OTTAWA — With less than three weeks to election day on Sept. 20, the Liberal Party released its platform Wednesday morning. It incorporates the big-ticket promises Justin Trudeau has revealed so far, particularly on housing; pledges to continue with pre-election efforts on child care and reintroduce a bill regulating streaming services; and adds numerous revisions to the industrial agenda the Liberals have followed in office. 

The platform proposes $78 billion in new spending over five fiscal years, with a projected deficit of $32 billion in 2025–26. Here’s what you need to know about what’s in it for the innovation economy.

Updating the innovation agenda

The Liberals are promising a grander vision for the economy, announcing a “permanent Council of Economic Advisors to provide independent advice to government on long-term growth.” Business lobby groups and innovation experts have complained that the incumbent government has no such plan to increase income and productivity. 

In their six years in office the Liberals have appointed plenty of advisory groups, including one on growth that included Corporate Canada heavyweights like Michael Sabia, Mark Wiseman and Elyse Allan—the former CEOs of Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, CPPIB and GE Canada respectively. Jim Balsillie, chair of the Council of Canadian Innovators (CCI), has called on Ottawa to rebuild the Economic Council of Canada to provide full-time expertise. 

Meanwhile, the Liberal government unveiled their innovation and skills plan in the 2017 federal budget, and this year’s budget provided the most significant funding boost since, recapitalizing many of its most popular and widely-subscribed programs. Wednesday’s platform pledges to follow through on those promises, and go a little further. 

The party would reform the scientific research and experimental development tax credit (SR&ED) to “make the program more generous for those companies who take the biggest risks” and cut down on red tape and consultants, a longstanding concern that has spawned an industry of human and AI consultants. Unlike the Conservatives, who unveiled their platform two weeks ago, the Liberals don’t propose to require SR&ED recipients to keep any intellectual property and profits from publicly funded inventions in Canada; domestic tech executives have long expressed concern that the program unduly benefits the local subsidiaries of foreign firms.

Pre-election, Liberal Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne told The Logic that the government was “putting enormous focus” on protecting made- or financed-in-Canada IP.  The platform proposes a $75-million annual fund for colleges and universities to commercialize research within their walls by patenting inventions and linking up with businesses. That’s on top of $90 million already included in April’s budget for accelerators and incubators—some of which are linked to post-secondary institutions—to provide client firms with IP advice.

The CCI, a scale-up lobby group, welcomed the proposed SR&ED overhaul, IP programs and digital regulations. The Liberals’ commitment to form an economic council will “build much-needed government capacity to remain engaged and proactive in fostering and regulating the evolving 21st- century economy,” said executive director Benjamin Bergen in a statement. But he said “the zeal of Canada’s ‘innovation’ government has faded” since the Liberals took office in 2015, and called for “a renewed vigour and ambition for supporting domestic innovators.”

Just before the election, the incumbent government published the report from its open banking advisory committee, which proposed a January 2023 launch date for a new system of data flows between big banks and fintech platforms. The finance department hasn’t agreed to adopting the recommendations, sparking concern among fintech firms. The Liberals made that commitment last week, and the platform promises open banking will be in place “no later than the beginning of 2023.” The Conservatives made a similar pledge in their platform, but without a timeline. 

DARPA strikes back: The Liberals are promising to set up the Canada Advanced Research Projects Agency, a Canadian counterpart to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), with $2 billion in startup capital. The party doesn’t say which sectors or technologies the proposed agency would focus on; the Conservative platform also promised such an agency headquartered in Calgary, but with a focus on EVs, space and other specific industries, and without “projects” in the name. Earlier this year, the Business Council of Canada—a lobby group for the CEOs of some of the country’s largest companies—called for the federal government to establish a DARPA-like department to issue challenges in fields like advanced manufacturing and cleantech.

The Liberals would allocate $250 million a year annually starting in 2022–23 to fund universities to hire 1,000 new research chairs, and the incumbents are also promising to follow through on budget promises for national strategies on AI and quantum. 

