Progress on the ownership agenda 

We were happy to see in the Spring Economic Update that the government began to articulate a strategy focused on the need for Canada to own and control more of our own productive assets. The government should deepen this focus on who owns our economy, for what purposes, and how we ensure that those making decisions about our economic assets care about the long-term well-being of Canadians.

Whether it is American big tech controlling our digital and information ecosystems; U.S.-based financial firms rolling up Canadian businesses and consolidating local markets, or large traditional corporate players extracting enormous wealth from their Canadian subsidiaries – these are all threats to our strategic autonomy, the health of Canadian democracy and the resilience of the Canadian economy.

We were pleased to see questions of ownership and economic sovereignty featured in the 2026 Spring Economic Update. We celebrate the government’s commitment to Employee Ownership Trusts (EOT) and the employee and co-operative ownership movement more broadly. By eliminating the expiry date in the initial EOT legislation, and by leveling the playing field between EOT exits and private equity (PE) exits, the government has eliminated policy and market uncertainty. Business owners now have the freedom to choose a succession path rooted in their values rather than an arbitrary deadline.

We also celebrate several government initiatives that underline the government’s commitment to sovereign ownership of the Canadian economy. These include:

• the Buy Canadian policy,
• a whole-of-government approach to competition policy, and
• many industrial strategies that use the federal government’s balance sheet to pursue an ownership agenda, including loan guarantees, first-loss capital, equity positions in strategic industries, and the mobilization of crown corporation and other agencies (including CDEV, BDC, the CGF) in pursuit of Canada’s economic objectives.

Recommendations 

We encourage the government to deploy a wider range of policy and fiscal levers to expand access to capital and increase pathways to ownership for more Canadians. A focus on creating more opportunities for more broadly-based ownership of the Canadian economy should inform the government’s economic plans.

We recommend that the federal government:

Establish business succession as a national priority

76% of Canadian business owners plan to exit within the next decade, representing $2 trillion in business assets, yet fewer than 10% have a formal succession plan. Without deliberate intervention, the default outcomes are businesses absorbed by PE, rolled into larger corporate structures, or closed entirely.

We recommend the federal government establish business succession as a national priority and build a suite of programs and financing vehicles to transition business assets to employees, Canadian entrepreneurs, co-operatives, non-profits, and community organizations.

As the Canadian Small Business Financing Program is moved to the Business Development Bank of Canada, we continue to encourage improvements to the program design that would enable increased entrepreneurship through acquisition.

Invest in alternative financing infrastructure 

Canada’s enterprise financing system is dominated by a small number of big, publicly traded, deposit-funded banks that provide nearly 80% of small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) lending outside Quebec. While these banks are internationally respected for their strength and stability, their institutional design creates predictable boundaries around what they can finance.

The result is the undercapitalization of viable enterprises, which, in turn, produces predictable, cumulative exclusions that compound over time into lower productivity, narrower entrepreneurship, weaker community resilience, and entrenched inequity.

Our recent report, Built to Exclude, examines this issue and argues that Canada needs to invest in building and supporting alternative financing infrastructure to serve the enterprises commercial banks cannot structurally reach.

We recommend that the federal government:

• Adopt institutional diversity in enterprise financing as an explicit federal policy objective
• Commission a formal review of Canada’s alternative financing infrastructure — credit unions, public financial institutions, CDFI-equivalent lenders, Community Futures, and mission-driven intermediaries — to assess current scale and identify gaps
• Establish a formal Canadian CDFI designation with associated capitalization, tax treatment, and reporting standards
• Review whether prudential rules calibrated for systemically important banks are appropriately adapted for credit unions and smaller deposit-taking institutions.

Ensure that Canada’s new sovereign wealth fund is a key instrument in Canada’s industrial strategy

In SCP’s budget submission last year, we called on the federal government to create a sovereign wealth fund. We are pleased that the government is moving forward to do so.

We would encourage the government to establish the fund as a key instrument in Canada’s goal to build sovereign industrial capacity. The fund should have a mandate to buy and invest in existing firms across strategic sectors. It should also provide patient capital to facilitate acquisitions by Canadian entrepreneurs, employees and communities in strategic sectors where those buyers cannot otherwise compete with private equity or foreign bids.

Expand the government’s focus on investment attraction to drive capital toward long-term social, environmental and economic resiliency objectives

The federal government has prioritized catalyzing private sector investment into large national projects. This is important, but the federal government can also play a role in derisking and crowding-in philanthropic, mission-driven and institutional capital into projects that build long-term economic resilience and community well-being.

We recommend that the federal government ensure that Canada’s fiduciary and regulatory frameworks explicitly allow for the consideration of long-term social, environmental, and resilience outcomes alongside financial returns. The federal government should host a complementary Canada Investment Summit focused on mission-driven investors and assess opportunities to institutionalize this priority through a dedicated Minister or an Office to drive the rapid delivery of projects.

Conclusion 

Canada is wealthy. We are the world’s ninth largest economy. We are respected around the world. Our people are the world’s most educated. There is no reason why we cannot come through this period of geopolitical rupture more prosperous, more equal and more democratic.

There are many lessons to take from the turmoil of the past few years, but one seems undeniable: deep inequality fuels cruelty, conflict and a breakdown in democratic societies. In fact, inequality is increasingly recognized by institutional investors as a systemic risk to the climate, the economy and democracy. The federal government should be intentional about confronting this risk.

Canada generates enormous benefits for its citizens, but too many of the economic benefits in recent decades have been concentrated into too few hands. That is the product of a model of extractive and financialized capitalism that is not working for most people. Canada can choose a different path by making policy choices that shape the market in ways that build broadly shared wealth and pathways for working people to own assets.

The government is already taking many positive steps. It should now accelerate those by making ownership, access to capital and inequality core components of its economic strategy.