Speaking at The Logic’s virtual event Tuesday, the Business Council of Canada’s senior vice-president of policy Robert Asselin noted that the new Biden administration is looking to use science and technology to grow the U.S. economy. “This is what we need to do in Canada,” he said. The BCC, which represents the CEOs of some of the country’s biggest companies, is recommending Ottawa create an organization like the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. (The Logic)

Talking point: Asselin argued that some of the federal government’s existing innovation programs to encourage commercialization, such as the superclusters or the startup-focused Innovative Solutions Canada, lack scale. “In Canada, we’re too tentative about these things,” he said. “We can’t do it in the margin—we need to be bold.” He similarly attributed the country’s longstanding lack of business investment in R&D, relative to other advanced economies, to a comparatively higher number of small- and mid-size firms, since large companies tend to drive that spending. Asselin said a DARPA-style program targeted at priority sectors like bioscience and cleantech could help some of those startups scale. Policy experts critiquing the proposal say DARPA doesn’t focus on commercialization and scaling up, and that Canada lacks the robust private sector to use the technologies its challenges might generate.