KANATA, ONT. — Standing in the suburban headquarters of a homegrown software success story on Monday evening, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau grazed two policy live wires that have long hung over his government’s innovation agenda. 

As the federal budget approaches, Trudeau has taken to the road, conducting town halls with workforces of various types—carpenters in Woodbridge, Ont.; university students in Halifax; firefighters in Mississauga, Ont. Monday night found him on stage before an audience of tech workers at the Kanata office of the supply-chain software company Kinaxis.

“We do want to create a place where entrepreneurs can be extraordinarily successful, as they take big risks and they pay off,” he said. “We don’t want to be seen as a branch economy to the United States, where we do a little innovation and they manage to commercialize it.” 

Wanting hasn’t made it so, some in the sector might respond. Several prominent tech founders and lobby groups have long argued that the Liberal government’s suite of innovation programs don’t do enough to help companies and the country benefit from ideas generated here. And Trudeau’s team has focused too much on courting foreign firms, they’ve complained. 

As he paced a stretch of floor between banks of filled chairs, sleeves rolled and mic gripped, Trudeau acknowledged the commercialization deficit, even as he reeled off a list of Canadian expansions that multinational companies have announced on his watch.

“There’s been a lot of different attempts over the years to try and figure out that [one] scale-up program” so that firms grow to global status while remaining in Canada, Trudeau said. 

His government has allocated billions to seed funding industrial megaprojects and sectoral clusters, buying from startups, and supporting emerging AI and quantum ecosystems. But Trudeau admits there are still gaps. “We have to get better at commercializing and patenting and scaling up,” he said. 

On Tuesday, the Prime Minister’s Office wouldn’t say which current programs Trudeau believes have failed to meet those objectives, and whether it plans to cut them. The government has solicited advice from an A-list of industry. They told it to concentrate more support on fewer firms, instead of spreading funding thinly across a wide range of companies, sectors and schemes.  

A well-known crowd worker and expounder, the prime minister fielded 10 queries across 80 minutes, peppered with references to on-topic luminaries like Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Richard Sutton of AI fame, but also Bryan Adams, Céline Dion and The Tragically Hip. “Another question,” he’d prompt, game-show host-esque, at the end of a round. The atmosphere was more polite attention than the overt excitement that often greeted Trudeau’s town halls earlier in his career. But his message still found some traction.

“We hold the Canadian government to a very high bar,” town-hall attendee David Ross told The Logic after the event, as a section of the crowd got their selfies with Trudeau along his exit route. Ross and his staff would have been on the poster for Monday’s event, had there been one. A computer engineer by training, in 2006 he took over the live-production tech company his father founded three decades earlier. He’s since multiplied Ross Video’s revenues several fold and gone on an acquisition spree, turning it into the kind of nine-figure firm of which, Trudeau will eagerly tell you, Canada needs more. 

Competitors in other countries are “so jealous” of the programs available to Canadian firms, said Ross, name-checking the National Research Council of Canada’s Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP) and scientific research and experimental development tax incentives. 

Trudeau “made a really honest comment” about the challenge of scaling and retaining tech firms here, Ross said. But Canada’s immigration-boosted population growth and the federal government’s focus on building a pipeline of promising companies are good signs. “They’re focusing a little less on startups and more on scale-ups, which is the right thing.” 

The prime minister mostly talked about business support in generalities on Monday. But for scale-ups he had a specific program to push. He’s putting his hopes in the new Canada Innovation Corporation, which will offer companies between $50,000 and $20 million in financing for R&D projects and absorb IRAP. 

“Hopefully, we will be able to land a few big platforms that will be homegrown,” Trudeau said. “It’s comin’.” 

As for his government’s support for multinationals in Canada—a regular subject for critics of the Liberals’ innovation policies—Trudeau said, “We want to make sure we’re investing in great Canadian companies that are growing and scaling up, but we also want to draw in global investments to contribute to a stronger ecosystem.” It’s all about “balance,” he insisted. 

Under the Liberals, the scales have sometimes tipped too far to the international side for the liking of some domestic innovators. At Monday’s event, Trudeau didn’t shy from touting big multinational projects his government has attracted—and subsidized—including Nokia’s $340-million expansion in the capital; Volkswagen’s forthcoming battery plant in St. Thomas, Ont.; Michelin’s tire-factory upgrade in Bridgewater, N.S.; and ArcelorMittal’s greening of its steel facility in Hamilton, Ont. 

Multinational tech expansions also got a shoutout in Trudeau’s answer to a Kinaxis employee’s question about retaining talent and staunching brain drain to the U.S. Shortly after assuming office in October 2015, Trudeau crossed the border for a conference. “I said to a number of big tech companies, ‘So what is it that would help you draw up and expand your footprint in Canada?’ And they said, ‘Talent,’” he recounted, touting the fast-track foreign-worker program his government subsequently launched. (On Tuesday, his office did not specify which event this was at, or to whom he’d spoken.)

The Council of Canadian Innovators (CCI), a scale-up lobby group, has argued that attracting those multinationals just creates more competition for talent for domestic companies. But Ross, a CCI member, said it’s not all bad. ”There’s some days when you think, ‘Oh no, another multinational comes to Ottawa,’” he said. “All of a sudden, there’s these crazy job offers at twice the salary, and you think the world is going to end.” But, he allowed, the branch plants keep Canadian tech graduates on this side of the border, where Ross can then poach them.

For all the talk of innovation policy, there does need to be a bottom line. Addressing a question about AI-driven inequality—ChatGPT went unnamed—Trudeau acknowledged the need to turn tech into jobs and economic growth. The government is “pretty good” about distributing wealth, he joked; outside, the sun set on one of the last days of tax-filing season. 

But everyone loves a success story. “It wouldn’t do us terribly to see a few more really successful platforms developed and a few more successful innovators who become world-famous for buying spaceships and things like that,” he said. “There could be a few more Canadians doing that.” Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos may not be particularly popular in Washington or Ottawa right now, but their money certainly still is.