Kingston is a midsize city that is home to over 172,000 residents at the place where the Cataraqui and St. Lawrence Rivers flow into Lake Ontario. Europeans settled the area in the 1600s on First Nation lands named Katarokwi, calling it King’s Town in honor of Britain’s George III. Kingston, as it became known, went on to serve as Canada’s first capital – and that federal connection continues to this day. Kingston is home to Canadian Forces Base Kingston, Corrections Canada, the Royal Military College of Canada and various departments of the federal and provincial government.

The significant role of federal spending in the economy represents both a benefit and a risk to the city. After decades of excessive dependence on federal spending, Kingston has created innovative, diverse economy that delivers growth and hedges against policy change at the national level Kingston has planned and executed carefully to create an innovative, diverse economy that delivers growth and hedges against policy change at the national level. 

Data and Economic Development

The city-owned Utilities Kingston provides electric, water and sanitation to the city – and also operates a 1,000-kilometer dark-fiber network, supplemented by fixed wireless in hard-to-reach areas. Low cost of deployment has attracted multiple service providers to provision and manage business and residential services to customers. Business customers include global companies such as DuPont, INVISTA, Frulact, IDEXX, IPG Photonics and Umicore.

The city’s economic development strategy has centered on another of its strengths: a robust academic sector anchored by Queen's University, a top research institution, and St. Lawrence College, a leading applied-learning institution with schools of business, computer and engineering technology, health sciences, and skilled trades. Together with the Royal Military College of Canada, these institutions give Kingston the second largest talent pool in Eastern Ontario and one of the most highly educated populations in the nation.

Queen’s University serves 28,000 students, mostly undergraduate, and has Canada’s highest graduation rate at 89%, with 95% of students gaining employment within six months of graduation. Overall, the city has Canada’s highest per-capita percentage of Ph.D.s and over 42,000 students in post-secondary education. The challenge for the university and the city – which work in close partnership, guided by a formal strategy to which leaders of both organizations are committed – is to connect enough of those promising graduates to local career opportunity to benefit both them and the city.

Diversity in Innovation

To that end, Queen’s has an assistant vice president of economic development in its leadership team. It developed an Ingenuity Lab Research Institute stocked with robots and robotic components, which allow students to develop projects with commercial potential. The Queen’s Innovation Centre gives budding entrepreneurs training and support in business skills, while the Queen’s Translational Institute of Medicine (TIME) provides research, facilities, equipment and students to help small companies develop medical technologies.  TIME is currently building out a C$15 million facility for state-of-the-art research equipped with equipment that can track processes at the cellular level, deliver drugs across the blood-brain barrier, and support development of personalized medicine.

With these assets at work, the city has established a track record of success for startups and scale-ups. Octane Medical Group, a biotech company, creates production technologies to rapidly scale medical treatments. IPG Photonics, a spin-out from Queens University, created a technology that can instantly assess the quality of welding, saving substantial time and money in manufacturing. The crossroads of the startup scene is 945 Princess Street, home to coworking spaces, offices, labs and Reaction Hub, an accelerator for specialty chemical businesses formed by company founders, universities and sector nonprofits.

Creative Industries

Talent is not just for technology. Kingston operates a Film Office to support local production companies in attracting location filming and staff the resulting productions with local talent. A new animation studio is also under construction. A Music Office works to leverage the Kingston origins and decades-long career of the Canadian rock band, The Tragically Hip. Supporting its development work is a Queen’s University BA program in music, and music business training from high schools and St. Laurence College. The proximity to Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal is an advantage for local musicians because they offer a large market of music venues where musicians can perform.

Kingston complements its academic and research capacity with innovative workforce and talent initiatives. The city developed the NEST* Program, which helps relocating professionals and their families integrate into Kingston by supporting spousal employment, housing searches and community connections. The program also serves newcomers undergoing the immigration process, which has made it a vital tool for attracting and retaining global talent.

The city further supports talent attraction with its Possible Made Here and bilingual counterpart Tout Est Possible Ici platforms that provide interactive tools like job search engines, cost-of-living calculators and neighborhood quizzes. Meanwhile, the Queen’s Career Apprenticeship Program connects Arts and Science graduates with employers through subsidized, year-long apprenticeships, resulting in more than $2.7 million in new payroll and the program’s expansion into other Canadian communities and the U.S.

