the advancements around the infrastructure and policy conditions advancing our sovereignty. There is momentum and recognition of the role our innovators play in protecting Canadian sovereignty while building intellectual property assets that generate economic prosperity. Our members met with government officials who showed strong interest in understanding how Atlantic Canadian technologies are supporting key regional sectors, particularly energy and defence, and how innovators are helping shape the future of both industries.

A key takeaway from our inaugural Atlantic Day on the Hill is that we need to continue building awareness of what’s at stake for Atlantic Canada if we don’t seize the moment and get the policy conditions right for our innovators. There is tremendous support for the region and a mutual commitment to wanting to ensure opportunities are not lost.  More work remains in continuing to build understanding of the region’s power, the potential opportunities for our innovators, and the need to expedite and streamline policies and programs to support scaling Canadian companies.

CCI will keep pressing for a procurement and industrial policy framework that treats Atlantic Canadian innovators as strategic economic assets and gives them a credible path to grow, compete, and stay anchored here at home.

Karen Moores is the Senior Advisor, Atlantic Canada, at the Council of Canadian Innovators.

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About the Council of Canadian Innovators

The Council of Canadian Innovators is a national member-based organization reshaping how governments across Canada think about innovation policy, and supporting homegrown scale-ups to drive prosperity. Established in 2015, CCI represents and works with over 170 of Canada’s fastest-growing technology companies. Our members are the CEOs, founders, and top senior executives behind some of Canada’s most successful ‘scale-up’ companies. All our members are job and wealth creators, investors, philanthropists, and experts in their fields of health tech, cleantech, fintech, cybersecurity, AI and digital transformation. Companies in our portfolio are market leaders in their verticals, commercialize their technologies in over 190 countries, and generate between $10M-$750M in annual recurring revenue. We advocate on their behalf for government strategies that increase their access to skilled talent, strategic capital, and new customers, as well as expanded freedom to operate for their global pursuits of scale.