Benjamin Bergen and the business of keeping Canada in the picture

Benjamin Bergen began his new job by leaving the office. Newly appointed chief executive of the Canadian Venture Capital & Private Equity Association, he announced a listening tour, with Halifax first on the itinerary. For someone hired to speak for an industry, it was a useful opening gesture: before taking the microphone, find out what the people paying for the microphone actually want to say.

He had arrived at CVCA on January 5, 2026, after nearly a decade at the Council of Canadian Innovators. The move placed him among fund managers and investors, following years spent working with the companies they might finance. His route had changed. The recurring concern was familiar: how does a Canadian business become large enough to compete internationally while keeping a meaningful share of its success in Canada?

That question can sound abstract until a company has to hire somebody, win a contract or close a financing round. Bergen’s career has developed around those moments. His work involves getting the company’s problem into a government conversation, then trying to make something useful happen after everyone has finished agreeing that innovation is important.

Sixteen companies need a voice

Bergen was born in Winnipeg and raised in Vancouver. At the University of Toronto, he studied economics and political science, earning a B.A. The combination suits the work that followed: one discipline asks how resources move; the other asks who gets to write the rules. His professional life has kept him within conversational distance of both.

He entered politics early, running in Toronto’s 2010 municipal election while pursuing his studies. Later he worked for Chrystia Freeland, and before that advised Glen Murray, the former Winnipeg mayor and Ontario transportation minister. Immigration, transportation and urban development were among the files in his early government work. He brought that experience to a business council whose members needed someone who understood the other side of the meeting table.

CCI had been created in 2015 by technology CEOs, with Jim Balsillie and John Ruffolo among its founders. Bergen joined in March 2016 as its first employee and executive director. Dana O’Born and Patrick Searle joined the founding team in the months that followed. There were 16 member companies at the start, enough to have shared concerns but still a small group in a large national policy conversation.

A recurring early concern was specialized talent. A growing company might have customers and financing, yet struggle to recruit the people required to deliver its product. CCI made access to global talent its first national campaign, working with then-immigration minister John McCallum and federal officials. That advocacy helped prepare the ground for the Global Talent Stream. It was an early demonstration that organizing founders could produce a practical policy result.

The council also began bringing CEOs to Ottawa. Its first Canada’s CEO Summit in 2016 gathered approximately 50 company leaders for meetings with ministers, parliamentarians and officials. A founder could explain a problem directly, rather than hope that a summary survived its journey through several offices. For an organization dedicated to access, getting people into the room became part of the method.

By February 2022, Bergen’s title had changed to president. O’Born became vice-president of strategy and advocacy, while the organization’s government-relations presence extended into Quebec, Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia. At his departure, CCI represented more than 175 Canadian-headquartered technology companies. He moved onto its board, and Searle became CEO in 2026. The first employee left the daily work to a team he had helped assemble.

The value behind the invention

In April 2017, Bergen published an essay about Canada’s difficulty turning startups into companies able to compete globally. His argument concentrated on talent, capital and customers. Governments, he argued, needed a working relationship with growing technology firms and a better understanding of the economy those firms occupied. Starting a company was only one part of the national challenge.

The concern runs through his subsequent public work. Research creates knowledge. Commercialization turns some of that knowledge into products people buy. Ownership determines who benefits as those products become more valuable. Bergen keeps asking policy makers to follow all three stages. A country can celebrate a discovery and still have difficult questions to answer about the business built around it.

He made the point to the House of Commons science and research committee in October 2025. Public buying, he argued, could help domestic companies establish themselves. A government purchase order could then support their efforts to attract investment. His test for public spending included whether it generated intellectual property, helped commercialize it, and supported firms headquartered in Canada.

There is a plain commercial logic underneath the policy vocabulary. An actual customer gives a company something to build against. It also gives a prospective investor evidence beyond a promising presentation. Government procurement is therefore part of Bergen’s growth argument, alongside research support and financing. The unglamorous purchase order gets a place at the table with the invention.

