For Canada’s public sector, 2025 was a year of perseverance. We saw many CFOs and finance leaders skillfully navigate a confluence of issues at the community, provincial, federal and global level. More will need to be done in 2026

The theme of BMO’s recent Ontario Public Sector Symposium was “Banking on Efficiencies.” By cultivating a deeper understanding of the issues and supporting actionable ideas within leaders’ control, we hope to contribute to the resilience of the sector.

To support our audience of finance leaders from across Ontario’s public sector, BMO hosted three panel discussions, covering macroeconomics and politics, digitization of the CFO function, and sustainability.

For those not able to join the conversation in person, below is a summary of the insights.

Economic and political risks are reshaping the global landscape and funding available for public sector organizations.

Roshni Patel, Managing Director, Public Sector (Ontario), BMO Commercial Bank, moderated a panel discussion on the intersection of the current economic and political environment.

Michael Gregory, BMO’s Deputy Chief Economist, began delivering an overview of the macroeconomic environment. Jason Lietaer, President of Enterprise Canada, discussed the political backdrop. The three then engaged in a roundtable discussion.

Gregory kicked off his presentation by summing up what's happening in the Canadian and Ontario economies in one phrase: treading water. "For both the Ontario and Canadian economies, we're not sinking, but we're not moving swimmingly, either,” he said.

However, Gregory believes conditions should improve as we close out the year. “I think the fourth quarter is looking better just because of lower interest rates, and Ontario is a very interest rate-sensitive economy. On average, you're probably looking at growth this year to be flat for Ontario, and up maybe 0.5% for Canada. But I think momentum is starting to build.”

In Lietaer’s presentation on the political front, he noted that the federal budget focuses largely on four areas: housing, infrastructure, defense and productivity. “If you're not one of those four things in Ottawa right now, you're on the 3% to 10% cut train. So, if you're dealing with the public sector, you have to ask, am I in one of the money areas or am I not? And that should determine how you operate and what your goals might be over the next couple of years, because money's going to be tight for the next little bit.”

The wide-ranging panel discussion touched on one area that could directly impact the public sector: healthcare.

Ontario's healthcare system is under significant strain from service delivery and funding challenges. Lietaer remarked on the government's priorities and what the future of healthcare in Ontario looks like.

“The federal budget doesn't see healthcare as a growth area,” he said.

From the Ontario perspective, Lietaer said the provincial government is alarmed by spiraling costs of hospital-based care and is trying to transition to a community- and home-based system. “They had a fall economic statement recently. There was about $1 billion in healthcare spending; almost all of it went to the home care sector. Expect more private delivery of publicly funded services.”

Given the new economic and political realities, it’s clear that public sector companies will need creative solutions to make their operations more efficient.

Digitization is one of the most in-demand topics among our clients across Canada. It impacts structural costs, fraud and cyber resilience, employee engagement, and revenue. Importantly, it’s something clients can control.

Our panelists were deeply experienced in the tools to support digitization and their implementation in the Public Sector —Rebecca Tascona, BMO’s Head, North American Treasury & Payments Solutions Product Management and Payments Modernization; Ryan Kinghorn, Senior Consultant, Payment Optimization & Strategy, BMO; and Darrell MacMullin, Senior Vice President of Product and Solutions, Mastercard.

Kinghorn began by addressing the obstacles and opportunities for public sector companies looking to adjust their payment flows. “It’s thinking holistically, and it goes beyond treasury and accounts payable,” he said. “It includes procurement, looking at the whole-system engineering of how are you going to market? What payment terms are you offering? Why are you doing that? And are the tools that you're using aligning with them? But if you don't have a strategy and you don't have participation cross-functionally, often there's just no visibility or willpower to do that, so you're left floating on an island.”

From MacMullin’s perspective, securing transactions end to end is one of the key pillars. “As we've gone from a paperless world to a much more digital world, the infiltration and the uniqueness and creativity of fraud is a bit of an arms race. We always want to optimize securing authentication of all these different transactions and connection points.”

