Today, the city of Fredericton styles itself the “Knowledge Capital” of Atlantic Canada, a region made up of four eastern provinces that border on the ocean. The name reflects the city’s impressive higher education sector – but also an Intelligent Community journey that has lasted more than three decades and shows no sign of stopping.
From Decline to Crisis
It was in 1992 that the city led creation of a Vision 2000 economic development strategy through in-depth collaboration among city, business and educational leaders. It was partly a response to decades of stagnation, as economic power concentrated in Canada’s geographic center. In those days, so many people departed the province in search of opportunity that Frederictonians gave a name to their brain drain: “goin’ down the road.”
It was also triggered by a more immediate crisis. Fredericton is the capital of the province of New Brunswick and public-sector employment long softened the impact of the province’s broader economic decline. Then in the mid-1980s, the Canadian federal government began running large deficits. It responded by offloading public costs onto provincial and municipal governments. By the 1990s, Fredericton found itself with a government that was too costly, a private sector too anemic to support it, and a doubtful future.
Designing a Future
The Vision 2000 strategy called on Fredericton to build an economy based on its unique human and economic assets. To kickstart that, it envisioned a major investment in digital infrastructure. But the private-sector telecommunications industry was not prepared to help. After fruitless attempts to attract investment, the city decided to create its own telco, called e-Novations, and built a fiber network funded by twelve members including the city, the University of New Brunswick, businesses and a regional ISP. Each paid for a minimum guaranteed bandwidth and the ability to tap unused capacity on demand. The members saw immediate cost savings while the network rapidly achieved positive cash flow. Commercial carriers finally went where their former customers had led by joining e-Novations and buying capacity for resale.
Using the fiber as backbone, the city built Canada’s first free Wi-FI network, dubbed Fred-eZone, in 2003, and the mayor gained headlines with his quote that “We don’t charge you to walk on our sidewalks. Why would we charge you for broadband?” Innovation in connectivity has continued since then. Fredericton has upgraded Wi-Fi speeds, deployed a LoRa network for IoT and developed partnerships with fiber networks spanning the Atlantic provinces and reaching into the US. In 2020, Rogers Communications made a major investment in 5G in Fredericton, giving the city bragging rights as the first 5G city in Atlantic Canada.
A Home for Knowledge Industries
The downsizing of government had an unintended consequence. It liberated the best and brightest of its civil servants to be recruited by private investors or funded by government programs to start knowledge-based businesses in technology and services. The timing was good, because the Vision 2000 plan also sparked development of Knowledge Park by city and provincial government and UNB. The first building was completed in 1995. It has since grown to six buildings on a 35-acre campus, with a new Cyber Centre to meet the needs of the fast-growing cybersecurity and defense sector. Tenants range from Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, Deloitte and Siemens to startups in a broad range of fields, many of them the product of Planet Hatch, an incubator created by the Park that pairs UNB students with local businesses to work through innovation challenges. An experiential learning program for students created by Planet Hatch and UNB led to the university being recognized by the nonprofit Startup Canada in 2015 as Canada’s most entrepreneurial.
UNB is Canada’s oldest English-language university and is known for its computer science, engineering and forestry programs. It also delivers entrepreneurial education and operates an energy-focused accelerator. It is partnered by the Fredericton campus of New Brunswick Community College (NBCC), which offers programs in business administration, civil engineering technology, health, IT and social sciences.
Together, the Park, UNB and NBCC anchor an innovation district that gathers more than 60 institutes and research centers within a 2-kilometer radius. Their work encompasses cybersecurity, IT, 5G, biomedical engineering, space science, forestry and nuclear energy, from the IBM Center for Advanced Studies to the Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity, Atlantic Forestry Centre and Canadian Nuclear Energy Research.
Making Growth Pay Off for Citizens
Decades of effort paid off for the local economy – so much so that, in 2016, the city saw the need to give citizens a voice in deciding how to manage residential and employment growth over the next 25 years. Imagine Fredericton, as the visioning project was called, engaged the public through open houses, online tools, countless one-on-one conversations and a three-day City Summit. From these consultations and engagements, city staff developed, and City Council adopted, a new municipal plan and growth strategy, aptly named Imagine Fredericton.
It became official policy in 2020 – just in time for the COVID 19 pandemic, which became every local government’s top priority for the next three years. Despite that, from 2022 to 2023, Fredericton earned a place among Canada’s top 10 fastest growing municipalities, which was triple the rate projected in its previous growth strategy. Part of the credit goes to Digital Fredericton, an award-winning strategic transformation project that moved core government systems to the cloud for better access, built more e-government services and conducted research to identify unmet user needs they could fulfill. The project proved crucial in helping Fredericton’s government pivot to a remote workforce and responsive online government.
The project proved successful in part because the city had already been running technology pilots and adopting tech from its startup companies for a decade. This bias for innovation was formalized in a program called Boost Fredericton, in which students, industry and startups develop tech solutions for municipal challenges. This complements the work of volunteers at the Civic Tech nonprofit, who collaborate to build digital tools that address social issues uncovered by other nonprofits, from social isolation to health and food equity.
Today, Atlantic Canada’s “Knowledge Capital” is home to the largest concentration of knowledge workers in that region and 70% of the province’s knowledge-based companies, including two of Canada’s largest “exits,” in which company founders sell their successful startups to larger firms. Thirty years is not long in the life of a city, and Fredericton’s Intelligent Community journey is far from over. In fact, it may just be getting started.
In the News
Read the latest updates about Fredericton.
Population: 64,812
Labor Force: 31,505
Website: Economic Development | City of Fredericton
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