Honourable senators, my response to the Speech from the Throne focuses on one phrase — “ . . . think big and . . . act bigger” — with the goal of building the strongest economy in the G7.

Our King’s speech identified five priority areas where progress is critical if we’re to become the G7’s strongest economy, these being:

First, building an industrial strategy that will make Canada more globally competitive while fighting climate change; second, protecting Canada’s sovereignty by rebuilding, rearming and reinvesting in defence; third, positioning Canada as the world’s leading hub for science and innovation; fourth, catalyzing new investment to create better jobs and higher incomes; and fifth, deploying technology to improve public sector productivity.

Hearing these commitments caused one sentence from the Prime Minister’s mandate letter to cabinet to echo in my mind:

Over the coming weeks, I will look to each of you to identify the key goals and measures of success on which to evaluate the results you will achieve for Canadians . . . .

The Prime Minister’s promise of action is clear, and enormously inspiring. We desperately need this intensity of focus on creating opportunities, jobs and prosperity for Canada.

However, thinking big and acting bigger is at odds with Ottawa’s ingrained risk-averse culture. Progress demands that we break down entrenched barriers and siloed thinking. There’s no time to waste. This is our 1939 moment.

So I will focus on actionable ways to better enable ministers, their deputies and their departments “to think big and to act bigger” by modernizing competition policies, the regulatory system, procurement and support to innovators.

Let me begin by focusing on removing anti-competitive policies across the whole of government.

Colleagues, I keep coming back to the topic of competition because it’s what drives innovation, business investment and productivity growth, creating the global competitiveness needed to improve our collective prosperity.

Canada’s failings were highlighted in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, Economic Surveys: Canada 2025. The OECD recommended that Canada pursue a wide range of pro-competitive policy reforms, specifically linking our productivity shortfalls to our weak competition and business dynamism, stating that Canada has “ . . . numerous policy and regulatory barriers to competition.”

These barriers exist because, for 40 years, we’ve mistakenly thought that we needed big national champions to compete with big American and global businesses. However, the resulting oligopolies charged Canadians more, innovated less and invested less than they would have if we had prioritized made-in-Canada competition. This is evidenced, in my opinion, by four decades of steadily declining productivity.

Some of you might think that the substantive amendments to the Competition Act, endorsed by the Senate in the last Parliament, fixed Canada’s OECD competition and productivity problem — they did not. Those changes only stopped the problem from getting worse. Put another way, the patient — our economy — has been stabilized but remains bedridden.

Too many anti-competitive, monopoly-entrenching rules remain across government. They must be addressed with urgency. To get healthy, federal departments, agencies and Crown corporations need to ensure that their policies and practices are pro-competitive. The Competition Bureau has been promoting this approach to achieve this end for five years, but there has been no appetite.

Colleagues, businesses will never be regulated into becoming customer-centric or globally competitive. Only robust, contestable markets can achieve those crucial goals. Olympians can attest to that.

Regulations are a reactive measure to market failures but, too often, they further entrench large incumbents who help to shape the rules and dig deeper moats of administrative burden that only the biggest can afford.

Australia’s Productivity Commission has been iterating on competition reforms since the 1990s. Their initial work, 30 years ago, delivered a permanent AUS$52-billion boost to GDP, worth over AUS$5,000 per household. Australia shows what’s possible when a country treats competition policy as an ongoing national economic and social priority. Canada should follow their whole-of-government approach to these policy changes.

My recommendation? Empower the Competition Bureau with the mandate and resources to identify anti-competitive policies across the whole of government. Furthermore, let’s reduce the risk of short-term political interference in the bureau’s work by making the Commissioner of Competition an officer of Parliament.

Why is this so important? Because there is an inherent conflict of interest between the mandates of the Competition Bureau and Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, or ISED. Most former commissioners have spoken about this quite broadly. And the fact that Canada’s oligopolies likely invest more money in lawyers and lobbyists than all their competitors combined is a reason as well.

As a law enforcement agency, the Competition Bureau needs to be fully independent, and this is simply not the case when it reports to just ISED rather than all of Parliament.

Strengthening competition across all sectors is critical to achieving Prime Minister Carney’s ambition to build the strongest economy in the G7. The Prime Minister knows this. As Governor of the Bank of England, he advocated for financial system reforms that increased competition and championed innovations that spread globally — but not yet in Canada.

This ties into my second area of focus — improving regulatory agility. Regulations are so important. They’re intended to protect consumers, the environment and the economy. They define how markets function and, if well done, make markets more efficient.

But regulations fail to protect when they do not evolve with the risks they’re designed to manage or when they become so burdensome that innovative new entrants cannot compete because of the resulting costs and complexity. Inefficient and outdated regulatory burden puts sand in the gears of business and our economy. If not addressed proactively, calls for deregulation increase, which is even more damaging.

At a political level, there has been no willingness to pass bills designed to update regulation.

Case in point, Bill S-6 on regulatory modernization. It passed the Senate two years ago and died, lonely and forgotten, when Parliament prorogued in January. The work underlying Bill S-6 began in 2018. When legislative efforts to modernize regulations aren’t prioritized by Parliament, it demotivates the public sector from driving initiatives.

Simply, Canada regulates in decades, but technology, climate change and other risks and opportunities change monthly. Our traditional regulatory processes are slow, exclusive, opaque and they reliably trigger lobbying resistance.

