Sean Mullin

I work at the intersection of economics, public policy and technology.

I am trained as a professional economist, with degrees from the University of Toronto and McGill. I also have an MBA from Oxford.

I like to build things and work on complex problems -- with the goal of having a positive impact on the world.

Over my career, I have:

• Served as the lead economic advisor to the Prime Minister of Canada. I helped create and launch Canada's package of clean economy tax credits, Canada's national housing plan, increased science funding, reset Canada's immigration strategy and launched Canada's sovereign AI compute strategy. I was also a member of the Canada-US Energy Transformation Task Force.
• Founded and ran a think tank focused on Canada's innovation economy. Our amazing team worked on hard topics ranging from forecasting employment demand to 2030, identifying Canada's scale-ups and how to help them, profiling Canada's tech workforce, the impact of automation on Canada's workforce -- and what to do about it, what policymakers should know about AI, and many others. (Note: In 2023, the Brookfield Institute merged with a sister organization and became The Dais Institute.)
• Helped launch a venture capital fund focused on linking corporate Canada to the country's most promising startups.
• Served as lead economic advisor and head of the policy team for the Premier of Ontario, where I worked on six provincial Budgets, created Ontario's first long-term energy plan with a heavy emphasis on renewables, and helped design and implement comprehensive tax reform. (Here is a great account of why HST reforms were successful in Ontario and not in B.C.)

I have also served on a number of boards and expert groups, including Woodgreen Community Services (2016-2023), Palette Skills (2017-2021), the CRA Expert Panel on Service (2018-2022), the C.D. Howe Task Force on the Digital Economy (2021-2022), the Ryerson Public Policy Task Force (2021) and the Ontario Chamber of Commerce Task Force on Scaling up Business (2016).

I started my career focused on technology, studying computer science (along with economics) at the University of Toronto and working at a (now defunct) Canadian technology company.