I write about Canadian innovation policy from the receiving end of it. I run Plurilock, a publicly traded cybersecurity company (TSX-V: PLUR), which means I have spent years on the operator’s side of the programs that policy people design: federal and provincial procurement, SR&ED claims, funding programs, security clearances, and the paperwork that sits between all of them. I am not an academic and I am not a lobbyist, so what I have to offer is not a theory of how the system should work. It is a record of what the system actually does to a company trying to build and sell something here. This hub collects that writing.
Innovation policy in Canada
The long piece is Innovation Policy in Canada: A Practitioner’s View, which is the closest thing I have to a full position. It covers where the money goes, why procurement so rarely reaches the companies the programs were written for, and the gap between what a policy intends and what an operator experiences when they try to use it. If you read one thing here, read that.
Procurement, tax credits, and funding programs
Most of my hard-won knowledge here is unglamorous and specific: how a government buyer actually gets to yes, what SR&ED rewards versus what it claims to reward, and which funding programs are worth the months of effort they cost to win. Write-ups on those pieces are in progress and will land here as they go live.
Code & Country
I also host Code & Country, a podcast about Canadian technology and the policy environment it has to survive in. The guests are usually people who have shipped something here, or tried to, which tends to produce a more useful conversation than the panel-discussion version of this topic. Where an episode turns into an argument worth writing down, the written version shows up on this page.