Fostering Community Engagement 

Kingston has made public engagement a central principle of its governance, seeking to embed transparency, trust and collaboration into its decision-making processes. The City’s Public Engagement Framework guides consistent outreach across neighborhoods and sectors, supported by digital tools that make participation more accessible. Get Involved Kingston, the city’s online hub for engagement, is among the highest-performing platforms in Canada. With more than 18,000 registered participants representing 14% of the population, it supports both local and citywide consultations, on topics ranging from park improvements to the official plan. In 2024, residents provided nearly 9,000 pieces of feedback, with participation doubling year-over-year. A 2025 consultation on a proposed sports stadium drew more than 10,000 visits and 1,450 contributions, one of the largest engagement efforts in Kingston’s history.

The city also fosters inclusion and cultural connection through targeted initiatives. The Welcome to Kingston app, developed with community partners, helps newcomers access essential services, cultural events and community organizations in 15 languages. Kingston has also prioritized reconciliation and Indigenous engagement, supporting initiatives like the Katarowki Indigenous Art and Food Market, Indigenous programming at festivals and the “Engage for Change” project to strengthen relationships with Indigenous Peoples. The Mayor records monthly city podcasts and regular video updates to provide context and more information on issues brought up at each City Council meeting. These tools and programs combine digital accessibility with cultural inclusivity, ensuring that residents are informed, connected and empowered to shape the city’s evolution.

Life, Health and Sustainability

Kingston has placed sustainability at the center of its development strategy, recognizing that long-term economic growth and community well-being depend on responsible stewardship of resources. The city was the first in Ontario to declare a climate emergency in 2019 and the first in Canada to adopt a protocol for sustainable energy procurement. Its Climate Leadership Plan sets an ambitious target of carbon neutrality by 2040 and integrates both mitigation and adaptation strategies. Planned actions span transportation, buildings and energy, waste, food systems and forestry, with initiatives including establishing LEED-certified facilities, expanding organic waste diversion, growing in local food production and planting thousands of new trees annually. Kingston is further supporting these efforts with investments in an electrified municipal fleet, including buses, Zambonis and a new electric ferry, alongside expanded EV charging stations on land and even for boats.

In 2010, the city began nine-year reconstruction of Princess Street, Kingston’s main commercial artery, to replace end-of-life utilities while separating sanitary and storm sewers to prevent overflows into Lake Ontario and flooding in downtown businesses. This complex project was phased to minimize disruption to the tourism economy, with winter construction allowing streets to reopen for summer visitors – an innovation rarely attempted in Ontario. Such work underscores Kingston’s ability to blend environmental priorities with economic and cultural vitality. Other initiatives include upgrades to wastewater treatment facilities, where waste methane fuels a generator that produces 370 kW of electricity, covering about a quarter of the plant’s needs while providing heat for buildings and digesters.

Kingston is also focusing heavily on community-driven action to advance sustainability. The Kingston Community Climate Action Fund, now in its fifth year, channels financial support and public awareness into local projects led by nonprofits and charities. In 2025, Extend-A-Family Kingston’s GrowAbility Hydroponic Greenhouse Project received support to scale two greenhouses capable of producing over 10,000 heads of lettuce annually using 90% less water than traditional farming. This initiative eliminates soil and transport emissions while strengthening local food resiliency.

Mclean’s magazine has recognized Kingston as one of the best places to live in Canada, with a thriving downtown, vibrant art and theater scene and high-class restaurant and bar district. Combining its strengths in connectivity, ongoing development of a high-skilled workforce and a well-established innovation ecosystem, Kingston is ready to adapt and prosper through the continuing waves of change crossing the world’s economy.

Population: 172,000

Labor Force: 90,000

Website: www.cityofkingston.ca, www.investkingston.ca

Kingston Tourism: http.visitkingston.ca.

Smart21 2009 | 2014 | 2025 | 2026

Top7 2014 | 2025 | 2026

Kenora is in "cottage country," where seasonal residents double the population in the summer. But the decline of forestry decimated the non-tourism economy, causing Kenora's best and brightest young people to leave town. In response, Kenora launched a Web portal strategy to leverage its 80% penetration rate for wired and wireless broadband. The goals were to make Kenora even more attractive to part-timers and visitors by providing anytime-anywhere access to services, while also supporting local business and building a broadband culture of use. Through the portal, visitors and seasonal residents can reserve facility, apply for permits and learn what's going on in town. Businesses create their own Web sites with e-commerce capabilities and promote tourism through GIS-enabled interactive search. Community groups build Web sites, recruit volunteers, solicit donations and collaborate online.

