OTTAWA — As the next federal election peeps over the horizon and the weakened Liberals fight for their political lives, multiple causes they’ve championed are finally reaching critical points.

Policymakers are determining how to apply big new laws regulating activity on the internet, billions of dollars that are supposed to alleviate the national housing crisis are going out the door, and bills on privacy, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity are winding through Parliament, with that election a hard (if yet uncertain) deadline for getting them passed.

A government known for big talk has turned some of that talk into action, and now we’ll get to see whether its actions are effective.

Beyond the obvious ex-officio figures like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne, here’s a look at some of the key politicians, public servants, regulators and others who will shape Canada’s innovation economy from Ottawa this year.

The hard man of housing

Sean Fraser

The cost of housing is both a pocketbook issue and a macroeconomic worry—some Canadians can’t afford to live anywhere close to where they want, others are sitting on real estate jackpots, rising interest rates have worsened the pressure, and if we’re in a bubble that pops, everybody could get hurt. As part of grief over the cost of living in general, housing has come to dominate politics at all levels in Canada.

Housing is also largely a provincial and municipal issue, bound up in zoning rules and the cost and speed of development approvals. Sean Fraser, as federal minister of housing, infrastructure and communities since this past summer’s cabinet shuffle, has one big lever, namely the $4 billion the Liberals put up for a “housing accelerator fund” in the 2022 budget, but Fraser has been swinging it like it’s a crowbar and he’s in a street brawl.

In September, as Calgary’s city council contemplated a new housing strategy, Fraser warned councillors they’d better vote for it if they wanted millions of federal dollars. They did, Fraser followed up by approving Calgary’s application for housing-fund money, and in November he was in the city to present it with $228 million.

At around the same time in September, the mayors of Burnaby and Surrey, B.C., were already in Ottawa for a scheduled announcement when Fraser cancelled it over concerns about new development charges. He’s told Toronto its housing plans aren’t good enough, too. In Ottawa itself, where housing construction is anemic, councillors are doing some of Fraser’s work for him as they seek $150 million.

The $4 billion Fraser is working with is supposed to get 100,000 new homes built, against a shortage the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. estimates at about 3.5 million. The government says the money is on track to produce more than 100,000 dwellings, but even if it’s a historic policy triumph, it will be a long way from solving the housing problem. Fraser at least seems to have the energy to try.

The moon visitors

Jeremy Hansen or Jenni Sidey-Gibbons

The Artemis 2 space mission is tentatively scheduled for November 2024, when a crew of four astronauts is to take off, circle the moon and return to Earth. Canadian Jeremy Hansen is to be aboard, with fellow astronaut Jenni Sidey-Gibbons as the alternate if he is unable to go.

Artemis 2 won’t land; it’s the intermediate mission between the uncrewed Artemis 1 moon circuit in 2022 and Artemis 3, which is to make a crewed landing in 2025. But Hansen or Sidey-Gibbons will get as close to our biggest satellite as any humans have been since Apollo 17 returned from a landing in 1972.

Canada is updating its rules on space activities to account for more private activity, considering questions like property rights over space resources, how to reduce space junk and who can regulate medical care up there (since space is a federal jurisdiction and medical licensing is provincial). 

The Artemis missions are steps toward establishing an indefinite human presence on the moon, with the planned Lunar Gateway space station (in which Canada is participating) as the staging area. They make the need for updated rules concrete.

More grandly, the Artemis program is a return to pushing the boundaries of off-world exploration, an effort that over the past 50 years has focused on staying up longer.

For generations that don’t remember when humans were last on the moon, Hansen and Sidey-Gibbons will be living inspirations to look farther and dream bigger.

The cyber defenders

Caroline Xavier and Sami Khoury

As chief of the Communications Security Establishment, a defence agency that’s partly in the cyberspying business, Caroline Xavier keeps a relatively low profile. As head of the CSE’s Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, Sami Khoury’s role is more public-facing, promoting good cyber habits for Canadians in general and urging companies to cooperate with the centre to track and fight digital threats.

As the next federal election approaches, by 2025 at the latest, the CSE has warned that AI poses ever-deeper threats to Canadian democracy, turbocharging disinformation and sharpening spear phishing attacks. That’s in addition to the familiar but worsening threats from ransomware and cybercrime gangs.

