Canada has entered a defining moment for its economic growth, global competitiveness and national sovereignty. Significant investment is already flowing into national priority sectors, including defence, energy, critical minerals, artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, health, housing, and trade-enabling infrastructure.
Capital is not the constraint. Execution is.
By treating talent as national infrastructure, we can strategically align Canada’s economic priorities and deliberately connect projects, sectors, employers, regions, and communities where execution capacity is needed most.
The Government of Canada should partner with organizations like the Business + Higher Education Roundtable (BHER), which plays a national leadership role in aligning business, post-secondary education, and workforce systems around Canada’s economic priorities. Through our Leadership Tables and employer-connected initiatives, BHER helps coordinate talent development and deployment efforts across sectors critical to Canada’s future growth and competitiveness.
Our Recommendations
1. Build employer-connected training programs aligned with Canada’s national priority sectors.
Expand training programs that link learning, training, and employment, and design them around employer needs rather than program silos, recognizing that employers often require integrated pathways for students, early-career hires, apprentices, newcomers, and mid-career workers to meet evolving workforce demands.
2. Coordinate talent development and deployment within and across Canada’s national priority sectors and major projects.
Require major federally supported projects and sector strategies to include talent development and deployment plans that identify workforce needs, employer demand, regional labour supply, training pathways, and measurable outcomes, and ensure these plans are coordinated across sectors and projects that may draw on similar talent pools.
3. Focus Workforce Alliances and the Strategic Workforce Innovation Fund on talent development and deployment outcomes.
Prioritize projects that expand talent pipelines in national priority sectors, strengthen employer capacity to hire, onboard, train, and retain talent, improve skills recognition and labour mobility, reduce fragmentation across the workforce development ecosystem, and generate real-time labour market intelligence.