The Roadmap in Action
Turning Opportunity into Greater Prosperity for the OLMCQ and Quebec
The economy is rapidly changing, while AI and digital technology are transforming work, business, and social enterprises. Demographic shifts are reshaping our labour market. The green economy transition is creating new industries, investments, and skill demands. Across Quebec, communities, businesses, and workers are adapting to a different economic future. For Quebec’s Official Language Minority Community (OLMCQ), this is a critical moment.
English-speaking Quebecers offer significant economic strengths: bilingual and multilingual talent, high education levels, entrepreneurial capacity, strong institutions, regional networks, and the ability to work across linguistic, cultural, and economic boundaries. However, persistent gaps remain in employment, income, workforce participation, and access to economic opportunity.
Our collective challenge as the Official Language Minority Community in Quebec is to ensure that the talents, experience, businesses, institutions, and ideas of English-speaking Quebecers fully contribute to Quebec’s economic development and prosperity. This will lead to addressing the persistent economic disparities confronting our community.
That is the purpose of The Road to Prosperity: The 2026–2028 OLMCQ Collaborative Economic Development Roadmap. Now, the work shifts from opportunity to action. At its core, the Roadmap proposes a simple idea: The stronger the OLMCQ’s contribution to Quebec’s prosperity, the stronger its own economic future becomes in return.
The Roadmap doesn’t start by asking what programs the community needs. Instead, it asks a different question: Where are the opportunities to create economic value, and how can English-speaking Quebecers help seize and fully leverage them?
This shift is important. The OLMCQ is not just a community facing economic challenges; it is an economic asset with people, institutions, businesses, knowledge, relationships, and regional capacity that can contribute more fully to Quebec’s future. The Roadmap aims to utilize these assets.
Implementing the Roadmap is the next step in advancing the OLMCQ 2023-2033 Collaborative Economic Development Plan. By 2033, the Ten-Year Plan aims to fill 1,000 jobs, create or expand 250 businesses and social enterprises, reduce OLMCQ economic disparity by 50 percent, attract $5 million in new investment, establish a $25 million Collaborative Economic Development Incentive Fund, and scale Collaborative Economic Development across Quebec. Achieving this requires action, not just ideas.
Ten Opportunities with One Shared Purpose
CEDEC’s applied economic development research over the last three years has identified ten key opportunities. These promise to help English-speaking Quebecers create economic value and contribute to the prosperity of both the OLMCQ and Quebec. They cover workforce development, entrepreneurship, agriculture, tourism, culture, care, housing, and transportation.
However, the Roadmap is more than a list of 10 projects. These opportunities are designed to work synergistically as part of a broader economic development effort.
The 10 Opportunities Identified in the Roadmap
- Workforce Development and Labour
- Market Participation
- Graduate Entrepreneurship and Startup
- Development
- Encore Seniors Cooperative
- Smart_Farm
- Agri_Value Recovery & Biotransformation
- Smart_Tourism
- Smart_Culture
- Smart_Care
- Green_Build
- Next-gen: RT Drones & Electric Aviation (Rural Transportation)
This effort focuses on generating critical and measurable outcomes, such as creating jobs or placing talent in jobs, increasing personal income and organizational revenues, and improving productivity. It also translates into increasing investment, strengthening regional economic participation, and boosting the economic involvement of English-speakers and their communities in key sectors of Quebec’s evolving economy.
The Roadmap emphasizes that no single organization can fully capitalize on these opportunities alone. This is where Collaborative Economic Development becomes crucial. It involves bringing Public, Private, and Civil Society partners together to organize around specific economic opportunities. The Roadmap calls these collaborations Ventures. Their role is to drive the innovation and productivity needed to translate economic opportunity into tangible, measurable economic results.
- For an English-speaking Quebecer, this should mean more avenues for economic participation and more ways to transform talent, knowledge, experience, and ideas into income and opportunity.
- For businesses and social enterprises, it should mean better access to talent, markets, technology, partnerships, and growth opportunities.
- For communities, it should mean stronger connections to surrounding economic activity and greater capacity for regions to contribute to and benefit from Quebec’s economy.
- And for Quebec, it should mean that the people, institutions, businesses, and networks of the OLMCQ are contributing even more fully to productivity, entrepreneurship, innovation, workforce development, and regional economic participation.
Now is the Time to Act
The Roadmap is not a plan for CEDEC or the English-speaking community to implement alone. It invites all Quebecers to build something together.
- If you are an employer, bring your workforce needs, experience and opportunities.
- If you are an entrepreneur or business leader, bring your ideas, markets and capacity to grow.
- If you represent government, education, economic development or civil society, bring the knowledge, programs, relationships and resources that can help promising opportunities move forward.
- If you are an investor or funder, help provide the capital that can turn tested ideas into sustainable economic activity.
- And if you are an English-speaking Quebecer, bring your talent, experience, ambition and determination to contribute.
Our destination extends beyond 2028. Our Ten-Year Plan takes us to 2033. Progress toward that destination, however, depends on what we choose to build now. The Roadmap has identified the opportunities. Now we must seize them.
Join us. Help turn opportunity into action, and action into measurable economic results. Together, we can build a more prosperous OLMCQ, contribute more fully to Quebec’s prosperity, and create a better economy for better lives.