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It’s time to transform

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As Canada struggles with declining productivity and the impact of slower wage growth, there is an urgency to do something. Our declining productivity growth can be attributed to:

  • A slower rate of innovation within Canadian businesses;
  • A decline in the rate of innovation diffusion amongst Canada’s firms; and
  • A decline in resource reallocation among Canadian firms and less business dynamism.

As a country we need to foster the growth of globally competitive companies in sectors that are stable, resilient and capable of improving Canada’s current economic plight.

One of those industries is ingredient manufacturing and food production.

Canada’s agriculture and food and beverage industry has been one of our best-performing sectors in terms of productivity growth. Productivity in Canada’s food and beverage industry increased 2.4 per cent between 2019 and 2020—a growth rate of 1.5 times that of the overall labour productivity growth in Canada.

Not only can this industry bring economic benefit to Canadians, it’s also going to become increasingly necessary to feed a hungry world. A growing global population, combined with fragile supply chains and unstable weather patterns, is making food insecurity a very real problem for our world. And a hungry world is a volatile world.

Canada has a generational opportunity to secure our position as a leading supplier of high-value ingredients and food products made from Canadian crops. By championing value-added processing—the manufacturing, marketing and selling of the components of the seed, like starch, oil, fibre and protein—we can create more economic growth for the country and help reverse the current economic trends.

By entering global value chains with high-value products, we can help improve Canada’s productivity and stature in the global marketplace. Protein Industries Canada has already begun to address one of the most significant challenges of improving labour productivity in Canada—to increase business-led investments in, and diffusion of, commercialized innovations.

Canada has a $25 billion opportunity in front of us. To capture this opportunity we must:

  • Improve access to capital, improve taxation capital investment and make Canada a more competitive place to invest;
  • Enable market access and offtake agreements to support investment into manufacturing plants;
  • Modernize Canada’s regulatory system; and
  • Build additional scale-up infrastructure.

By taking a strategic and thoughtful approach to high-growth sectors, such as agriculture and food production, through the creation and implementation of industrial policy, Canada will be in a position to add $50 billion to our GDP within the next 10 to 15 years.

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