Good morning,

As the summer has come to a close and many of you are in the middle of back-to-school season, please find below the last update from our team before the election.

For those of you that have been on this journey with us since the beginning, thank you for maintaining your interest. And for those more-recent additions, we hope to resume regular communications with you in a couple months. We truly value our interactions with every stakeholder, so please, continue to be engaged.

As you’re likely aware, we hit the ground running a little over a year ago, and haven’t stopped yet! With that said, here’s our summary of a very busy August:

Implementing the Women’s Entrepreneurship Strategy has been a key priority for Minister Ng during the past year. In August, the remaining projects for both the Women’s Entrepreneurship Fund and the Ecosystem Fund were announced. We were also able to announce the successful WEF recipients from the additional $10 million announced in June. Here’s a run-down:

• Minister Ng was is Vancouver where she announced an investment of $1,845,000 for women entrepreneurs across BC, alongside colleagues Randeep Sarai and Gordie Hogg.
• In the Prairies, Randy Boissionnault announced up to $3.3M for women entrepreneurs and organizations supporting them in Alberta, while Minister Ng announced over $500,000 for women entrepreneurs across Saskatchewan.
• • Special thanks to Minister Chagger, Omar Alghabra, Kim Rudd, and Mark Gerretsen for their help in the region!For Ontario, Minister Ng and Julie Dzerowicz announced a package of up to $19 million in investments for women entrepreneurs and ecosystem recipients at OneEleven in Toronto.
• In Quebec, Minister Bibeau announced up to $4.8M from St-Pie, while Joel Lightbound announced up to $5.7M into our largest Regional Ecosystem recipient, Femmessor.
  • Thanks to Steven MacKinnon for echoing as well!
• For Atlantic Canada, Minister Ng and Matt DeCourcey also announced investments of nearly $10 million for women entrepreneurs and the ecosystems supporting them in Fredericton.
• In the North, Larry Bagnell announced over $300,000 for women entrepreneurs across the Yukon.

To learn more about all of the companies funded through the Women’s Entrepreneurship Fund please click here, and for more information on recipients of the Ecosystem Fund, here.

Another key focus has been continuing to promote our key initiative to help companies scale up through the integrated market established by CAN Health, including a recent visit to the Healthtech Innovation Hub in Surrey alongside Randeep Sarai. Here are a number of articles of interest:

• Government Helping Create Network to Address Procurement Barrier in Canadian Healthtech;
• Mississauga’s Trillium Health Partners About to Create New Jobs and Make Life Easier for Patients;
• Ottawa announces $7M investment into new health-tech procurement model in B.C., other provinces;
• Sunnybrook named as partner in national network to accelerate the adoption of innovations in health and biosciences, and scale up Canadian medical technology companies.

Finally, our national rollout of the Trade Accelerator Program is almost complete after Minister Ng’s recent visit to Halifax, where she announced $425K for the region’s new Trade Accelerator Program, which will help 100 companies across the province access new markets. These are key initiatives of our Export Diversification Strategy, enabling small- and medium-size companies to successfully expand into new markets.

In other news of interest:

• Minister Bains launched CyberSecure Canada, a certification program that aims to raise the cyber security baseline among Canadian SMEs, and better position them to compete globally.
• Minister announced $38 million over five years for Futurpreneur alongside Terry Beech, which will support young entrepreneurs as they start and grow their businesses.
• On Wednesday, we released an update to the Canada Business App, which incorporates feedback and enhancements suggested by users after its initial launch in June. You can download the Canada Business App on the App Store here, and on Google Play here.

If you have any questions about any of these items or if you would like to get in touch with our team on any other matter, please don’t hesitate to contact Simon Robertson, Director of Policy, between now and October 21^st: simon.robertson@canada.ca.

Cheers,

Jason Easton

Chief of Staff |Chef de cabinet

Office of the Minister of Small Business & Export Promotion

jason.easton@canada.ca