At third reading of Bill S-6, I proposed an enhanced tool for our regulatory tool box — one that has been successfully optimized in other jurisdictions, improving the speed and agility of rule making. It’s called incorporation by reference.

Incorporation by reference allows regulators to point to voluntary, consensus-based industry standards developed in an inclusive, transparent and agile manner. These are equivalent to regulations. Standards already keep us safe in our homes, cars, airplanes and offices and, unlike regulations, are constantly updated. Yet this approach continues to be resisted by federal regulators, something I experienced again this morning in the briefing on Bill C-5.

One amendment to the Statutory Instruments Act could allow for specific standards to be identified as equivalent to a given regulation without having to amend that regulation. This could be very helpful as we look to overcome interprovincial trade barriers.

In Europe, EU legislators now request standards development organizations, rather than regulators, to update existing standards or to develop new ones to align with the requirements of new legislation. A similar process is already used at Health Canada for medical devices. So why not broaden its use?

Senator Woo and I have worked on this file over the past two years and share a lot of enthusiasm for its potential.

Lastly, we need to actively use regulatory sandboxes. These controlled environments bring regulators and innovators together so that regulators can learn about emerging innovations and ensure that regulations keep up as risks and opportunities change. Regulatory sandboxes play an important role in informing effective rules, especially where there is a complex web of competing regulatory responsibilities.

However, the proper application of tools like standards and sandboxes is still not enough. Bureaucrats must adopt a more risk-based and outcome-focused approach to reduce innovation-killing burdens.

My third area of focus is federal procurement. Federal government procurement expenditures equal about 15% of the GDP. The Canadian economy could be turbocharged by the government’s becoming the first and best customer for Canadian innovators. Currently, this is far from being the case.

I’m going to paraphrase from the 2023-24 annual report to Parliament from Canada’s Procurement Ombud. He highlighted that creating barriers through excessive rules, overly complicated language or unclear written evaluation criteria all discourage suppliers from bidding, thereby narrowing the pool of prospective bidders and making the process less open and accessible.

With the ongoing trade war and the recently announced boost to defence spending, now is the time to transform federal procurement.

There’s a lot of support. Last year’s Fall Economic Statement proposed a small business innovation and procurement act with a minimum of 20% of goods and services purchased from small and medium-sized enterprises, or SMEs, and 1% from innovative firms.

A similar recommendation was made by our Banking Committee in June 2023 in a report called Needed: An Innovation Strategy for the Data-Driven Economy. The Council of Canadian Innovators has challenged the government to become “the world’s best customer for homegrown innovators . . . .”

This government has also promised a Digital Transformation Office to centralize innovation procurement. It’s intended to “proactively identify, implement, and scale technology solutions and eliminate duplicative and redundant red tape.” With private-sector leadership, it might just deliver long-needed digital government progress.

Leveraging defence spending for commercial applications by prioritizing dual-use infrastructure, technology and equipment ensures efficient capital deployment for nation building. Testing programs like Innovative Solutions Canada have been delivering dual-use technologies, and they should be refined, not cut, as they were a year and a half ago.

However, this program’s second phase, called Pathway to Commercialization, does not fulfil its promise to fast-track successful companies to become pre-approved vendors. Instead, it wastes precious time when innovators need to be laser focused on growth.

To have an innovative economy, we need an innovative government. We must find creative ways to bring technology and talent into public service delivery and disrupt systems that favour incumbents.

That leads me to my final area of focus: investing in innovation to catalyze productivity growth.

Last summer, my office studied 134 different innovation programs across the federal government. I don’t think we found them all. Almost none of them had key performance indicators; most of them had unclear application criteria; and few of them leveraged arm’s-length, private-sector due diligence. Conversely, this cabinet promises to be laser focused on leveraging private-sector due diligence and capital.

I would challenge all public servants in Ottawa to work with proven accelerators and incubators who have, track and report on key performance indicators. Organizations like Creative Destruction Lab, Bioindustrial Innovation Canada, Natural Products Canada, ventureLAB and others are far better suited for investment decision making than the public service. That’s my opinion, based on the key performance indicators, or KPIs I’ve seen — or haven’t seen, because the data is not there.

Talent and technology don’t wait for governments. Our public service needs to embed private sector know-how instead of providing resistance.

Lastly, remember that the only way we can afford to strengthen Canada’s globally competitive research engine is to finally build a transmission that converts our world-leading ideas in intellectual property into Canadian opportunities, Canadian jobs and Canadian prosperity.

Colleagues, in conclusion, I’m thrilled that the priorities outlined in the Speech from the Throne detail a bold vision for economic growth. That’s a tall order. To “think big and act bigger” requires that we break free from outdated practices by making our markets more competitive and contestable, modernizing regulatory processes to make regulations more agile, transforming procurement so that Canadian innovators are empowered to drive innovation into government, and ensuring that Canadian ideas aren’t just born here, but are also commercialized and scaled globally from here. Colleagues, none of these ideas require any new government spending.

Targeted efforts in these areas will go a long way toward building the strongest economy in the G7. We need to rethink how our programs are designed, how our rules are written and how we measure success.

Let’s think big. I believe that will change how we compete, regulate, procure and support innovation. If we do that, it will help us to act bigger. Canadians are counting on us.

Thank you, colleagues.