Innovation as Power: The Choices That Will Define 2026

By Daniel Perry
Director of Federal Affairs

If 2025 was about clarity, 2026 will be about consequence.

Last year, something shifted in Ottawa and across the country. Long-standing debates about innovation, productivity, and competitiveness gave way to a more serious conversation about economic sovereignty. Questions that once lived at the margins moved to the centre of decision-making: who builds critical technology, who owns it, and who ultimately benefits when it scales.

At the Council of Canadian Innovators, 2025 was about meeting that moment. We pushed beyond abstract support for innovation and focused squarely on outcomes. Canadian ownership. Domestic capacity. Strategic procurement.

That work showed up across files. From SR&ED reform and procurement modernization, to defence, AI, quantum, housing, and trade, a consistent through-line emerged: Canada cannot afford to treat innovation policy as separate from economic security or national resilience. Our members are not just building companies. They are building the capabilities that underpin modern economies.

That is the work ahead in 2026.

CCI will be focused on positioning Canada to compete and lead in a world where technology, data, and IP are treated as strategic assets. The global operating environment has shifted in ways that demand a strategic response. Major economies are now explicit that economic strategy and national security strategy are inseparable.

We will work to ensure that the 2026 Federal Budget reflects the realities our members navigate every day. We will push for stronger IP protection and commercialization policies that stop the leakage of Canadian talent and ideas. We will advocate for strategic procurement that builds domestic capability in critical sectors.

We will continue to advance our members' priorities on AI, compute infrastructure, and dual-use technologies, areas where Canada has real strength, but where we risk falling behind if we do not act with urgency. We will push for trade and investment policies that diversify Canada's exports of technology, services, and IP beyond dependence on any single market, and ensure that Canadian innovation priorities are reflected in continental negotiations as CUSMA review approaches.

Our call for Prime Minister Carney to convene Canadian business leaders is not symbolic; it is an essential step toward building the kind of ongoing public-private collaboration required to develop and execute a sovereign industrial strategy. The reality is now explicit: the 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy makes clear that major economies view their technology sectors as extensions of national power, their standards as tools of influence, and their supply chains as matters of security. Governments are directing their embassies to prioritize commercial outcomes for domestic companies.

They are monitoring global technological advances to identify vulnerabilities and opportunities. They are using leverage to secure preferential access for their firms in strategic sectors. Meeting once is not enough. We need sustained engagement, advisory structures, and mechanisms for private sector intelligence to inform public policy in real time.

The model exists: Sector Advisory Groups on International Trade have proven that ongoing collaboration between government and industry produces stronger, more strategic outcomes. That same approach must extend to economic security, procurement, AI governance, and IP protection. Canadian business leaders understand global competition, supply chain realities, and emerging technology vulnerabilities because they navigate them every day. That knowledge must be embedded in how Canada develops and executes strategy, not consulted occasionally, but integrated continuously.

The next six months will test whether Canada is prepared to make the strategic choices required to secure our economic future. CCI's members are building the next generation of globally competitive Canadian companies are ready. Our role is to ensure the government is ready to meet the moment with them.

The ambition is already here. Now we need the strategy to match it.

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To learn more about CCI’s federal advocacy priorities, contact Daniel Perry.

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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 175 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.