Most of the world celebrated the start of the new century in 2000, but it was a time for mourning in Saint John.

A shipbuilding contract from the Canadian government came to an end and a major food manufacturer closed its plant in the same year. A long period of industrial decline had suddenly reached crisis point.

Despite being home to New Brunswick's telephone company, NBTel, and a branch of the University of New Brunswick (UNB), Saint John developed some of the poorest neighborhoods in the province. But while it had Canada's largest per capita decline in manufacturing from 1989 to 2003, it also saw 8% growth in services, double the Canadian average.

Battling Decline

To accelerate that positive trend, the city created a partnership with education, health care, provincial government, cultural institutions and business. It targeted ICT, life sciences, tourism, energy and advanced manufacturing for growth. Its timing was good: a local cable TV company (owned by a local entrepreneur) had just launched a competitive battle with NBTel that accelerated broadband deployment. In a strategy called True Growth, the city engaged with local employers and educators to identify and recruit skilled young people emerging from secondary school and university. It also recruited skilled immigrants and launched a mentorship program to connect immigrant entrepreneurs with business executives.

UNB did its part by partnering with a major employer to create an Executive MBA program for working executives. Meanwhile, a group of local entrepreneurs and angel investors formed PropellICT, a technology incubator with a difference. PropellICT focused on mentorship instead of office space, pairing entrepreneurs with senior business executives. In its first 3 years, PropellICT nurtured 21 start-ups, of which Radian6 became its most successful and best known, and went on to host the region's first angel investor conferences.

Meanwhile, local executives formed the Business Community Anti-Poverty Initiative, which attacked the root causes of multi-generation poverty, from helping new mothers properly nurture their children to tutoring students and intervening with at-risk teens. As it entered the second decade of the new century, Saint John found itself with much to celebrate and much more to do.

Population: 68,000

Labor Force: 35,615

Website: www.saintjohn.ca

Smart21 2012

Top7 2012

The first decade of the 21st Century was a good one in Quebec City. Home to the Quebec provincial government as well as thriving technology, research and creative sectors, the city region achieved one of the highest GDP growth rates in Canada (+24%) while unemployment fell from 9% in 2000 to 4.9% in 2013 and 73,000 jobs were created. Economic success was the product of business-government-university collaboration that stretched back into the Nineties, including a 1997 high-tech business summit leading to creation of a downtown tech district, a 1998 economic diversification strategy, and the birth, in 2003, of a regional economic development agency. Progress received a push forward from the 2002 amalgamation of 12 municipalities into an expanded City. Today, seven industries – including life sciences, ICT, value-added materials, transportation equipment, financial services, energy and tourism – generate 44% of the region’s $325bn in GDP.

Building a Skilled Labor Force

In the century’s second decade, Quebec City is challenged to head off growing labor shortages in these fields and to boost the rate of commercialization of the innovations emerging from public and private R&D spending. It has also targeted the digital divide that affects almost one in five residents. To build its skilled labor force, Quebec City and financial partners are investing over $4 million in such initiatives as “It’s Cool to Stay in School,” which encourages students to finish high school and explore science and technology careers. Young people are exposed to companies, workshops, internships and mentoring to motivate their involvement in the digital economy. The Quebec International agency provides online marketing to potential immigrants and programs that facilitate their application for residency and integration into the economy.

City government supports technology entrepreneurship with scholarship programs, a public-private crowdfunding initiative, and innovation events that involve startups and organizations in tackling business and public-sector problems. The city is also the recipient of a Smarter Cities Challenge grant from IBM that aims to reduce the “digital divide population” by 4% through 2016. Meanwhile, the nonprofit ZAP Quebec continues to expand a city-wide set of 500 WiFi hotspots that complement the 98% broadband availability provided by the private sector. With this range of programs, Quebec City hopes to ensure that its story of growth continues into the next decade.

In the News
Read the latest updates about Quebec City.

Want to know more about Quebec City?
Quebec City was featured in the Intelligent Community Forum book Seizing Our Destiny.

Population: 516,625

Website: www.ville.quebec.qc.ca

Smart21 2011 | 2012 | 2014

Top7 2012

Ottawa and Gatineau are cities on the opposite banks of the Ottawa River, with English-speaking Ottawa on the Ontario side and Gatineau in French-speaking Quebec Province on the other. Together, they form a metropolitan area of over 1 million people. In addition to language, one more thing distinguishes Ottawa from its sister city: since 1867, it has been the capital city of Canada.

As with other national capitals, the main business of Ottawa has long been government. Total Federal government expenditures have risen from C$16 billion (US$14bn) in 1970 to C$158 billion (US$134bn) in 2001, though a growing economy has actually reduced Federal spending as a percentage of GDP. While most of that spending is distributed across Canada's vast land mass, the nation's capital naturally benefits. Today, 13% of the current labor force of Ottawa-Gatineau consists of Federal government employees.