A bill meant to stiffen Canadian resistance to cyberattacks—the same one the Liberals introduced to allow them to ban products from Huawei and ZTE in Canadian telecom networks—is before the House of Commons committee on public safety and national security, though it’s languished there, unexamined, since last March.

If the government wants to pass Bill C-26, the committee will need to take it up. Civil liberties groups have filed briefs warning it’s too sweeping and gives the government power with too few restraints; an association of cybersecurity workers warned the desperate shortage of skilled staff could make following the law an insupportable burden. The telcos, railways, banks and other federally regulated firms to which it will apply haven’t yet weighed in.

When Bill C-26 comes up for debate, Xavier’s and Khoury’s voices will be important. Even if it doesn’t, the work they oversee will be.

The climate capitalist

Patrick Charbonneau, CEO, Canada Growth Fund Investment Management

The Liberal government is asking a lot of its new net-zero economic program. The $15-billion Canada Growth Fund (CGF) must finance emissions-reducing megaprojects, help cleantech startups scale, spur lower-carbon supply chains and roll out a country-first form of price guarantees for greening polluters. 

The arm’s-length operation must do all that while breaking even over the long term and enticing institutional investors to use their cash in support of public policy goals. And ideally, it must sidestep the sort of failures that, across the border, turned “Solyndra” into a byword for green scandal.

It’s Charbonneau’s task to achieve those goals and avoid those pitfalls. The federal government has outsourced the running of the CGF to the Montreal-headquartered Public Sector Pension Plan Investment Board (PSP Investments). As The Logic first reported in July, Charbonneau, the asset manager’s former global infrastructure head, will lead the fund. 

Industry groups have been clamouring for Ottawa to get going on its suite of green subsidies, incentives and programs, as the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act starts pumping out billions. The CGF is now in financing mode, announcing its first deal in October: a $90-million injection for Eavor Technologies, a Calgary-based geothermal firm. In December, it landed its first carbon contract, with Calgary-based Entropy. 

“My colleagues and I have had meetings over the past several months with innovators, developers and investors from across the country,” Charbonneau said at the October announcement. “I would like to underscore: our door is open—we are looking to make good deals happen.”

This year, Charbonneau and his team will need to keep up a busy pace of investments to put more of their federal funds to work. 

The AIDA team—and the swing votes

Mark Schaan, senior assistant deputy minister, Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, et al.

Sébastien Lemire, Bloc Québécois critic for industry, and Brian Masse, NDP critic for innovation, science and industry

Members of the House of Commons industry committee left Bill C-27 and its Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA) on the docket when they departed Ottawa for the winter break. The Liberal government is proposing a law that would impose rules on developers and users of high-impact and general-purpose AI systems, including making disclosures, identifying risks and instituting safeguards. When the committee picks the bill back and turns to examining it clause by clause, it’ll be Schaan in the hot seat explaining what AIDA does and how MPs’ amendments would change that. 

The experienced executive runs the part of the Innovation Department that deals with industrial laws and regulations in increasingly AI-inflected areas like privacy, copyright, investment and competition. (He’s already spent a lot of time talking legislation at the committee this year.)

Tech executives complained AIDA was too vague and didn’t strike the right balance between encouraging beneficial AI adoption and mitigating its risks. Rights advocates worried it didn’t do enough to protect vulnerable populations. Schaan and other departmental officials have held more than 300 meetings on the bill since June 2022. In November 2023, the government signalled it would seek to amend AIDA based on the feedback. If the law does make it through Parliament, the department will need to start a two-year process of writing the regulations that put the law into action.

Lemire and Masse will play major roles in determining whether it gets that far. Conservative MPs on the industry committee have signalled they could try to split AIDA from the rest of Bill C-27, while letting the privacy-overhaul parts of it proceed. The Liberal members will almost certainly vote for their government’s text and amendments as proposed. But in a minority position they can’t push AIDA forward on their own.

That leaves Lemire and Masse, the long-standing industry critics for the BQ and NDP, respectively, as the swing votes. 

