CCI's 2026 Pre-Budget Recommendations for the Alberta Government

The province’s tech sector is maturing quickly, and we know that companies that scale from millions to billions provide the most returns to local and national economies. Common-sense and nimble policies are necessary to get us there, keep Alberta competitive and continue to diversify our economy while building on past success.

Alberta has long been at the forefront of creating marketplace frameworks and building winners across our cornerstone industries — namely, oil and gas and agriculture. We’ve enjoyed significant success and our policymakers have been historically shrewd in their approach to securing customers and navigating global supply chains for the things we produce and pull out of the ground.

But we need to do more in the context of the 21st century economy, where IP, strategic procurement, and data sovereignty are everything. Long before the current U.S. President began redefining the global trade consensus, U.S. jurisdictions were building significant economic strength through innovation policy in a deliberate and concerted way. We would do well to take a leaf out of that book.

On behalf of Alberta’s homegrown technology leaders, CCI is providing policy recommendations as part of the Alberta 2026 pre-budget consultations. These recommendations build on the Council of Canadian Innovators’ previous work with the Government of Alberta, with which we have had a longstanding productive relationship.

1. Develop and Implement a Provincial Intellectual Property Framework.
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2. Establish a One Window Procurement Division for Technology and IT Solutions.
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3. Establish an Alberta Sovereign Compute Working Group or Consortium to Drive Domestic Infrastructure Development.
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4. Establish A Financial Technology Patent Box.
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5. Establish the Alberta Venture Capital Innovation Investment (AVCII) Fund, a $275 million public-private sector co-investment fund.

You can read the full submission HERE:

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À propos du Conseil des innovateurs canadiens

The Council of Canadian Innovators is a national member-based business council, working to reshape how governments across Canada think about innovation policy, and supporting homegrown scale-ups to drive prosperity. Established in 2015, CCI represents over 150 of Canada’s fastest-growing technology companies. Our members are the CEOs, founders, and top 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.