AI needs somewhere to grow

The arrival of another AI-policy discussion gave Bergen a new setting for that argument. In 2025, he participated in the federal AI-strategy task force. In an October article written with CCI’s Laurent Carbonneau, he argued that Canada’s research contributions had not translated into equivalent commercial leadership. Their proposed response concentrated on building Canadian AI companies and helping them reach scale.

His recommendations included Canadian-controlled compute and cloud capacity, alongside access to talent, capital and customers. The emphasis was consistent with the older CCI agenda, applied to technology with particularly demanding infrastructure requirements. Research ability mattered. So did the commercial and physical conditions in which a company would use it.

When discussing the consultation process in 2026, Bergen pointed toward execution: procurement arrangements that produce customers, capital and tax policies that support scaling and intellectual-property retention, and decisions about compute, power and data. These are his policy prescriptions. Their attraction, within his argument, is that they give officials concrete decisions to make after the consultation closes.

He also became a founding board member of the Canadian SHIELD Institute and joined Digital Journal’s editorial advisory committee in 2025. The latter role put him alongside advisers including Kamales Lardi, Terry Rock and Kirstine Stewart. His stated interests included procurement and economic sovereignty. Managing IP included him in its 2025 list of 50 influential people in intellectual property, recognition of a subject that had become central to his public work.

A new constituency, a familiar question

CVCA announced Bergen’s appointment in December 2025. The association had represented private-capital investors since 1974, combining advocacy with market research and activities connecting its members. For Bergen, moving there meant addressing the financing side of company growth directly, across venture capital and private equity. It also meant listening to a broader set of investment businesses than the technology CEOs he had represented at CCI.

“Private capital is central to building the companies and industries that drive growth across the country.”Benjamin Bergen / December 2025

By March 2026, CVCA was urging Ottawa to direct a $750 million startup funding program toward funds capable of leading substantial growth-stage rounds. The position reflected a concern about whether Canadian funds were large enough to finance expanding businesses. Bergen’s public case linked access to that capital with where a company’s future economic gains would land.

Meanwhile, the listening tour took him through Halifax, Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Kitchener-Waterloo and Montreal. In his account of the first hundred days, he described testing what he believed against what members told him. Their priorities included advocacy, research, programming and stronger connections. They also wanted the association to tell more of the stories about the companies its members backed.

He described the private-capital community as relatively small, with people who had co-invested and built friendships over decades. Ahead of Invest Canada in May, he highlighted a new program matching general partners with limited partners. That attention to introductions fits the job: a policy argument may require a minister, while a fund manager looking for a capital commitment requires somebody else entirely.

The work before the handshake

His first year at CVCA also took him to the Gulf. In a public account of his UAE visit, Bergen described an unexpected reversal: the investors he met were making Canada’s case to him. They wanted exposure to high-growth Canadian companies alongside the funds already backing them. He connected those conversations with the requests he had heard from members for more active work attracting capital.

In September, CVCA convened the Canadian Global Growth Forum in Toronto, bringing international investors together with Canadian managers and company builders. Bergen called the approach Canada plus: keep the United States as an integral partner while developing additional investment and trading relationships. His interest in Canadian ownership did not require Canadian companies to stay within Canadian borders.

“First there’s trust, then there’s capital, and then there’s trade.”Benjamin Bergen / September 2026

Days before the forum, he used a LinkedIn post to credit CVCA’s Stephanie Lewis for the event work: registration lists, floor plans, visiting delegations and the small decisions participants feel when something goes wrong. He acknowledged how much she had built before he arrived. It was a revealing choice of detail in a week concerned with enormous pools of money. Somebody still has to decide where everyone sits.

Bergen’s ambition for the gathering was to see introductions turn into visible investments. That is a fair test of the work he has chosen. Over a decade, he helped turn a small council of companies into a national voice. His next chapter asks whether the relationships he helps assemble can give Canadian businesses more room to grow, and more reasons to keep building from home.