The Road to Prosperity: The 2026-2028 OLMCQ Collaborative Economic Development Roadmap is Coming

The Road to Prosperity: The 2026-2028 OLMCQ Collaborative Economic Development Roadmap is Coming

A New Chapter in Building a Better Economy for Better Lives

Something important is taking shape at CEDEC.

Over the past two years, CEDEC has been engaged in an ambitious effort to better understand the major forces reshaping Quebec’s economy and to explore how the Official Language Minority Community in Quebec (OLMCQ) can participate more actively and meaningfully in the opportunities emerging from those transformations. That work is now converging into The Road to Prosperity: The 2026-2028 OLMCQ Collaborative Economic Development Roadmap.

The Roadmap, which CEDEC will soon release publicly, represents much more than a traditional economic strategy document. It reflects that Quebec’s economy has entered a period of profound transformation, and that the ability of communities, enterprises, and governments to collaborate effectively around emerging opportunities will increasingly determine long-term prosperity.

This is precisely why the Roadmap matters now, according to CEDEC President and CEO John Buck. He described an economy being “…reshaped by deep technological transformation like artificial intelligence, demographic transition, continuing labour shortages, climate transition, and changing patterns of economic activity.” These forces, Buck stressed, are no longer distant possibilities or abstract trends. “They are now restructuring how businesses operate, how labour markets function, how services are delivered, and how communities participate in the economy.”

For the English-speaking Community of Quebec, these changes create both significant challenges and substantial opportunities. The Roadmap begins from an important premise. Communities must possess the collective willingness and capacity to identify emerging opportunities early enough, organize around them effectively, and collaborate at sufficient scale to generate meaningful and lasting economic benefits.

A Long-Range Vision Rooted in Economic Participation

The Roadmap does not emerge in isolation. It is deeply rooted in CEDEC’s broader 2023–2033 OLMCQ Collaborative Economic Development Plan, which serves as the long-range strategic framework guiding the organization’s work over the next decade. The relationship between the two documents is fundamental.

  • The Ten-Year Plan establishes the broader vision, the long-term economic objectives, and the measurable outcomes CEDEC and its partners hope to achieve over time.
  • The Roadmap, by contrast, serves as the implementation architecture through which those goals begin to move from strategic direction toward practical economic activity.

At the centre of this long-range vision is a powerful and increasingly important idea: Community vitality and economic development are inseparable.

Lasting vitality increasingly depends upon the ability of individuals and communities to participate meaningfully in Quebec’s evolving economy through employment, entrepreneurship, innovation, investment, enterprise development, workforce participation, and collaborative economic activity.

This marks an important evolution in how economic development itself is being understood. The Roadmap does not treat collaboration as a symbolic aspiration or a secondary organizational value.

Why the Roadmap Matters Now

The timing of the Roadmap is not accidental. Quebec’s economy has entered a period in which traditional approaches to economic development are increasingly insufficient to address the scale and complexity of emerging economic realities.

  • Artificial intelligence and digital technologies are transforming industries, labour markets, and service-delivery models.
  • Climate transition policies are reshaping infrastructure, manufacturing, transportation, and energy systems.
  • Labour shortages and demographic pressures are altering workforce dynamics across multiple sectors.
  • New forms of entrepreneurship and digital commerce are changing how economic value is created and distributed.

At the same time, communities across Quebec are seeking ways to strengthen economic resilience, improve workforce participation, and attract investment. The Roadmap emphasizes that these challenges cannot be addressed effectively through fragmented interventions alone. Instead, economic success increasingly depends upon the ability to coordinate assets, align stakeholders and integrate workforce systems. That economic success also relies on being able to strengthen regional collaboration, mobilize investment, support commercialization, and build scalable implementation environments capable of responding to economic transformation.

This is particularly important for the English-speaking Community of Quebec, which operates across multiple regions and sectors while functioning within a minority-language context. The Roadmap recognizes that for the OLMCQ, collaboration is not merely beneficial. It is strategically necessary.

What Readers Can Expect

While the Roadmap itself will contain extensive implementation-oriented material, readers should not expect a conventional policy report filled with abstract recommendations or disconnected project descriptions. The forthcoming document is intentionally designed as a practical implementation framework. Readers can expect the Roadmap to explore:

  • The major forces shaping Quebec’s economy.
  • The structural conditions affecting long-term economic participation.
  • The role of collaborative Ventures in economic development, and the implementation pathways required to transform opportunity into measurable economic activity.

The document will also introduce a series of Collaborative Economic Development Ventures organized around opportunities emerging in major sectors and economic drivers emerging across Quebec’s economy. These Ventures are not presented as isolated initiatives, but as interconnected components of a broader collaborative implementation architecture.

At its core, the Roadmap seeks to answer a practical question: How can existing assets, institutions, workforce capacity, entrepreneurial activity, technologies, relationships, and inter-regional participation be better organized and coordinated to generate stronger and more sustainable economic outcomes across Quebec?

Looking Ahead

The launch of the 2026–2028 Collaborative Economic Development Roadmap will mark an important milestone in CEDEC’s long-term efforts to strengthen the participation and contributions of the English-speaking community in Quebec’s evolving economy. It signals an important transition: from discussion to implementation.

CEDEC will continue to share information about the launch process, stakeholder engagement activities, and opportunities for organizations, businesses, institutions, communities, and partners to participate in the next phase of this work.

The Roadmap is coming. And with it comes a new conversation about collaboration, economic participation, implementation, the future of prosperity in Quebec, and the OLMCQ’s critical contribution.