OTTAWA — Tech executives and researchers are crowding government offices across the country to pitch their sectors as crucial components of Canada’s economic future. As policymakers look to disruptive technology fields for growth—or craft rules to ease their impact—a new crop of industry associations has formed to lobby for funding or favourable regulation.

They’ve emerged amid an evolution in governments’ outlook. Ottawa and several provinces are betting on innovation as they plot an economic path out of the pandemic, pledging to modernize data and IP rules and promising to spend billions to back startups and transform existing sectors. Tech sub-sectors where Canada has shown promise are looking to attract some of that attention. Over the last three years, new associations have launched, representing companies in the payment-technology, quantum, semiconductor, crypto and robotics spaces. 

Some groups have lobbied Ottawa to establish national strategies to support their technology fields, modelled on the nearly $569 million it has promised to spend on its flagship AI initiative between 2017 and 2032. 

In November 2021, Canada’s Semiconductor Council called for governments to offer chipmakers financial incentives to establish manufacturing facilities in the country, and for measures to keep workers and intellectual property in the country. Members of the group have since met with officials, including Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai. 

In February, Ottawa announced it would allocate $150 million from its flagship Strategic Innovation Fund for chip manufacturing. “No one in the sector is going to deny that’s really small, but you’ve got to start somewhere,” said Melissa Chee, a council member and CEO of Markham, Ont.-based VentureLab, which operates a hardware incubator. By contrast, a U.S. bill enacted this month promises almost US$53 billion in semiconductor-manufacturing subsidies and other programs. 

Still, Canadian policymakers are paying increasing attention to chips, partly due to shortages that have recently stalled the auto industry, according to Chee. A year and a half ago, “there was no policy,” she said, adding that Canada needed to signal that the semiconductor sector is part of the country’s long-term industrial policy. It did so in April’s federal budget, she noted, which set aside $45 million for the industry department to assess the country’s chip capacity. 

The Canadian Robotics Council, launched earlier this month, is “explicitly not looking for massive amounts of funding,” said co-chair Ryan Gariepy, CTO at Kitchener, Ont.-based Clearpath Robotics and Otto Motors. Launched by scale-up executives and top university researchers, the council will hold its inaugural symposium in Ottawa in September, before publishing a state-of-the-sector report. 

“We need every Canadian worker—whatever sector they’re in—to be amplified by robotics,”  Gariepy said. “These robots are available now.” The country ranks low on robot density on the International Federation of Robotics’s list of advanced economies, with 176 machines per 10,000 employees, compared to South Korea’s 932. But every country is still “on the starting line,” said Gariepy, and Canada’s economic base in primary industries, such as mining, forestry, agriculture, is well suited to current robotics technology. The council aims to educate firms on its use.

The group also plans to weigh in on robot rules. Gariepy cited recent examples of cities studying whether to allow automated delivery vehicles on sidewalks. The council could show them existing robot regulations in other jurisdictions or for other settings like warehouses. Or it could point them to rules developed for similar technology issues like drones in public space. “There are areas where Canada can learn without spending our time and money on reinventing the wheel,” Gariepy said.

Some of the new industry associations are explicitly focused on regulatory issues. As legislators crack down on or court crypto companies, a group of firms formed the Canadian Web3 Council in March to push for policy coordination across the country. It’s since registered to lobby the federal government. Meanwhile, Paytechs of Canada, formed in June 2019, is pushing Ottawa on the modernization of transaction infrastructure.

The proliferation of lobby groups reflects the growth of Canada’s tech sector—and its importance to governments. The Liberals came to office federally in November 2015 with few innovation proposals. They spent their early years in power trying to attract major projects from foreign tech giants like Alphabet subsidiary Sidewalk Labs’s Toronto development, and Amazon’s second headquarters, said Benjamin Bergen, president of the Council of Canadian Innovators (CCI). There’s since been a “pretty seismic” change in the recognition of scaling tech companies’ economic importance.

The CCI, formed in December 2015, represents 150 such firms. “We’ve gone from [the] activist [or] protest side, in terms of engagement, to really becoming part of the more formal aspects of how public policy is created in this country,” Bergen said. The group has lobbied federal officials 41 times this year, and now also has staff focused on governments in Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec. 

While the policy priorities of different technology sub-sectors vary, Chee noted that “they all require STEM talent.” The semiconductor council counts among the industry associations calling on governments to update, and increase the number of, post-secondary education and training programs. Chee said such groups have an important role to play in policy development. “The voice of industry” is “a very impactful and a very powerful one,” she said, noting that “industrial policy, for Canadians, is about wealth creation.” 

But policymakers should heed the cautionary tale of online-platform regulation, where Canada has lagged the likes of the EU, said Sonja Solomun, deputy director of the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy at McGill University. Social media, she pointed out, was “celebrated as a largely democratizing public good only a few years ago, compared to what we know now about the kinds of harms that are enabled by the data-driven profit model [and] the lack of privacy protections.”

Industries pushing new technologies have long used arguments about their economic potential or the prospect of innovation and global leadership to downplay their risks, said Solomun. But she noted that framing doesn’t account for the labour and environmental impacts of innovations like cloud, crypto and robotics. “The inevitability of economic growth,” she said, “should not be taken for granted.” 

Correction: This story has been edited to reflect the correct date of the Council of Canadian Innovators’ formation