Population: 17,000

Website: www.kenora.ca

Smart21 2009

The Golden Horseshoe is the region that bends around the westernmost end of Lake Ontario in Canada. At the center of the horseshoe’s curve is Hamilton, a city of 520,000 known for industry, education and cultural diversity, having the third-largest foreign-born population in the country. Located 70 kilometers southwest of Toronto (the 2014 Intelligent Community of the Year), Hamilton was once known as the Steel Capital of Canada, producing 60% of the nation’s steel. It is also a successful lake port city and operates an airport that saw passenger traffic grow tenfold from 1996 to 2002. A 30-year economic development plan begun in 2003 set the goal of creating a massive aerotropolis industrial park around that airport to capitalize on its success.

From Steel to Fiber

Being an industrial city in the broadband economy, however, has its challenges. Its biggest steel producer nearly went bankrupt before returning to profitability in 2004. It subsequently sold out to US Steel, which sold to ArcelorMital of India.  That company made major investments in the facility, making it one of the company’s most efficient and productive plants – but one that employs a much smaller number of more highly-skilled employees. 

Hamilton’s economic development effort now focuses on playing to its 21st Century strengths. In 2014, it established HCE Telecom as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the city. The City Council was driven to make this decision by Hamilton’s major employers, who complained about unplanned outages, poor customer support and lack of responsiveness from incumbents. 

Since its start in 2015, HCE has deployed a 10-gigabit fiber network to serve city facilities, business, universities and hospitals and make the city more attractive to leading-edge employers. More than 160 Hamilton locations currently receive service, and HCE has extended connectivity to more than 600 locations across Canada.  

In March of 2017, HCE acquired Sunrise Interactive Net6, which is an organization that specializes in on-shore, near-shore, and offshore Internet solutions. HCE plans to use Sunrise’s expertise to deliver new hosting, disaster recovery, call center and data center options for the area.

Forging New Companies

City leaders have come to recognize that, in the past, the city wasted too much of potential of its universities, colleges and public schools.  These institutions have formed a collaborative initiative called Education City to brand Hamilton as a destination for academic success, to which each partner contributes programs.  The public school system has made it requirement for graduation from secondary school for students to devote 40 hours to community-building work with local nonprofits.  McMaster Innovation Park (MIP) is a 55-acre innovation and research park where technology startups are collocated with the research capabilities of McMaster University and Mohawk College. MIP is home to Innovation Factory, a regional innovation centre set up to help companies find and access resources to start technology businesses; and the Forge, an incubator-accelerator by McMaster University to help drive entrepreneurship within their students and faculty that provides training, access to prototyping and production facilities.

The city has also established a life sciences cluster called Synapse Life Sciences Consortium comprised of local hospitals, academic institutions, and private sector firms to leverage its strong hospital network and bring health research to commercialization.  Using funding from public and private sources, it has also established a Centre for Integrated Transportation and Mobility to offer business and technical advisory services to Ontario-based startups and small-to-midize companies working to commercialize connected and autonomous vehicles. 

Mohawk College has partnered with the city, the District School Board, the Hamilton-Wentworth Catholic School Board and other industry partners to start two programs to expand educational opportunity.  College in Motion places staff in various Hamilton high schools, libraries and community centers to offer information and encouragement to students consider post-secondary education.  Staffers provide one-on-one counselling and advice, including identifying students’ areas of interest and connecting them with college faculty members for further support. The City School program provides free, for-credit courses and workshops to students in poor neighborhoods, including specialized learning programs, workshops and other services. It targets school-age and older people who lack educational credentials and offers skills training in subjects from digital photography and advanced manufacturing to child development and welding.  Courses are developed in close collaboration with neighborhood champions who help shape the local offerings and help residents gain access to them. The program launched a mobile classroom with over 1,000 square feet of learning space including carpentry and welding stations in the fall of 2017 to bring education to disadvantaged neighborhoods.  Delivered by Mohawk College staff, the courses are designed to break down fears of the educational system, provide a base level of skills – but also to create an “on-ramp” to programs at Mohawk, where students can earn an associate’s degree and substantially increase their earning potential.  The success of the program has led Hamilton’s Community Access & Engagement team to present it at conferences across Canada. 

Creating New Land

With a lack of new land for development, Hamilton has focused on remediation of industrial brownfield sites. Through an innovative program called ERASE, it offers financial incentives to companies to clean up and repurpose polluted sites. The city has approved hundreds of development grant applications worth more than C$20 million. Redevelopment underway has generated C$3 million in construction and created 650 jobs.

