Canada has been losing ground, both in productivity performance and living standards. Concluding that markets alone will not be enough to propel Canada to the top of the “gifted class,” the Leaders’ Panel on Innovation-Based Commerce (LPIC) has identified three “pathways” for Canada to follow: clean energy, water management, and regenerative medicine, each of which represents a multibillion-dollar global market opportunity with double-digit growth rates. The challenge now is to aggregate Canada’s advanced technology capabilities, currently in isolated clusters, into globally competitive companies that can offer integrated, complete solutions. To achieve this, the Conference Board, working with LPIC, recommends:
- for clean energy, letting provincial energy utilities go global;
- for water management, implementing a national program to retrofit municipal water infrastructure with leading-edge “smart” technologies and building Canadian global players while doing so; and
- for regenerative medicine, using the health-care system to build discovery centres, treatment centres, and clinical trial management capacities in regenerative medicine.