Canadian Government Executive - Volume 27 - Issue 02

16 / Canadian Government Executive // September/October 2020 INNOVATION mousetrap, but your mousetrap relies on the data that the customer’s been collecting with another company, it’s pretty hard right now for that customer to say, “I want to migrate my personal data to the new company be- cause it has a better service offering.” Q: How is the government promoting digital adoption and digital inclusion more broadly? We’ve seen just how important it is both for the functioning of the economy and for so- cial interaction to have access to broadband internet. We all know there’s been a rush to digital adoption, but pre-pandemic we were still lagging our competitors in this space. The statistics show that Canadian small and medium-sized enterprises generally have been slower to adopt digital technologies than, say, their American counterparts. Still, in March of 2020, 4.7 million Cana- dians shifted to work from home, and hun- dreds of thousands of businesses quickly adapted their service offering to go online. My department works with the telecommu- nications companies and with the internet service providers; we regulate those orga- nizations, and we partner with them on the expansion of broadband. They were working like mad to increase the capacity of their net- works and to handle the additional demands. In my own ministry, which has prided itself on being the ministry that’s responsible for connectedness and that embraces technol- ogy, we decided last spring we needed to aim for a roughly fourfold increase in our broad- band capacity, if we were to continue provid- ing a full service offering effectively. And we are looking at further upgrades over time. When you talk about digital inclusion, though, too many households in our coun- try still lack access to high-speed broadband. Pre-pandemic, the federal government an- nounced significant investments in this area. But the pandemic has underlined the im- portance of bridging the digital divide. Not every Canadian was affected equally; the pandemic has disproportionately affected minority communities, indigenous peoples, and women. In general, we have groups in society that are not included, and although we have made good progress on connectiv- ity, we still have a way to go. The government announced a new uni- versal broadband fund in late 2020, with CAD$1.75 billion [US$1.39 billion] in ad- ditional investment. That’s a 75 percent in- crease from its original plan. The govern- ment’s total investment in broadband in the past five years or so is now approaching about 10 times the total investment in this area historically. The formal objective is to connect 98 percent of all Canadians to high- speed broadband internet by 2026, and ev- ery Canadian by 2030. Q: Beyond the need to accelerate digital adoption, what did the pan- demic reveal about Canada’s resilience? There are areas such as biomanufacturing where we didn’t have as much capacity and resiliency as we’d want. We have a number of big companies in Canada that make vac- cines and therapies, but we did not have the surplus capacity to make vaccines for CO- VID-19 at scale. The existing manufacturing capacity is largely dedicated to other priori- ties, such as pandemic influenza, diphtheria, polio, tetanus, and so on. Rebuilding our biomanufacturing capacity is a top priority for my ministry and the government. We’ve also seen how the pandemic has widened disparities in our society, and that has led to increased government support for Black and women entrepreneurs. We are also working to drive greater diversity on boards and management teams. I’d include my own organization in this effort — we have some way to go before we can claim to be a truly di- verse department. But that’s where we need to go. The research is clear that diverse or- ganizations are more effective and resilient. We need to be thinking about what the con- cept of resiliency might mean for the future, and whether some areas need to be recali- brated, as we are doing with biomanufactur- ing. Because at the end of the day, you want an efficient and well-functioning economy, but you want to be resilient to shocks, too. That said, I think that there were many ways in which Canada was resilient. We have many strengths as a country: We have a significant resource endowment, a strong industrial base, a well-functioning public administration, and a population that pulls together in a crisis. I think we were lucky that we had a business sector that had certain core competencies, as well as the manufacturing capacity, that enabled us to adapt relatively quickly. And I think we were also lucky to have some ex- pertise in the public sector to be able to iden- tify where the opportunities were and to work with industry to get things done. For example, at the outset of the pandemic, we sourced almost all our personal protective equipment from abroad. Now, by dollar value, almost half of all PPE is made in Canada. We had textile manufacturers who normally make underwear and ski jackets who transitioned to making medical gowns. Firms that normally make flight simulators or automobile parts were making ventilators. Distilleries were pumping out hand sanitizer. This represented a significant pivot of some of our industrial capacity. And it was only in an emergency that Canadians realized we could do it. This article was originally published in strategy+business, March 2021, © 2021, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and reprinted here with permission. Ellen Corkery-Dooher is PwC Canada’s federal government and public sector leader. Based in Ottawa, she is a partner with PwC Canada. Laura W. Geller is a senior editor of strategy+business.