The broadcasting regulator

Scott Shortliffe

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission is taking on a lot of new duties, including regulating online streaming services for Canadian content and their operators’ contributions to Canadian production. The CRTC springboarded into an overhaul of how it regulates broadcasting as a whole, intending to apply a new framework by the end of 2024 that encompasses traditional radio and television, plus Netflix, Spotify, Amazon’s Prime Video, YouTube and any other such services you care to name.

Many of them were vehemently opposed to the changes, creators have been worried, and the opposition called the Online Streaming Act a censorship law. Now the law is in place, the battles have shifted to how it will be applied.

As the CRTC’s executive director of broadcasting, Scott Shortliffe’s job is to make it work. The act “gives us large policy questions” that the commission has to wrestle with, he told MPs during a committee appearance in November. Such as: how do pornographers fit into a landscape previously inhabited by staid corporations very used to close regulation?

Shortliffe went to the CRTC after 23 years at the Department of Canadian Heritage, where he oversaw some of the department’s support funds— including the Canada Media Fund to which commercial distributors must contribute.

Meta started blocking news links in Canada in response to a different bill, but it has set a precedent for how a large enough foreign player could deal with new Canadian restrictions and requirements. Shortliffe’s task is to come up with new broadcasting rules that work better than the existing ones, without breaking anything major.

Empty chair

New CEO and chair, Sustainable Development Technology Canada

Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC) was set up to address the country’s long-standing challenge with commercializing the green wonders that flow from our researchers, labs and entrepreneurs. But the agency has a case of the blues, caught in a political uproar with vacancies at the top. 

The Crown corporation, which gives startups support and funding to prove their products and scale needs a new chair and CEO, after Annette Verschuren and Leah Lawrence both resigned in November. Parliament and federal watchdogs are scrutinizing the agency after former employees alleged conflicts of interest in some of its cleantech funding decisions. Champagne has ordered SDTC to stop backing new projects until it’s changed its processes; he gave the agency until the end of December to follow through.

In turn, SDTC has pushed back on the findings of an investigation the Industry Department commissioned from an external auditing firm. Cleantech executives have expressed concern that a prolonged pause at the agency could hurt startups in the sector, cutting off a source of support as economies around the world try to get greener. 

Champagne has emphasized the program’s utility. “SDTC isn’t a well-known organization, but it funds the most green technology projects,” he told a House committee in November, noting it’s “helped create Canadian champions in certain fields.”

The new chair and CEO will need to diffuse the political furor around SDTC if it’s to get back to that work.

The outside influences

Gina Raimondo, U.S. secretary of commerce

Kemi Badenoch, U.K. secretary of state for business and trade

Governments everywhere are trying to bring home supply chains for critical technologies like semiconductors and electric vehicles, profit off others like AI, and keep all of them out of the turf of geopolitical opponents. With its economic and commercial heft, the U.S. is setting the direction for the rest of the field, while the U.K. tries to plot its own path. While their titles don’t quite say so, Raimondo and Badenoch are the ministers for new, nationalist industrial policies in their respective countries.  

The Biden administration has allocated sums for green and semiconductor projects via the US$52.7-billion CHIPS and Science Act and US$369-billion Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). It falls to Raimondo and her Commerce Department to pass out most of the cheques for the former, and some for the latter. The former Rhode Island governor is also a key player in the U.S. push to cut China off from advanced semiconductor supplies and AI funding. And the Commerce Department will host a new AI Safety Institute, as part of Washington’s bid for a leading role in the technology’s governance. 

Ottawa has its own green and chip plans, which policymakers and the private sector hope will integrate with the new builds across the border. Meanwhile, Canada may find itself drawn into the geopolitical wake of a great-power tech conflict, even as it tries to take a leadership role in AI rule-making.

Across the Atlantic, Badenoch has insisted the Conservative government won’t “pick winners,” and slammed the IRA as protectionist. Still, that hasn’t stopped her from successfully pushing her own government for money to spend on industrial priorities. London’s £4.5-billion Advanced Manufacturing Plan will subsidize new auto plants, battery factories and aerospace facilities, as well as clean-energy and life-sciences projects. 

Ottawa is going after all the same sectors with billions of its own. Badenoch is also Britain’s trade chief as Canada and the U.K. continue to negotiate a post-Brexit economic pact.

Along with U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai and U.K. Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan, Raimondo and Badenoch are likely to come up a lot in Canadian policymaking and business circles this year.