A New Relationship with Business

The Ontario Government and Ontario businesses share important common goals: to protect the public from harm, create jobs, and foster a more innovative and prosperous province.

As a government, we must go beyond “routine” consultations to proactive and collaborative engagements with business in both the design and implementation of our policies and services. Together, government and business must develop an open, responsive and collaborative relationship that can deliver economic opportunities and growth. We must work together to achieve our common goals.
 
Communication, consultation and collaboration are the cornerstones of Open for Business’ approach, and province-wide stakeholder input is being actively sought to ensure that the needs of the business community are more fully understood and reflected in our work.

Over the next two years, Open for Business will:

• Continue to meet with business to share information, consult on proposed initiatives and solutions, and engage in joint problem-solving
• Proactively share information about business needs within and across government
• Establish new opportunities to bring business and government together
• Work within government to identify practical ways to respond to business needs as quickly as possible
• Model new behaviours and help create a bridge between government and business that leads to a new relationship that will yield lasting change.

Four Key Initiatives
Open for Business’ consultations with business associations have consistently highlighted that we need to engage business in a fundamentally different way. Building on this feedback and the experience of other jurisdictions, Open for Business has identified four key initiatives to establish the approach, tools, capacity and knowledge required to build a new relationship with business:

• Establishing guidelines for engaging business
• Creating new business feedback mechanisms
• Evaluating and continuously improving our relationship with business
• Building capacity within Government