ICTC’s Perspectives on a Data Economy Strategy

This white paper highlights ICTC’s response to ISED’s Digital and Data Consultations in an era where a data-driven economy is a global stimulus for fledging entrepreneurs, and emerging industries to create and commercialize new Intellectual Property (IP) to achieve national, economic, and social aspirations.

Innovation: Canada’s ability to fully partake in a global data-driven race will heavily depend on our ability as a nation to unleash open data innovations while maintaining public privacy, enhancing security, and enabling inclusive growth.

This will require a delicate balance between economic, democratic, and private interests that will govern the free flow of information across borders while maintaining Canada’s comparative intellectual advantage in a global economy.

Canada’s open data innovation landscape must be underpinned by a technology strategy that is built on API- enabled standards that empowers third party players to grow the ecosystem of applications and services to Canadians outside the confines of a vendor specific environment, in health, commerce, banking, transportation, and many others.

Privacy and Trust: Highly publicized data breaches and data privacy issues have eroded public confidence in both the private and public sectors’ ability to responsibly collect, manage, and analyze their personal information. The environment created by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has motivated Canada to review its own data and privacy legislation and ICTC recommends action is required to better address the areas of consent, data breach notification and enforcement mechanisms, and the importance of data portability rights.

The Future of Work: ICTC’s labour market foresight points to the demand to fill 216,000 critical ICT positions by 2021, and job growth in ICT is outpacing the overall economy by 6 to 1. At the same time, non-digital jobs are being displaced by AI, robots, and other disruptive technologies. Comprehensive, national skills development initiatives are necessary to maintain and improve Canada’s data and digital competitiveness.

ICTC asserts that carving a carefully designed “National Data Strategy” for Canada is an important impetus for signalling Canada’s aspirations in this space and setting the stage for investment, growth, and social prosperity.