The best of the rest: The platform also lays out a number of support programs and smaller-dollar incentives and subsidies for entrepreneurs and small businesses. Firms would be able to borrow up to $500,000 over 15 years from the Canada Small Business Financing Program—up from $350,000 and 10 years respectively—and borrow against IP. And the government would set up a new hotline for employers looking to bring in skilled foreign workers via the popular Global Talent Stream visa program. 

Regulating Big Tech

In recent years, the Liberal government has taken aim at large social, streaming and search firms, dropping its initial attempts to attract the tech giants’ investment and jobs in favour of proposals to tax and regulate them. Much of that agenda, signalled in the May 2019 launch of a high-level digital charter, died on Parliament’s order paper when Trudeau called the election. Wednesday’s platform restates it, but doesn’t go much further. 

The Liberals are proposing a “digital policy task force” of voices across industry, academia and government to “position Canada as a leader in the digital economy and shape global governance of emerging technologies.” Canada’s recently-signed trade treaties like the CPTPP and USMCA have included significant new measures on online commerce, while the Liberal government has actively participated in global negotiations over the taxation of multinational firms, even as it moves forward with a domestic digital services tax. 

The Liberals are also promising to re-introduce strengthened privacy protections, introduced in Bill C-11 in November 2020.  The party also proposes to “provide a clear set of rules that ensure fair competition in the online marketplace,” but doesn’t specify what they will be. 

Then-innovation minister Navdeep Bains first instructed the Competition Bureau in May 2019 to evaluate Canada’s antitrust rules in light of the digitization of the economy. The results of that review have yet to be made public. The Conservative platform included more specific competition promises, including focusing on algorithms and data.   

Content regulation: Just before the election call, the federal government launched a consultation on new rules and regulators to police the posting and spread of “online harms” such as hate speech, terrorist messaging and intimate images shared non-consensually. The platform promises that if re-elected, the Liberals will introduce legislation to that effect “within its first 100 days.”

Culture: The election call killed Bill C-10, the Liberals’ move to bring digital streaming platforms like Netflix under the authority of the CRTC to enforce Canadian-content requirements. The Liberals promise to bring it back within their first 100 days after re-election.

Also within that period, the party says a Liberal government would bring in a bill to require digital platforms that make money by publishing news content to share revenues with Canadian outlets, “based on the Australian model,” which Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault thundered about last spring but had not executed before the election call. The Australian model requires companies like Facebook and Google, which publish links to news sites, to negotiate payments with the sites, with a mandatory arbitration to settle terms if they can’t agree.

The platform promises to help Canadian cultural industries make sales abroad, with help from federal economic-development agencies, and to “modernize” the CBC (with a $100-million-a-year funding boost) so it delivers “unique programming that distinguishes it from private broadcasters.”

Environment and cleantech

The Liberals have invested heavily in building their image as green champions, differentiating themselves from a Conservative Party that spent several elections resisting carbon taxes and other pro-environment measures as job-killing burdens on the middle class. They’ve also made themselves targets for environmentalists by spending billions of public dollars buying the threatened Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion project.

The Liberal platform pledges to recognize a “right to a healthy environment” in federal law, beef up labelling of chemical content in consumer products and testing of imports, keep targeting  plastic waste (including requiring that all plastic packaging be composed of at least 50 per cent recycled material by 2030), and end testing of cosmetic products on animals by 2030 and toxicity testing on animals by 2035.

Squeezing the fossil-fuel industry: On the campaign trail, Trudeau has already promised to force oil and gas companies to cut their net greenhouse-gas emissions to zero by 2050, put $2 billion into a transition fund for Alberta, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland and Labrador, and lead efforts to make all of Canada’s electricity generation carbon-neutral by 2035. The government plans to keep hiking its backstop carbon price (and its associated rebates) to $170 per tonne of carbon dioxide by 2030.

