The Council of Canadian Innovators (CCI) is launching a think tank focused on advancing innovation policy and promoting economic nationalism.
The Canadian SHIELD (Securing Homegrown Innovation, Economic Leadership, and Defence) Institute is opening with a $10-million CAD donation from Jim Balsillie, CCI co-founder and chair and former BlackBerry co-CEO. The policy institute will focus on a broad range of issues that impact the Canadian economy, including economic sovereignty, national security and defence, tax policy, and innovation strategies for sectors like deep tech, energy, agriculture, and forestry.
“If we don’t have a sense of economic nationalism, we’re going to actually continue to see the erosion of our wealth and prosperity as we have for the last 25 years.”
Benjamin Bergen
According to CCI, a core value of the institute is the need for a “sovereign, self-reliant economy” in Canada, fuelled by large homegrown companies instead of foreign multinationals.
“We’ve got to come up with a new playbook that can respond to the economic crisis that we find ourselves in,” CCI President Benjamin Bergen said in an interview with BetaKit.
“If we don’t have a sense of economic nationalism, we’re going to actually continue to see the erosion of our wealth and prosperity as we have for the last 25 years.”
The think tank will operate as a separate entity from CCI, Bergen told BetaKit, with opportunities for the two to collaborate. Though membership with CCI is exclusive to tech company leaders, participation in Canadian SHIELD activities will be open to a broader range of people.
When asked how long the funding would sustain the institute, Bergen said that CCI’s intention is to build Canadian SHIELD as a long-term institution built upon the “solid foundation” of Balsillie’s donation. Bergen declined to share future funding plans or a specific number of staff members they plan to hire at Canadian SHIELD.
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According to a statement, Canadian SHIELD plans to disseminate its research and policy ideas through events, research papers, think pieces, and policy recommendations.
The institute’s launch comes at a tumultuous time for Canada, amid declining productivity rates and uncertain political leadership following Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s resignation announcement. At the same time, US President-Elect Donald Trump, who takes office Monday, has repeatedly threatened to levy 25-percent tariffs on Canadian goods imported to the US.
“The impetus to really get this going has obviously been some of the political chaos that we’ve seen take place in Ottawa over the last year, with a Prime Minister not willing to show the leadership required in order to move things forward,” Bergen said.
As to whether Canadian SHIELD is debuting in response to the incoming Trump administration, Bergen said that that was a consideration, but the project is also a “natural result of CCI’s advocacy work over the past decade.”
CCI was founded in 2015 by Balsillie and John Ruffolo, founder and managing partner of Maverix Private Equity. The council now counts more than 150 CEOs of Canadian scaleups and lobbies for the Canadian tech industry on a range of innovation policy issues.
The Council has been a vocal advocate for and critic of policy proposals that impact the tech industry and entrepreneurs in general. CCI has outlined reforms to the Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) tax incentive program, called for procurement policy improvements, and pushed back against the proposed changes to the capital gains inclusion rate, penning an open letter signed by more than 2,000 business leaders.
“Capital gains really showed us there was a desire from business leaders to participate in something broader than just CCI’s mandate of innovation,” Bergen said.
With Canadian SHIELD, Balsillie continues a streak of philanthropic donations to academic and policy-focused institutions, most recently to the University of Waterloo’s Balsillie School of International Affairs and Waterloo-based think tank Centre for International Governance Innovation, which he founded in 2001. Balsillie is also a founding member of Waterloo-based startup hub Communitech.
In a recent National Post op-ed, Balsillie criticized Canada’s current industry policies, noting that the country lacks a national strategy to capture wealth, and that a large portion of federal innovation fund dollars have gone to foreign entities. Balsillie has repeatedly argued that encouraging sovereign IP retention is part of the solution to Canada’s productivity woes.
“No country with our potential inflicts as much damage to its own economic prosperity and sovereignty as Canada,” he wrote.
Not everyone agrees with Balsillie’s view, however. Canadian-American economist Robert D. Atkinson, president of the Canadian Centre for Innovation and Competitiveness, wrote on X that Balsillie’s assessment is “fundamentally wrong.” Atkinson has rebutted Balsillie’s IP argument by noting that Canada runs a trade deficit on IP, so increasing the amount of domestic IP would not meaningfully impact productivity.
Feature image courtesy Council of Canadian Innovators.