The city has also focused its efforts on cleaning and revitalizing the Hamilton Harbour with the help of the provincial and federal governments via the Hamilton Harbour Remedial Action Plan. Beginning in 1989, the city has built nine combined sewer overflow (CSO) tanks to capture untreated sanitary and storm sewage during storms to keep it from being returned to the water supply until treated. Hamilton has dramatically revitalized the shoreline through the Pier 4 Park and Bayfront Park developments in the West Harbour, transforming what was once an industrial landfill site into a beautiful recreational public space. The city is also currently working on wastewater treatment plant upgrades and a variety of other projects to fully restore and enhance the Harbour’s ecosystem, including commissioning a LEED-certified environmental laboratory at the Woodward Wastewater Treatment Plant.

Engagement in Change

Hamilton created a master plan called Vision 2020 in the 1990s to guide development over the next 25 years. In 2015, it began a refresh of the plan that is a model for community engagement in planning.  It brought a booth to local festivals and community centers to have conversations with residents about their vision of the future.  Engagement methods included online surveys, meetings with key stakeholders, advertising and public meetings, but also bus tours to orient newcomers to the city and encourage residents to see their community in a new way.  Through these means, Hamilton engaged with over 50,000 residents and from that input created the “Our Future Hamilton” vision setting priorities for a new 10-year strategic plan. Among the many goals is the establishment of a Digital Office for the city focusing on improving quality of life and the digital transformation of government. 

Digital Equality

The decline of industrial employment has stranded workers who do not possess the skills and access to technology to compete in the broadband economy. A Hamilton charity operates a successful digital equality program called GreenBYTE that collects end-of-life computer systems, refurbishes them, and provides them to low-income households at no cost. It also provides computer certification training to low-income individuals. Since 2001, GreenBYTE has donated more than 12,000 computers to households, helped 100 graduates receive computer certifications and upgraded an after-school computer lab for the city.

In addition to providing computer access to households in need, Hamilton has focused on introducing local youth to digital learning at an early age. The Hamilton Code Clubs (HCC) is an initiative of the Industry Education Council (IEC) and Software Hamilton. Now in its third year of operation, HCC has had over 1,800 student participants aged 9 to 14 years old. The program teaches students core programing fundamentals during lunch breaks or after school, as well as bringing youth from across the city together to create video and data management games and websites and to program SPRK Sphero robots. HCC now includes weekend programs at the Hamilton Public Library and summer and robotics camps.

Geography, trade, industry and hard work built Hamilton’s successful economic past. Its future will leverage those same assets to create an economy that can prosper in the digital era.

Population: 787,000

Website: http://investinhamilton.ca

Smart21 2016 | 2018 | 2020

Top7 2018 | 2020

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

Smart21 2006 | 2008 | 2009 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024

Top7 2008 | 2009 | 2022 | 2024

The city of Edmonton became the capital of Alberta Province in 1905. Then, in 1947, the discovery of oil in the nearby town of Leduc began transforming the city into a different kind of metropolis: the Oil Capital of Canada. For decades, government and petroleum were the principal drivers of an economy and population that surged upward – until the boom-and-bust cycle of the oil and gas industry proved to the city it needed to diversify into such industries as manufacturing, education, finance and technology.

By 2024, 13% of employees still worked in public administration and only 1% in oil and gas, while 86% were employed across nearly 20 other sectors. In the 21st Century, that taste for innovation and diversification has helped the community adapt to the continuing waves of change that keep sweeping across Canada and the world.

New Drivers

Being a provincial capital brings its privileges, and access to good infrastructure is usually one. The regional incumbent wired the most attractive markets on its own, and Edmonton’s government complemented it with an Open Access Initiative: a partnership with multiple providers to expand access to underserved areas. As a result, by 2022, 92% of the population had access to broadband at a minimum of 50/10 Mpbs (upload/download). The city’s free Wi-Fi network meanwhile logs 14,000 device connections per week.

Equipped to compete in a digital economy, the city focuses on accelerating growth through its innovation agency, Edmonton Unlimited. Founded in 2020 with a mission to create a vibrant innovation ecosystem, EU is a partnership with MacEwan University’s School of Business that supports students, graduates, post-doc researchers and faculty in turning ideas into enterprises. It offers workshops, co-working space and partnerships with three accelerators that can guide startups in scaling up their customer base, products and services. Its annual Startup Week is a highlight of the business calendar that focuses attention on the newest crop of innovative new businesses – which total more than 240 alumni company in the first three years of the agency’s existence.