But, like the capital region of other nations, a strong government cluster has also attracted businesses that depend on government policies and spending decisions. Canada's telecommunications industry, once state-owned, is headquartered in the region, and defense, security, software and life sciences companies have found good reason to locate offices and research facilities there. Current employment in the region's more than 1,800 high-tech companies is equal to 11% of the total labor force, even after the technology bust at the turn of the last century.

Besides being prosperous and dynamic, Ottawa-Gatineau is a nice place to live. It enjoys a beautiful natural setting at the junction of three rivers and boasts the lowest cost of living of any major North American city. It was ranked sixth in the world for quality of life by the Swiss firm Corporate Resources Group, and a cross-Canada survey recognized the region as the best place to live and work in the nation.

Ottawa 20/20

Given this situation, the region's political leaders could be forgiven for resting smugly on their laurels. But they have done nothing of the kind. In 1999, the City of Ottawa formed The Ottawa Partnership (TOP), a group of public and private-sector leaders who advised government on growing and sustaining the local economy. In 2001, the area completed a political reorganization that united a regional government body and 11 urban and rural municipalities, including both Ottawa and Gatineau, into one local government structure. As part of that process, the new government published a plan called Ottawa 20/20. Its goal was to establish a unified planning, zoning and development scheme that would see the community through the next 20 years as its population increased by as much as 50%. Following a performance review of the first five years, the government recently published a detailed plan for 2006-2009 focusing on economic development, equality and privacy issues. With an overall goal of making Ottawa-Gatineau an "Innovation Capital," priorities include workforce skills development, improving knowledge sharing among businesses and citizens, linking innovation more effectively with the marketplace, strengthening entrepreneurship and upgrading marketing.

Behind these priorities are two primary challenges to the region's continued success. Research by The Impact Group in Toronto, in collaboration with H. Douglas Barber, co-founder and retired CEO of Genum Corporation, one of Canada's most successful high-tech firms, shows that Canada suffers from a "commercialization gap" compared with its neighbor nation to the south. Canada is strong in research and development and has some world-class technology companies like Nortel and Mitel, but Canadian business generally lags American business in bringing technology innovation to market. According to Dr. Barber, the key to the problem is the relative inability of government, compared with the private sector, to understand customer needs and innovate competitively to meet them. Statistics from Industry Canada reveal that, in 2000, 68% of funding for R&D came from government and related sources while industry contributed 32%. This is nearly the reverse of the US, where industry spent 67% of each R&D dollar and government spent only 33%. This relative lack of customer centricity and commercial competence tends to produce technology-based enterprises that cannot afford the marketing or R&D needed to succeed.

The other challenge has to do with the region's unique mix of urban and rural areas. In urban areas, 94% of households and 100% of business and government facilities had access to broadband in 2003, whereas availability in rural areas was about 2%. Lack of broadband infrastructure posed a severe constraint on further development outside the existing urban zones.

Changing the Culture

It may be ironic to ask government to tackle a commercialization gap caused by an excess of government over private investment. But Ottawa-Gatineau is pursuing several creative approaches to changing the culture of innovation in business. Leading by example, the city has put dozens of services, from pet registration to utility bill payment, online. A SmartCapital program completed in 2003 introduced a collaborative online catalog of the resources of major universities, institutes and libraries in the region. An Entrepreneurship Center offers assistance in starting and growing companies, and connects them with local venture capitalists. More than 2,400 clients started businesses in 2004 alone, and they created more than 7,800 new jobs and C$205 million (US$174m) in new investment. Annual venture capital investment in the region has grown at an average of 50% per year since 1995, peaking at C$1.35 billion (US$1.15bn) during the technology boom and settling to a more sustainable C$250 million (US$212m) since then. Government, business and academia now collaborate on workforce development programs ranging from math tutoring for talented low-income children to analyzing skills gaps and working to fill them.

Meanwhile, government spurred the formation of a volunteer group, the Ottawa Rural Communities network (ORCnet) to build awareness about broadband and aggregate demand in rural areas. Through workshops, communities meetings and work with the telecom sector, ORCnet helped service providers build a business case for extending broadband into low-density markets. To sweeten the pot, local government put C$1 million (US$850k) into a public-private partnership that is investing C$3 million (US$2.5m) in a network build-out scheduled for completion in autumn 2007, which is expected to largely close the urban-rural broadband gap.

Ottawa-Gattineau has targeted life sciences, which already employs 11,000 people, as well as wireless, VoIP and green technologies as its best hope of future growth as the Innovation Capital. With over 78,000 people employed in high-tech already, the region looks forward to having a technology labor force larger than its Federal labor force, and to seeing privately-funded innovation become the primary driver of its economy.

