Section 2: 2025-2028 Strategy

The AGCO’s new Strategic Plan will guide our organization as we continue to provide world-class regulation to growing sectors with greater public impact. Aligned with our vision and mandate, this plan sets out the goals, initiatives, and outcomes that will lead the AGCO’s focus over the next three years. The AGCO is committed to fulfilling the Government of Ontario’s priorities and direction and will ensure that our goals reflect their expectations to continue to be innovative, sustainable and accountable.

To ensure that the AGCO achieves its goals, ten strategic initiatives have been established to further guide decision-making and prioritization of resources across the agency. Each strategic initiative has key outcomes to guide the agency’s progress for the three years of the plan.

Our Strategic Plan will help us achieve our vision of being a world-class regulator that is innovative, proactive, inclusive, and socially responsible.

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Further mature our strategies and approaches for combatting illegal markets and enhance proactive harm reduction programs and processes.

Advance the reduction of red-tape and unnecessary regulatory burden, expand our support of innovation in regulated sectors, and increase agility in responding to evolving market trends and needs.

Continue to utilize modern operating models and advance our capabilities, tools and systems in a way that builds digital technology into our core work, providing streamlined and increasingly helpful services to our stakeholders.

Build and strengthen the talent and skills of our team to offer leading services to stakeholders, while championing a culture of diversity, inclusion and accessibility.

Goals

Reduce the Risk of Harm

Reducing the risk of harm is central to the AGCO’s purpose and mandate. By prioritizing proactive harm reduction and a strong approach to combatting illegal markets, we are focused on assuring Ontarians that our markets are safe and responsible, while also supporting our legal operators and licensees by leveraging key partnerships to eliminate illicit actors.

The AGCO will bolster its proactive approach to monitoring emerging risks across sectors through robust harm reduction frameworks and standards. This includes deepening our collaboration and partnership with social responsibility, public health, and law enforcement stakeholders to enhance strategies to eliminate illegal markets and protect minors and communities.

Foster Industry Sustainability and Innovation

The AGCO is focused on fostering competitive, safe, and fair markets that balance robust regulatory oversight with competitive markets that bear minimal regulatory burden and offer expanded consumer choice. We are committed to identifying and advocating for the removal of regulatory barriers, expanding our support of innovation in regulated sectors, and strengthening our operational readiness to be responsive to evolving market trends and needs.

Our regulatory frameworks are key enablers to facilitating innovation and healthy participation in our markets. By identifying and responding to emerging needs and mitigating risks, we put customers at the centre of our programs and are committed to providing services that reduce unnecessary burdens on businesses while maintaining a focus on social responsibility.

Strengthen Our Organizational Foundation

As our existing sectors evolve and diversify and new sectors emerge, the AGCO remains committed to adapting our operational approaches and building upon our strength as an agile regulator. This commitment extends to building an organization foundation that reflects the same focus on outcomes, efficiency, and innovation that the AGCO uses in its regulatory approach.

We will enhance our decision-making and governance frameworks to support the adoption of increasingly responsive operating models that meet the needs of our stakeholders while driving organizational excellence and regulatory effectiveness.

Digital enablement of the AGCO’s strategic goals and continued integration of technology into our core work and culture is a key focus of the organization. Our increasingly digitized operating models improve our performance by creating efficiencies, streamline how we interact with our stakeholders, and enable the AGCO to leverage data to support and inform decision-making. This ensures new initiatives and service updates accurately reflect the needs of our stakeholders and provides an array of sophisticated tools to monitor and assess compliance programs, market trends, and customer and employee satisfaction.

Attract, Retain and Develop Our People

Our people play a key role in ensuring the AGCO remains a leading regulator with modern, efficient and effective processes. To ensure our work environment embodies the agility with which we regulate, we will further build and invest in the talent and capabilities of our team to offer best-in-class services to our customers and stakeholders.

By being open to new ways of working, prioritizing employee well-being, and ensuring our values translate into our culture, we will attract and retain top talent with in-demand skills and help build an optimal workplace culture to deliver on our mandate. In doing so, we are committed to establishing a team reflective of Ontario’s demographic diversity, prioritizing inclusiveness, and fostering a workplace that is increasingly free of discrimination and harassment.

Enterprise Strategic Initiatives & Three-Year Outcomes
 

Performance Measurement

The AGCO has developed a series of outcome-based performance measures to evaluate our efforts and assess alignment with the goals set out in our Strategic Plan. These measures offer insight into our overall direction, highlight successes and identify emerging risks, enable data driven decision-making, and strengthen our ability to be agile and drive continuous improvement in a dynamic environment. We will prioritize collecting and analyzing new data sets to establish baselines where needed to enable this critical element of our plan.

*Note: Targets to be updated once baselines established. All baselines will be established by end of 2025-2026 fiscal year.