For existing companies, the Business-Friendly Edmonton team guides owners through permitting, licensing and grant programs. To reduce the bureaucratic workload, the city has introduced AI-enabled permit approvals for property development, virtual permit inspections and online business license applications, which has reduced the time it takes to issue a business licenses by 30 percent.

Edmonton also invites companies to use city infrastructure as a testbed for innovative technology. Successful testing opportunities become case studies that help companies market their products, while city departments gain access to innovations that can benefit their work. One example of this “City as a Lab” service is a pilot project enabling a company to test, on city-owned land, its advanced tree seedling production for reforestation. The project provided a proving ground for the company’s business model while improving carbon storage on city property.

Partners in Positive Change

As Edmonton grows, the city is careful to listen to what its residents care about and to keep them informed about the actions it plans. The Edmonton Insight Community is a platform where more than 15,000 subscribers – residents and property owners age 15 and up – provide feedback on city issues.

Engaged Edmonton is a hub for city-led engagement. It offers residents information on proposed projects, ranging from planning to safety, transportation and arts and culture. The platform invites their feedback and makes it easy to connect directly with city staff leading the projects and to receive notifications as the project develops.

Lifting Up its Citizens

Change brings both gains and losses. According to the Edmonton Social Policy Council, from 2006 to 2019, Edmonton had a poverty rate of 12-13% due to a continuing preponderance of low-wage jobs in agriculture, education, health care and tourism. The pandemic made things worse.

The EndPovertyEdmonton Strategy began in September 2014 with 200 Edmonton residents from diverse backgrounds and sectors divided into working groups to analyze poverty issues and develop recommendations for action. With approval by the City Council in 2015, the organization developed an Implementation Road Map to provide specific direction for combating poverty, including making all Edmontonians aware of its realities in the city and the steps they can take to help. This program wound down its operations in 2024, and the city replaced it with a Community Mobilization Task Force on Housing and Homelessness.  In 2025, the City Council budgeted more than C$3 million for its programs, including housing retrofits, aid in moving from homelessness into housing, and support for vulnerable tenants. 

Another Edmonton institution, the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT), focuses on qualifying people for better employment. NAIT has created numerous programs designed to give students the skills most needed by regional employers, including classes to address climate change and to help the region make its cities smarter and its industry more efficient. NAIT operates a fleet of mobile semi-tractor-trailer education units known as NIMs (NAIT in Motion) that bring state-of-the-art equipment directly to communities most in need. It is one of seven post-secondaries in Edmonton, with the University of Alberta ranking 8th in the 2025 Times Higher Education Impact Ranking. 

The Edmonton Public Library (EPL) loans portable Wi-Fi hotspots with unlimited data to adult library cardholders. These hotspots enable cardholders to access the Internet anywhere they take the device. “We know many Edmontonians don’t have home Internet access, and EPL is committed to providing people the skills and support they need to participate in the digital world,” said Pilar Martinez, EPL’s Chief Executive Officer.

From Petroleum to Sunlight

Turning from its petroleum legacy, Edmonton is encouraging an energy transition among its residents and businesses with a Community Energy Transition Strategy and Action Plan. By 2030, the plan targets a 50% reduction in community-based net GHG emissions and a 35% reduction in per-capita energy use, compared to 2005 levels, with continuing progress through 2050. The keys to the plan are investment and economic development of renewable energy, the energy-efficient retrofit of buildings and more stringent building codes, and the development of low-emission transportation. Edmonton now has a Green Economy Coordinator on staff and programs helping to finance energy retrofits and solar panel installation. While adding to government expenditures and regulation, these moves are also enhancing quality of life and generating investment, business starts and new employment.

To help with this transition, NAIT has invested heavily in its Alternative Energy Technology program, which provides training and research in alternative energy technology. The program has achieved a 92% employment rate for full-time student within nine months of graduation. NAIT also offers 13,800 apprenticeship seats and is one of the largest apprenticeship trainers in Canada with 33 distinct registered trades programs.

Edmonton has made an impressive pivot from its economic past to a future that holds greater opportunity as well as major uncertainties. Of all the skills the city and its people have learned, the ability to experiment, learn and adapt may be their greatest asset.