Population: 1,148,785

Labor Force: 686,000

Websites: ottawa.ca/en | www.gatineau.ca

Smart21 2006 | 2007

Top7 2007

Ottawa and Gatineau are cities on the opposite banks of the Ottawa River, with English-speaking Ottawa on the Ontario side and Gatineau in French-speaking Quebec Province on the other. Together, they form a metropolitan area of over 1 million people. In addition to language, one more thing distinguishes Ottawa from its sister city: since 1867, it has been the capital city of Canada.

As with other national capitals, the main business of Ottawa has long been government. Total Federal government expenditures have risen from C$16 billion (US$14bn) in 1970 to C$158 billion (US$134bn) in 2001, though a growing economy has actually reduced Federal spending as a percentage of GDP. While most of that spending is distributed across Canada's vast land mass, the nation's capital naturally benefits. Today, 13% of the current labor force of Ottawa-Gatineau consists of Federal government employees.

But, like the capital region of other nations, a strong government cluster has also attracted businesses that depend on government policies and spending decisions. Canada's telecommunications industry, once state-owned, is headquartered in the region, and defense, security, software and life sciences companies have found good reason to locate offices and research facilities there. Current employment in the region's more than 1,800 high-tech companies is equal to 11% of the total labor force, even after the technology bust at the turn of the last century.

Besides being prosperous and dynamic, Ottawa-Gatineau is a nice place to live. It enjoys a beautiful natural setting at the junction of three rivers and boasts the lowest cost of living of any major North American city. It was ranked sixth in the world for quality of life by the Swiss firm Corporate Resources Group, and a cross-Canada survey recognized the region as the best place to live and work in the nation.

Ottawa 20/20

Given this situation, the region's political leaders could be forgiven for resting smugly on their laurels. But they have done nothing of the kind. In 1999, the City of Ottawa formed The Ottawa Partnership (TOP), a group of public and private-sector leaders who advised government on growing and sustaining the local economy. In 2001, the area completed a political reorganization that united a regional government body and 11 urban and rural municipalities, including both Ottawa and Gatineau, into one local government structure. As part of that process, the new government published a plan called Ottawa 20/20. Its goal was to establish a unified planning, zoning and development scheme that would see the community through the next 20 years as its population increased by as much as 50%. Following a performance review of the first five years, the government recently published a detailed plan for 2006-2009 focusing on economic development, equality and privacy issues. With an overall goal of making Ottawa-Gatineau an "Innovation Capital," priorities include workforce skills development, improving knowledge sharing among businesses and citizens, linking innovation more effectively with the marketplace, strengthening entrepreneurship and upgrading marketing.

Behind these priorities are two primary challenges to the region's continued success. Research by The Impact Group in Toronto, in collaboration with H. Douglas Barber, co-founder and retired CEO of Genum Corporation, one of Canada's most successful high-tech firms, shows that Canada suffers from a "commercialization gap" compared with its neighbor nation to the south. Canada is strong in research and development and has some world-class technology companies like Nortel and Mitel, but Canadian business generally lags American business in bringing technology innovation to market. According to Dr. Barber, the key to the problem is the relative inability of government, compared with the private sector, to understand customer needs and innovate competitively to meet them. Statistics from Industry Canada reveal that, in 2000, 68% of funding for R&D came from government and related sources while industry contributed 32%. This is nearly the reverse of the US, where industry spent 67% of each R&D dollar and government spent only 33%. This relative lack of customer centricity and commercial competence tends to produce technology-based enterprises that cannot afford the marketing or R&D needed to succeed.

The other challenge has to do with the region's unique mix of urban and rural areas. In urban areas, 94% of households and 100% of business and government facilities had access to broadband in 2003, whereas availability in rural areas was about 2%. Lack of broadband infrastructure posed a severe constraint on further development outside the existing urban zones.

Changing the Culture

It may be ironic to ask government to tackle a commercialization gap caused by an excess of government over private investment. But Ottawa-Gatineau is pursuing several creative approaches to changing the culture of innovation in business. Leading by example, the city has put dozens of services, from pet registration to utility bill payment, online. A SmartCapital program completed in 2003 introduced a collaborative online catalog of the resources of major universities, institutes and libraries in the region. An Entrepreneurship Center offers assistance in starting and growing companies, and connects them with local venture capitalists. More than 2,400 clients started businesses in 2004 alone, and they created more than 7,800 new jobs and C$205 million (US$174m) in new investment. Annual venture capital investment in the region has grown at an average of 50% per year since 1995, peaking at C$1.35 billion (US$1.15bn) during the technology boom and settling to a more sustainable C$250 million (US$212m) since then. Government, business and academia now collaborate on workforce development programs ranging from math tutoring for talented low-income children to analyzing skills gaps and working to fill them.