Tascona outlined the digitization technologies available, such as payment APIs. “It's about helping clients embed our payment ecosystem directly into their ecosystem,” she said. “If you have a client-facing website where you’d like to collect your receivables, your tech team can take our code and embed it directly into your client experiences. That's going to be game-changing for many of our clients because it's real time. We have APIs that are launching that are also about real-time data about your accounts so that you don't have to wait until end of day. Pretty soon, no one's going to have the patience to wait until next day, and that future is here now within Canada.”

To close out the session, the panelists each offered one actionable idea for companies to think about when it comes to digitization.

Tascona: “Pull your teams together and come up with what's driving them crazy. The wall of ridiculousness is what I would call it. That can be your starting point to say, these are things that they find really inefficient or they're asking, why do we still do it this way?”

MacMullin: “Identify where you think you can deploy virtual cards today. Do you know within your existing AP who accepts virtual cards? That way, you don't have to convince several of your suppliers to use them right out of the gate. That's probably a very easy, quick win.”

Kinghorn: “Cross-functional teamwork. Is this value flowing through all of the stakeholders in your company? Get everybody at the table talking about what success looks like as an organization and not in silos.”

Canada’s public sector is innovating new approaches to build sustainability into core operations despite funding challenges.

James Burrow, Director of Sustainable Finance, BMO moderated this panel discussion on trade-offs, technologies and financing models to create a lasting impact. Offering their insights were Ron Saporta, Chief Operating Officer, University of Toronto; Young Lee, CFO, The Hospital for Sick Children; Randy Topp, Senior Vice President of Energy Services, Ainsworth; and Stuart Galloway, Senior Vice President of Investment, SOFIAC.

There was a lot of discussion about change during the symposium. Technological change, economic change, political change, and the change in the environment for sustainability initiatives.

As Burrow noted, holding a panel about sustainability four years ago wouldn’t seem out of the ordinary. “All of our politicians were talking about net zero, the need to combat climate change, and no corporate worth its salt would be without a net zero pledge.”

But things have changed. In the current economic environment, topics like affordability, housing supply and tariffs are all top of mind, not necessarily how to reach net zero. Yet, the challenge of sustainability remains. The question is: how do public sector organizations navigate sustainability commitments in a much different environment? The goal of the conversation was to offer practical advice about how to make progress when there are so many other competing priorities.

Given the new economic and political realities, it can be difficult to rationalize the need to focus on sustainability. For Saporta and the University of Toronto, it was a combination of meeting customer demands, mitigating operational risk and cutting costs. Also, in this new environment, the key is to continue unlocking sustainability benefits without making difficult financial trade-offs or incurring the high price tag of a major capital project.

Topp cited AI as a tool for accomplishing this goal. “Desktop energy audits will allow you to identify possible measures to reduce your carbon footprint,” he said. “You feed it your energy data, your equipment lists, possibly building automation sequences and so forth, and it gives you a possibility of what those measures are. You’ll need to send in energy engineers and analysts to identify precisely what it is, but the use of these AI desktop energy audits gives you a running start.”

Lee noted that even small steps can make a difference. “The way we’ve paid for it to date largely has been through some creativity and generating quick wins that generate actual internal return,” he said. “So yes, we invest in modernizing our waste management strategy. But we do other things like digitization, which includes simple things like reducing paper. Things that actually result in cost savings and energy savings.”

For Galloway, it’s about focusing on reducing costs in a way that results in sustainability wins. “It's more than just looking at the carbon footprint. We always know there's a finite amount of money in the system, specifically for the public sector. But if you're saving money between your assets, you're getting rid of backlog maintenance, and you're wiping out your capital replacement program, then you’re actually saving money on the bottom line.”

Saporta also noted that the University of Toronto takes a creative approach to the procurement process for its sustainability projects. “We engage the market in a different way. It’s more outcomes-based and focused on performance guarantees. We basically went out to the market and said, here's what we would do. How can you do it faster, cheaper or better? And the market responded phenomenally well. Capital costs came in 30% to 40% less than we projected.”

The depth of insight at the symposium was very encouraging and left everyone with a sense of confidence that there were actionable steps within their control.

Symposiums are only the start of mobilizing a large complex public sector organization. BMO’s dedicated team of public sector and functional experts are available to help clients like you unlock efficiencies.