Population: 1,190,000

Website: www.edmonton.ca

Smart21 2008 | 2009 | 2015 | 2017

Top7 2017

Photo credit JustaClick

Burlington lies at the western tip of Lake Ontario and, together with neighboring Hamilton, forms the southern end of a dense and prosperous metro area that runs south from Toronto. It is a midsize city that mixes an urban core with suburban surroundings, an attractive waterfront to the south and the rugged cliffs of the Niagara Escarpment on its northern side.

The city’s location, infrastructure and pro-development leadership have generated substantial success. It is home to advanced manufacturing and tech companies including Evertz Microsystems, L3 Harris, Boehringer Ingelheim and Cogeco, as well as major Canadian food processers and Amazon distribution operations. The diverse economy includes many smaller firms, startups and scaleups in clean tech, life sciences, information technology and professional services. The city also anchors a new QEW Innovation Corridor, a 40-kilometer stretch of highway where Ontario Province is funding development of a testbed for connected vehicles, AI traffic management and other mobility technology. This density of leading-edge companies explains why two-thirds of Burlingtonians have post-secondary degrees.

Yet its latest plan for the future, Horizon 2050, stresses quality services, community engagement, social connectivity, the preservation of nature and what the plan calls “Intelligent Growth.” Like many successful communities, Burlington finds itself at the limits of one development model - focused on business attraction - and is innovating to create a new model for the future.

Room to Grow

Fast growth has brought its share of problems and distortions. Past expansion – and a commitment to keep half of its land rural or protected to preserve quality of life – has left the city boxed in by Lake Ontario on one side and by protected lands on the other. Lack of room and continued population growth drove the average 2025 home price above Can$1 million.

Horizon 2050 seeks to address this housing crisis while maintaining the quality of life treasured by residents. A massive housing strategy is building 29,000 new homes by 2031, concentrated in high-rise and mixed-use buildings surrounding the city’s three transit stations, which connect Burlington with cities running northward to Toronto. The city is also easing zoning laws to allow for more townhomes and small-scale multi-family homes (“four-plexes”) to bridge the gap between single-family homes and glass towers.

Climate Action

The fast growth of the past has also overstressed the city’s infrastructure. A recent municipal budget earmarks Can$106 million for upgrades to roadways and parks, and to transition the transit fleet to hybrid-electric vehicles. The 10-year funding target for infrastructure exceeds Can$1.2 billion. Digital infrastructure is also undergoing revamp with AI pilot projects, next-generation 911, the digitization of citizen and business services, and programs to help small businesses improve their online presence and digital tools.

Horizon 2050 also sets that year for the community to reach net-zero emissions. In addition to hybrid transit, a Better Homes Burlington program provides low-interest loans to residents for energy retrofits, from insulation to heat pumps, of older homes. The city will also combat “heat islands” by increasing the urban tree canopy in newly developed areas by 35%.

The plan projects a population of 265,000 by 2050, a +30% increase in a place that has no room left for conventional development and job creation. To meet its goals, the city has embraced the need for change in its physical form without sacrificing the beauty, safety, quality education and quality of life that have made it so desirable.

Population: 200,000

Website: www.burlington.ca

Smart21 2006 | 2007 | 2026

Free trade zone and regional business hub for information technology companies.

Population: 5,500

Website: www.dic.ae

Smart21 2006

Despite an increase in output since 1999, oil reserves will be depleted by 2020. In anticipation of this, Doha, the national capitol, has committed nearly 3% of GDP to science and technology initiatives, including Education City, which are beginning to build a society driven by knowledge work.

Population: 400,051

Website: www.gov.qa

Smart21 2008

The second largest city in Israel, Tel Aviv is also its richest, home to the nation’s stock exchange. Newsweek magazine called it one of the ten most technologically influential cities in the world, because of its concentration of venture capital, research institutes and technology firms. Other industries include chemical processing, textiles and food. By the end of 2000, the city contained 86% of Israel’s high-tech companies but is also a center for the creative industries and home to Tel Aviv University, the country’s largest academic institution. Fixed broadband passes 99% of homes and penetration is well above 60%. The Great Recession has hit Tel Aviv’s tech sector hard, particularly venture capitalists used to a 25% annual return, but pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and solar technologies continue to grow.

Population: 384,400

Website: www.tel-aviv.gov.il/english

Smart21 2010

Using funds from development agencies and the US government, this war-torn capital of Afghanistan has built a telecom-based foundation for government by linking ministries with district offices and military bases throughout the country while expanding mobile service nationwide from 0.01% to 6% in three years.

Population: 2,500,000

Website: km.gov.af/en

Smart21 2007