CCI's Remarks at the Standing Committee on Bill 194

Today, CCI Director of Ontario Affairs Skaidra Puodžiūnas presented to the Standing Committee on Justice Policy at the Ontario Legislature regarding Bill 194 - Strengthening Cyber Security and Building Trust in the Public Sector Act. You can read Skaidra's full remarks below, delivered on behalf of CCI's members, or watch her presentation here:

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Good afternoon, Chair and members of the Standing Committee on Justice Policy. 

Thank you for the opportunity to present today on Bill 194, Strengthening Cyber Security and Building Trust in the Public Sector Act, 2024.

My name is Skaidra Puodziunas and I am the Director of Ontario Affairs for the Council of Canadian Innovators - CCI, is a national business association representing more than 150 of Canada’s fastest-growing technology companies. 

More than half of CCI’s members are proudly headquartered here in Ontario, employing more than 30,000 workers and contributing nearly $7 billion to Ontario’s economy. Our CEOs are job and wealth creators, investors, community philanthropists, and experts in their fields of artificial intelligence, health technology, clean technology, financial technology, cybersecurity and more.

CCI commends the government's commitment to enabling guardrails for trust in the digital age, with an initial focus on the public sector. We  urgently call on the Ontario Government to involve the domestic innovator community as this important work evolves. 

With Bill 194, this is a historic opportunity to lay out a path for safety and clear regulation, with the flexibility, innovation and economic potential that Ontario needs to seize right now. 

For the purposes of today’s presentation, I want to hit on three key points: 

1. The importance of standards
2. Ensuring that  markets, platforms and products remain open,
3. Engaging and Adopting Ontario Innovation.
    

Firstly, embracing standards can free up government capacity to focus on important priorities and allow innovators a degree of regulatory certainty. Standards can also  present opportunities to create foundational, building-block technologies that many other companies rely on. 

Even with the accelerating pace of change in different families of technologies, from semiconductor design to AI, standards bodies are working hard to create and keep up to date countless standards that ensure quality and keep people safe.

We encourage additional language in Bill 194 authorizing ministers to recognize standards as statutory instruments if they are satisfied that they have been developed fairly and transparently through a process led by a standard development organization accredited by the Standards Council of Canada, Digital Governance Council, or by similar standard development organizations. 

This flexibility already exists in recent Ontario laws, having been included in the Modernizing Ontario for People and Businesses Act, 2020 and would allow for regulatory innovation, while also protecting citizen and user rights.
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Secondly, keeping markets, platforms and products open.

Smaller companies are particularly dependent on access to data. Rigid data minimization laws benefit large, established companies and prevent new market entrants from reaching customers and gathering the information they need to compete and succeed. 

Ontario’s governance frameworks should incentivize data portability and data access, for example, open onboard diagnostic ports in automobiles that enable vehicle owners to upload data about their vehicles to any supplier who can help them process that data.
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Thirdly, Engaging and Adopting made-in-Ontario Innovation. 

Procurement is the most powerful economic development tool available to the government. Ontario spends nearly $30 billion each year procuring goods and services, from pencils to complex medical technologies. When a firm in Ontario sells goods or services to the provincial government, it is considered a major validator for the company – one that helps acquire investors and accelerates future sales with other governments and businesses across Canada and globally. 

Bill 194 has the opportunity to open vast new markets to deploy cyber security and AI technologies across the broader public sector - we call on Ontario public officials to consider the Ontario market first. 

Ontario’s innovation problems are not due to the lack of commercialized and market-ready innovations, but the adoption of them. The lack of a dedicated system to evaluate and fund innovation across the public sector has a direct impact on the local economy.

And let’s take a moment to talk about why this matters. 

Ontario’s economy is seeing a profound shift and is foundationally different from the traditional production-based economy of commodities and physical goods which dominated the 20th Century.

Today, over 90 per cent of the value of the S&P 500 comes from intangible assets — things like data, patents, algorithms, and copyrighted works. For a number of reasons, the intangible economy operates very differently from the traditional production economy.

Strictly speaking, most technology companies don’t actually sell products at all. They amass data and intellectual property, and then extract economic rents by allowing customers to use their systems. 

Let’s look at this example in the context of Ontario.

Just this month, the Ontario government issued a request for proposals to supply software for provincial call and contact centers, including ServiceOntario and the Family Responsibility Office, mandating the use of Amazon Web Services. 

Let’s assume the government’s due diligence leading up to the RFP confirmed that this was the most viable provider, with no Canadian alternative capable of delivering widespread cloud services for Ontarians. 

Even so, in this scenario the government isn’t just buying a product for the next five years. Mandating the use of AWS means that other companies who interface with these services must write software and format data to a standard established by Amazon. This gives a large platform company enormous control and ability to shape the marketplace to their benefit.

This is a pivotal moment for Ontario to demonstrate accountability by actively consulting and collaborating with domestic innovators. 

Investing in Ontario’s innovation ecosystem is not just economically sound; it’s a strategic imperative for our province’s future.

Building up domestic companies does more than create new products — they attract significant capital, generate high - value jobs, build the foundation for future economic growth and prosperity and in the delivery of our public services they are invested in protecting and driving value to citizens because their employees are citizens. 

As always, we appreciate your interest in our organization’s advocacy and look forward to further dialogue about how we can increase Ontario’s innovation outputs while building a stronger and more inclusive economy for all. 

Thank you for your time and I look forward to any questions you may have.

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To review CCI's full 2025 Ontario pre-budget recommendations, click here.

‍Skaidra Puodžiūnas leads CCI's Ontario Bureau and works on behalf of innovators in Ontario to advance strategies at Queen's Park that help domestic companies scale-up globally. To learn more about CCI's Ontario advocacy efforts, email Skaidra at spuodziunas@canadianinnovators.org.

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About the Council of Canadian Innovators \ Conseil Canadien des Innovateurs

The Council of Canadian Innovators is a national member-based organization reshaping how governments across Canada think about innovation policy, and supporting homegrown scale-ups to drive prosperity. Established in 2015, CCI represents and works with over 150 of Canada’s fastest-growing technology companies. Our members are the CEOs, founders, and top senior executives behind some of Canada’s most successful ‘scale-up’ companies. All our members are job and wealth creators, investors, philanthropists, and experts in their fields of health tech, cleantech, fintech, cybersecurity, AI and digital transformation. Companies in our portfolio are market leaders in their verticals, commercialize their technologies in over 190 countries, and generate between $10M-$750M in annual recurring revenue. We advocate on their behalf for government strategies that increase their access to skilled talent, strategic capital, and new customers, as well as expanded freedom to operate for their global pursuits of scale.