Bains overpromises on superclusters
TORONTO—One of the best examples of the Trudeau government’s practice of overpromising is the superclusters project of Industry, Science and Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains. With $950-million to be spread out over five years and to be matched by industry, the plan is to fund about half a dozen so-called superclusters which, in the space […]
Public-sector expert recommends government technological overhauls be done in smaller increments
Governments should not waver from pushing ahead with technological changes to improve the way they operate despite several examples—such as the Phoenix pay system for federal employees—turning into disasters, says a U.S. public-sector expert who was in Ottawa last week. The Phoenix pay system, turned on last year, was supposed to bring efficiencies to the […]
Help bring Canadian research into the marketplace
It is a Canadian economic truism that we have been the proverbial hewers of wood and drawers of water. For 150 years, we have largely relied on the extraordinary abundance of our natural resources to build our economy, but only to the extent that we export those resources in a raw form for others to […]
Women in business: let’s go beyond tokenism and the status quo
In 1996, my first formal speech on women in business described the “female model of leadership,” and here we are still debating the same topic in 2017. Canada was one of the first signatories to the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women in the early 1980s, and gender equality is […]
Globalization can be a force for good, if we make it so
Globalization is not the problem. How we have failed to manage it—including our failure to deal with inequality and improve opportunity for all—is the problem. The future of globalization depends on how well we can make it fairer and better. It’s hard to imagine a world in which trade does not occur, where ideas cease […]
Bite-sized health investments a worthy use of innovation dollars
As the president of a non-profit association working hard to improve the quality of cardiovascular patient care, the Trudeau government’s recent launch of its $950-million supercluster initiative has me feeling a bit conflicted. On the one hand, major federal investments with the potential to channel significant funding into the area of health and biosciences are […]
Grit MP Fry suggests misinformation led to PM’s quick rule-out of broadband tax
Liberal MP and Canadian Heritage Committee Chair Hedy Fry has suggested that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau didn’t fully understand what the committee was recommending when he shot down the idea of new taxes on broadband distribution. That recommendation—to expand an existing five per cent levy on TV service providers, which gets put toward producing Canadian […]
Is technological change a huge, dark cloud threatening to create a jobless society?
TORONTO—Is technological change—the digital world of robots, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things—a huge dark cloud threatening to create a jobless society? Or at least an uneven world where a small percentage of highly paid, high-skilled workers and a similar percentage of low-paid, low-skill servant workers co-exist, with no need for a middle-skills world? Or […]
Research community awaits government response to science review
The federal government is expected to respond in the coming days to a report that called for a more-than $1-billion hike in scientific research spending, and it remains to be seen if stakeholders are pleased or disappointed with what they see. Ann-Marie Paquet, a spokeswoman for Science Minister Kirsty Duncan (Etobicoke North, Ont.), last week […]
Importance of IP agents to innovation ecosystem
Intellectual property is fundamental in the growth of innovative companies and the road from idea to commercial product includes the key step of protecting the IP inherent to innovation. But it doesn’t stop there. Companies that are successful at growing and scaling their businesses almost always have protections of their intellectual property that they can […]
