Global supply chain disruptions continue to impact businesses and consumers worldwide. While trade and e-commerce have stabilized since the post-pandemic surge, new challenges – such as geopolitical instability, climate-related events, and labour shortages – cause persistent delays across critical sectors. Canadian businesses face mounting pressure to manage these disruptions while maintaining service and cost expectations. These issues are compounded by underinvestment in technologies that provide real-time visibility into supply chain operations, and in contingency planning strategies. Strengthening these areas is essential to ensuring Canada’s long-term economic competitiveness and ability to respond to future crises.

Canada’s automotive sector is at a critical juncture, facing mounting global competition, rapid technological change, and the need to transition toward electric vehicles (EVs) while maintaining strength in gas-powered vehicle production. There is a need to fund a public-private feasibility study to establish a 100% Canadian-owned automobile manufacturer, leveraging Canada’s critical minerals, integrating supply chains across provinces, drawing on international best practices, and removing interprovincial trade barriers. Without decisive action, continued declines in domestic production, plant closures, and job losses will leave Canada dependent on foreign automakers, risking further erosion of its industrial base and economic sovereignty.

Aviation & aerospace hold opportunities for business growth in Canada as the country enters an era of geopolitical change. Aviation & aerospace are integrated industries recovering from negative pandemic impacts, now under threat.

Leveraging regional strengths would create new economic activity, diversify a region’s industrial base, & build high-quality employment. Manufacturing, MRO activity (maintenance, repair and overhaul) & pilot training comprise Canada’s industry. Federal government can underpin aerospace super-clusters & ensure dynamic growth & expanded business opportunities both in-place and across Canada.

Canadian flight training schools are under resourced; tackling Canada’s pilot shortage would strengthen the industry. {1}

Increasingly, organizations must measure, monitor, manage and report on their Scope 3 GHG emissions. Decarbonizing value chains while balancing profit targets with increasing costs and decreasing resources is one tough mission for the private sector. It is a tougher mission for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) that lack the resources of capital, time and trusted sources from which to make sense of the complex and confusing requirements to measure and report Scope 3 emissions. Providing SMEs access to affordable capital to implement Scope 3 reporting is not only key in addressing the market demands for action on climate but also in maintaining globally competitive supply chains.

The federal government has a critical role in addressing key competitiveness issues that have a real impact on Canada’s manufacturing sector. This includes retaining skilled workers, introducing competitive incentives to invest in technology and helping Canadian-based manufacturers become more competitive and lower their business costs.

Canada’s strategic infrastructure is vital to our supply chain, acting as gateways to bring products to market: it is therefore key to the Canadian economy and to the competitiveness of Canadian businesses. This infrastructure is essential to support international partnerships by ensuring the arrival and movement of goods destined for global trade, whose export value alone represents more than 768.2 billion Canadian dollars (Statistics Canada, International Merchandise Trade in Canada, May 2024).

Strategic and effective government support is required to increase investment and innovation across the Canadian manufacturing sector.

In 2006, the World Bank’s “Ease of Doing Business” report ranked Canada an impressive 4th in the world. In just 14 years, our country had fallen to 23rd, largely attributed to a challenging regulatory environment. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, reports proliferate showing lagging national productivity. Canada has become a unfriendly place to invest in infrastructure due to lengthy and unpredictable regulatory processes. It is crucial for the prosperity of Canadians that Canada’s regulatory frameworks are reformed to strike a more effective balance between strict regulation and economic competitiveness.

Canada is in a productivity crisis. Interprovincial trade in Canada continues to be hampered by a number of policies restricting competition for a few well-connected sectors of our provincial economies. A rise in each province’s and territory’s GDP would increase overall GDP, improve efficiencies, labour practices, productivity, and make us less reliant on international trade and our lagging innovation economy. In 2024, Statistics Canada computed that these barriers add between 7.8% and 14.5% to goods and services in Canada.{1}