Successive governments have taken Canada's economic security for granted, businesses say

financialpost.com:

It may seem on first blush that Canada has taken a number of steps to protect its businesses in the past few years, given it has restricted Chinese companies from investing in this country’s critical minerals sector and introduced cybersecurity bills to protect critical infrastructure.

But a new report by the Business Council of Canada, a group of about 150 companies, including Microsoft Canada Inc. and Google Canada, said successive governments have “ignored, overlooked or simply taken for granted” this country’s economic security.

Rising geopolitical tensions accompanied by technological advances in cyberspace that can better penetrate defence systems has put Canada “in the midst of the greatest, most complex, and unpredictable security environment” in a generation, said the authors of Economic Security is National Security, which came out on Sept. 7.

“Canadian companies, in almost every region and sector of our economy, now face unprecedented dangers,” the report said. “They are operating on an increasingly skewed playing field in which traditional private commerce is always at a disadvantage.”

Canadian companies, in almost every region and sector of our economy, now face unprecedented dangers

The report, which was based on consultations with businesses, security experts and former government officials, urges the need for a new national security strategy, the core of which should be based on economic security. Canada passed its last national security policy in 2004.

“During that time, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction were the preoccupations of the day,” said Trevor Neiman, director of Digital Economy and a legal adviser at the Business Council of Canada. “The strategy made almost no mention of the modern