Quebec’s economy is entering a period of profound transformation.
Artificial intelligence, demographic change, labour shortages, climate transition, digitalization, supply chain restructuring, and new forms of entrepreneurship are reshaping how economies function and how communities participate within them. These are not things that might happen in the future. They are already reorganizing economic life across Quebec.
For the Official Language Minority Community of Quebec (OLMCQ), this moment is particularly important. The English-speaking community possesses many of the very assets that will help Quebec compete and prosper in a changing economy. It is highly bilingual, well-educated, entrepreneurial, adaptive, supported by a province-wide institutional infrastructure, and can operate across linguistic, regional, and sectoral boundaries. Yet the OLMCQ continues to experience persistent economic disparities in employment, income, workforce participation, and access to opportunity.
The question before the OLMCQ and Quebec society more broadly is whether we possess the collective willingness, discipline, and collaborative spirit to work together to capitalize on emerging opportunities in ways that deliver measurable economic outcomes for all.
CEDEC believes that by working together across public, private, and civil society sectors, we have the capacity to build collaborative economic development efforts that strengthen participation, unlock innovation, expand opportunity, and generate meaningful economic benefits for individuals, communities, and regions across Quebec. Together, we can help build a stronger, more productive, and more prosperous economy that benefits Quebec as a whole.
This Roadmap proposes developing scalable Collaborative Economic Development Ventures that can organize and align public, private, and civil society assets to generate stronger economic participation, enterprise growth, productivity, investment, and long-term economic vitality across Quebec.
At its core, this Roadmap reflects a simple principle that has guided CEDEC’s work for many years: A BETTER ECONOMY CREATES BETTER LIVES.
John Buck
President and CEO
CEDEC
THE ROAD TO PROSPERITY: The 2026–2028 OLMCQ Collaborative Economic Development Roadmap represents the next major stage in implementing CEDEC’s OLMCQ Ten-Year Collaborative Economic Development Plan. It is grounded in a central proposition: the long-term vitality of Quebec’s Official Language Minority Community and the long-term strength of Quebec’s economy are deeply interconnected.
The Roadmap seeks to take advantage of the profound economic transformation occurring across Quebec, shaped by artificial intelligence, demographic change, labour shortages, the climate transition, digitalization, entrepreneurship, and regional economic restructuring. These forces are already reshaping how Quebec’s economy functions and how communities participate within it.
The Roadmap proposes that stronger economic outcomes can no longer be achieved primarily through fragmented projects, isolated interventions, or disconnected initiatives. Increasingly, economic competitiveness depends upon collaboration, coordination, ecosystem development, workforce participation, commercialization, investment activation, and the ability to organize existing assets more productively at scale. The Roadmap, therefore, introduces a Collaborative Economic Development Model centred on scalable public, private, and civil society. Ventures that can collaboratively organize workforce systems, technologies, infrastructure, enterprises, institutions, and communities around shared economic opportunities.
The Roadmap identifies ten interconnected opportunities and Venture developments linked directly to the major forces reshaping Quebec’s economy, including the following:
Together, these opportunities form an integrated implementation architecture designed to strengthen the following:
Importantly, these pportunities are grounded in identifiable economic activity already occurring within Quebec’s evolving economy.
The implementation of the Roadmap will be guided by a four-stage developmental logic moving opportunities from incubation and pilot deployment to commercialization and operational viability, to replication and regional expansion, and ultimately to provincial-scale impact. The objective is not simply to launch projects, but to build durable Collaborative Economic Development capacities capable of generating measurable economic value over time.
The Roadmap also advances a broader proposition: collaboration itself is increasingly becoming a strategic economic capability.
In an economy shaped by interconnected systems, integrated supply chains, digital coordination, and ecosystem-based innovation, stronger economic outcomes increasingly depend upon the ability to align institutions, enterprises, technologies, workforce systems, infrastructure, capital, and communities around shared economic objectives.
Ultimately, the Roadmap advances a simple but important proposition: Quebec’s economy can generate stronger, broader prosperity when its existing assets are organized more collaboratively, more strategically, and at greater scale.
The Roadmap demonstrates that the Official Language Minority Community of Quebec is not peripheral to Quebec’s economic future, but a meaningful contributor to workforce development, entrepreneurship, innovation, regional vitality, and long-term economic resilience.
The task ahead is both demanding and hopeful. It calls for discipline, trust, imagination, and sustained collaboration. It asks stakeholders to recognize that Quebec’s future prosperity depends not only on the strength of its largest institutions or most established sectors, but on the ability of all communities, regions, enterprises, and talents to participate fully in the economy we are building together.
The Roadmap identifies the opportunities. It provides the logic, structure, and pathway for action. What is required now is the collective will to implement this plan.
For CEDEC, this is the next stage of our work. For the OLMCQ, it is an opportunity to deepen its contribution to Quebec’s prosperity while strengthening its own long-term viability.
For Quebec, it is an invitation to build a more productive, inclusive, innovative, and resilient economy by mobilizing more fully the talents and capacities of all who call this province home.
The Roadmap begins with a simple belief: a better economy creates better lives. Its implementation now depends on those willing to help turn that belief into practical action, durable Ventures, measurable outcomes, and shared prosperity for Quebec.
