More than 130 Canadian technology leaders are calling on the Government of Canada to create a "prosperity plan" because they say the country won't excel without greater support for innovators.
In a letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, 133 executives -- including the leaders of Lightspeed, Wattpad, SkipTheDishes, League and Dialogue -- say Canada needs a plan to champion innovators and help build new jobs and industries as the country grapples with the economic fallout from Covid-19.
The executives who penned the letter want a government prosperity plan to include strategic investments in businesses on track for success, help commercializing Canadian ideas, creation of an ecosystem where innovators can grow at home and abroad, and development of processes around intellectual property and data.
They say they are tired of waiting for the creation of a national data strategy, the rollout of a national intellectual property plan and implementation of recommendations from several economic tables.
The technology leaders all agree that now is the time to act because Covid-19 has created a sense of flexibility within the business and technology communities. Failure to act on this moment puts Canada's technology sector in danger of reversing the progress it has made and regressing, the letter to Trudeau states.
Canada recently fell two spots, to 22nd place, behind Slovenia in the 2020 Bloomberg Innovation Index, which measures entrepreneurship within a country and the efforts of government to support ingenuity and technology.
