It has a number of different mechanisms at its disposal. One area is academic funding; that could be a focus. Training initiatives through Employment and Skills Development Canada offer another. There are also the labour market agreements with the provinces, other relationships with post-secondary institutions, and simply leading the conversation with the business community and rallying the tech community and driving this as an element in Canada's overall approach to the digital economy or knowledge-based government—whatever kind of wrapper you would want to put around it.
Those routes would be open. Access to data is a fundamental part of it, but it isn't sufficient. Skills, insight, and the ability to use the data describe the direction in which we really need to go.