Daniel Perry is Director of Federal Affairs at the Council of Canadian Innovators (CCI), where he leads national advocacy on behalf of Canada's high-growth scale-up companies. Named to The Hill Times' Top 100 Lobbyists for 2026, he has testified this year before three House of Commons standing committees — Industry and Technology, Finance, and Citizenship and Immigration — each time making the same case: capital, customers, talent, and sectoral strategy aren't separate policy files, they're one connected problem. He holds a Master of Political Management from Carleton University and has written a bi-weekly political column for the Niagara-Hamilton Independent since 2021.

The conversation turns to risk. Perry shares the story of a CCI member who couldn't crack Canadian capital, flew to San Francisco, and closed a deal with an investor over drinks at the airport bar — a deal they said would have taken six to eight months at home. He is candid about the branch-plant economy, where Canadians become the worker bees while the real value flows elsewhere, and why every foreign investment should face one question: where does the IP live? When CCI loses members, he says, it's usually because a US acquirer or investor pulls the leadership team south.

On healthcare, Perry calls it a national security asset. He points to CCI's Care at Scale report, which estimates that better, more portable health data could save up to $2.4 billion a year, and warns that Canadian health data stored on foreign servers can be reached by foreign governments — making Canadian-built "maple stack" infrastructure a sovereignty issue. He closes with CCI's budget priorities: a Canadian QSBS, a startup visa, a Buy Canada policy that supports genuinely Canadian companies rather than those Canadian in name only, and a reminder, borrowed from Red Green, that we're all in this together — but duct tape won't fix it this time.

This is Breaking Innovation Paralysis: research for a book on why Canada keeps losing the cures, capital, and companies it builds. Not a promotional platform, an honest look at the structural gaps: inertia, risk aversion, and diffusion of responsibility.

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