The platform adds a promise to push “other major economies” to match a Liberal pledge to make petroleum companies cut emissions of methane—a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2— to at least 75 per cent below 2012 levels by 2030. The Liberals also say they would accelerate the end of fossil-fuel subsidies from 2025 to 2023.

Advancing cleantech: The platform includes a vaguely described investment tax credit of up to 30 per cent for investments in “a range of clean technologies” that would be determined later with help from external experts. The Liberals estimate this would cost the federal treasury $250 million a year after starting with $65 million in 2022.

They’d also temporarily triple funding for cleantech in agriculture and make a point of using the federal government’s buying power to favour cleaner options in procurement.

Vehicles and transportation: The Liberals promise to invest heavily in low- and zero-emissions vehicles. Besides an existing order the Liberals made in government to phase out the sale of new light vehicles—passenger cars— with internal-combustion by 2035, the platform promises to spend $200 million retrofitting big trucks to cut their pollution and to require that, “where feasible,” all new medium- and heavy-duty vehicles be zero-emission by 2030.

Batteries: Getting the raw materials to make vehicle batteries is a worldwide challenge and the Liberals say that with the federal government’s help, “Canada has all the right ingredients to win the race.” If re-elected, they say they would try to attract processors for the minerals that go into batteries and other leading tech, so Canadian raw materials don’t get shipped abroad for upgrading. They would double exploration tax credits for critical minerals (at a cost of $45 million), aim to make Canada a global leader in recycling batteries, and work with the United States to build an integrated supply chain for battery production.

Infrastructure

In government, the Liberals have already made big promises—spending more than $180 billion over 12 years—to support public transit in cities, including electric buses, and high-frequency rail between Toronto and Quebec City. The platform doesn’t make new pledges.

It does repeat promises to boost support for electric-vehicle charging stations and also to add to the national supply of what the Liberals call “natural infrastructure” with more protected natural areas, cleaned-up coastlines, and a new Canada Water Agency to protect freshwater lakes and rivers.

Affordability

The cost of housing has been a major issue on the campaign trail and the Liberals have already made a raft of promises, including to spend $4 billion on incentives for municipalities to encourage more construction and to support new and repaired non-profit housing.

Child care has been a signature priority for the Liberals, and Trudeau called the election after having secured deals with seven provinces and one territory that will see them add spaces and reduce costs to parents with federal support. The Liberal platform pledges to keep on with this effort, using money already included in the 2021 federal budget.

Support for precarious workers: The Liberals also promise to create a new employment-insurance-type benefit for self-employed workers through the tax system, to supply unemployment coverage for up to six months. There’s still homework to be done on this plan, though, and the Liberals say it would launch in 2023. The EI system would add a new benefit to help people laid off when a business closes if they’ve worked there five years or more, adding two years of reduced assistance for people needing to remake their careers.

Gig workers would also get stronger rights and job protections under the Canada Labour Code, with EI and CPP benefits funded by the digital platforms that enable the work (the Conservatives have promised a similar measure).

Student loans: The Liberals say they’d eliminate interest on federal student loans (at an annual cost of more than $500 million) and raise the income line where graduates have to start making making payments to $50,000 for single people, more than double the current threshold (at a cost of $110 million a year).

Broadband internet access: The government already has a fund subsidizing the extension of high-speed internet access to every corner of the country, with a completion target of 2030. The Liberal platform promises to crack the whip on companies that buy the rights to deliver internet services through federal spectrum auctions, giving them until 2025 to use the spectrum they’ve bought or resell it to smaller regional providers.

The bottom line

A party that has led the government for six years has limited scope for great big new visions, since it’ll face questions about why, if these ideas are so important, it hadn’t done something about them already. But since the pandemic began, the Liberals have been vocal about the need to patch holes in the social-safety net and make Canada more self-reliant for essential goods. Their platform takes those ideas and turns them into specific pledges that together attempt to position the Liberals as the party of social progress—with a green tint.