From federal modernization to municipal scale

Earlier this month, the Government of Canada launched Digital Transformation Canada (DTC) with a mandate that should be closely watched by municipalities, technology companies and anyone working to modernize public services.

DTC is being created by bringing together Shared Services Canada with selected digital functions from the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, Public Services and Procurement Canada, and the Canadian Digital Service. Its mandate is to change how the federal government develops, buys and uses technology.

Leading that work is Patrick Pichette, the former global CFO of Google, who has more than 30 years of experience spanning technology, finance and organizational transformation.

But what is most important about DTC is the model behind it. The federal government describes its priorities in this way:

“Scale shared solutions across government to reduce duplication and operating costs, making better use of emerging technologies such as AI, strengthening Canada’s digital sovereignty and security, and improving Canadians’ experience with federal services.

Equip public servants with more modern, secure tools to reduce administrative burden, improve efficiency, and help departments focus on delivering their core programs and services.

Use the Government of Canada’s purchasing power more strategically to help Canadian digital and AI companies test, scale, and commercialise new technologies – creating opportunities for Canadian firms to grow at home and compete globally.”

While defined at the federal level, these three priorities could easily become the cornerstone for the next phase of municipal digital transformation. One Ontario has been working toward many of the same objectives through the modernization of planning and building approvals.

The timing matters. Municipalities are already adopting digital permitting systems, AI-assisted review tools, applicant-facing pre-checks and new forms of automation. This is no longer a hypothetical transition.

The choices being made now will determine whether those investments connect and scale, or whether we recreate the fragmented systems of the past with a new generation of technology.

1. Scale shared solutions instead of duplicating them

This may be the most important part of DTC's mandate.

Across Ontario, hundreds of municipalities are solving many of the same underlying technology problems independently. They may have different local policies and workflows, but they rely on common provincial legislation, similar development information, overlapping regulatory requirements and many of the same professional participants.

Our recent chapter in Digital Transformation of Building Permitting examined precisely this problem. While Ontario has made substantial progress digitizing planning and building-permit processes, meaningful modernization requires more than moving individual processes online. It requires shared infrastructure, standardized data, interoperability and greater coordination across municipalities.

If every municipality independently structures its regulatory information, builds its own data mappings, develops its own AI workflows and integrates another isolated set of tools, we will have digitized the fragmentation rather than solved it, while also incurring a massive duplication of procurement and development costs.

One Ontario's AI for Housing Coalition is taking a different approach.

The pieces being developed are not separate experiments. They are components of the same architecture, built on a standardized, shareable foundation that can then be configured around the needs of individual municipalities, applicants and other users.

LandLogic, One Ontario's technology partner, has spent years building the standardized land, zoning, planning and property intelligence layer underneath that system. On top of it, the coalition is developing capabilities for identifying requirements, supporting regulatory and compliance review, navigating applications and coordinating workflows. Many of these capabilities are already being used or deployed through municipal and industry initiatives.

The experience can be customized, but the foundation does not have to be rebuilt every time. That is what scaling shared solutions should mean at the municipal level.

2. Give public servants better tools

DTC’s second priority is to reduce administrative burden and help public servants focus on their core responsibilities. That same principle should guide municipal AI adoption.

These capabilities are no longer theoretical. Applicant-facing tools can already help residents and professionals understand requirements before they submit. Conversational AI can guide users through property-specific questions. Structured land and regulatory data can reduce repeated searching and interpretation, while AI-assisted compliance tools can surface issues for professional review.

The goal is not to replace municipal professionals. It is to give them better information and better tools so they can spend less time on repetitive administrative work and more time on the decisions that require their judgment.

3. Use public investment to build Canadian capability

DTC's third priority should receive more attention at the municipal level. Canada is explicitly saying that government purchasing should also help Canadian digital and AI companies test, scale and commercialize technology while strengthening Canadian digital sovereignty.

Municipal permitting presents a real opportunity to apply that principle. There are already digital permitting technologies being implemented across Canada, including solutions developed internationally. But as these systems move beyond electronic document submission and increasingly incorporate regulatory intelligence, AI and automated workflows, Canada should prioritize building and adopting domestic capability.

Planning policies, Building Code requirements and land-use regulation are fundamentally Canadian public infrastructure. The knowledge required to digitize, interpret and govern them exists here. And Canada should retain ownership and control over its own data.

One Ontario's goal is to bring those pieces together around a Canadian-built foundation that can be proven locally and scaled.

Municipalities have an opportunity to lead

Municipal digital transformation is already underway, but the DTC mandate offers a useful model for how to do it well: share what can be shared, reduce duplication, equip staff with better tools, and invest in technology that can scale.

For municipalities, there is a real advantage to moving early. Early adopters have the opportunity to shape these systems around the realities of municipal work, such as real workflows, staff constraints, regulatory responsibilities and resident needs, rather than adapting later to technology designed without that input.

They can also avoid paying repeatedly for capabilities that other municipalities need too. Shared foundations allow individual municipalities to focus their investment on what is genuinely local, while benefiting from technology, infrastructure and lessons that can be reused across jurisdictions.

That is the opportunity in front of municipalities now: be among the first to put the DTC principles into practice at the local level, help define the technology through real-world use, and demonstrate how a shared approach can deliver better services at lower cost.