Meanwhile, government spurred the formation of a volunteer group, the Ottawa Rural Communities network (ORCnet) to build awareness about broadband and aggregate demand in rural areas. Through workshops, communities meetings and work with the telecom sector, ORCnet helped service providers build a business case for extending broadband into low-density markets. To sweeten the pot, local government put C$1 million (US$850k) into a public-private partnership that is investing C$3 million (US$2.5m) in a network build-out scheduled for completion in autumn 2007, which is expected to largely close the urban-rural broadband gap.

Ottawa-Gattineau has targeted life sciences, which already employs 11,000 people, as well as wireless, VoIP and green technologies as its best hope of future growth as the Innovation Capital. With over 78,000 people employed in high-tech already, the region looks forward to having a technology labor force larger than its Federal labor force, and to seeing privately-funded innovation become the primary driver of its economy.

Population: 1,148,785

Labor Force: 686,000

Websites: ottawa.ca/en | www.gatineau.ca

Smart21 2006 | 2007

Top7 2007

The capital cities of states and nations have an unfair advantage. Businesses that sell to government tend to cluster there. The business of governing also dominates their economies and, generally speaking, government responds less to the economic cycle than business. Good times may not be as good but bad times are eased – in fact, demand for government services typically rises in a recession.

Ottawa appears to be an exception to the rule. Three times in the past fifteen years, it has passed through recessions that tested the foundations of its economy. But each time, Ottawa has adapted, rallied and emerged more dynamic than before.

Canada's fourth largest metro area, Ottawa went through its first downturn in 1995. Faced with a major budget deficit, the national government downsized and devolved many functions to the provinces. Thousands of former government employees were suddenly looking for work. Fortunately, they found it in a set of communications technology companies started in the 1990s that were growing into multinationals, including Newbridge Networks, Nortel, Cognos and Mitel.

The talent released by government became an important resource for a wave of growth that peaked in 2000 – and then fell off a cliff in the telecom recession of 2001-02, when the companies that had fueled Ottawa’s boom suddenly became its biggest liability. Once again, the community adapted. It brought to bear its significant R&D capacity in communications technology, expertise in military software security and semiconductor design. Companies diversified out of reliance on wireline telecommunications and into wireless, gaming, digital media and medical devices. Growth resumed as telecommunications bottomed out and a broader range of technology companies hit their stride.

For Ottawa, the financial crisis of 2009 was headlined by the bankruptcy of Nortel, its largest private-sector employer and major contributor to research and development. Yet while Canada's unemployment rate moved toward double digits, Ottawa's rate remained below five percent, despite the drastic restructuring taking place at Nortel. Ottawa's position as Canada's capital surely gets some of the credit. But equally impressive is the city's track record of investing in information and communications technology, creating an environment that nurtures the start-up and growth of ICT-based companies, and equipping its citizens to prosper in that environment.

Infrastructure for Growth

Despite being a major population center, Ottawa is hardly an urban jungle. Ninety percent of its land is rural, where just 6% of the population live. In 2006, only 2% of that rural population had access to broadband. But by 2012, through the Rural Broadband Expansion project funded by the city, broadband passed 100% of all homes, businesses, government offices and educational facilities throughout the city. In a survey of rural business owners, 75% said that access to broadband had improved their sales and profitability and 15% said that they would be forced to relocate if broadband access were not available. The survey also asked employees living in rural area about the economic importance of broadband to them: 20% said they would not be able to continue working for their current employer without it.

The public library system has backstopped this broadband deployment with free high-speed Internet access at all 33 branches since 2001, when it also introduced free computer and Internet training courses for the public. In 2008, over 1,500 people attended courses specifically targeting older adults and newcomers to the community.

Working in close collaboration with its educational institutions, Ottawa has built another kind of infrastructure as well: one that develops talent, nurtures start-ups and connects them to opportunity. At the center of this effort is the Ontario Center for Research & Innovation (OCRI), an economic development nonprofit funded by government and more than 700 member companies, which fosters the advancement of the region's knowledge-based institutions and industries. OCRI's goal is strikingly simple: to make Ottawa recognized as one of the most innovative cities worldwide. It acts as a catalyst and contributor for government, university and private programs reaching from research labs and incubators to school classrooms.

OCRI's path was set by a plan issued in 2000 titled Ottawa 20/20. It identified government, tourism and technology as the three pillars of the local economy. It committed the city to continuing collaboration among government, industry and education, with a focus on cluster-based development and the nurturing of talent. Ten years later, a working group refreshed the 20/20 strategy to drive the community's contined growth. The working group's membership is a portrait of collaboration in action, with representatives from Ottawa's colleges and universities, OCRI, city government and the life sciences, cleantech, ICT digital media and software sectors. The emerging plan aimed to create an "innovation architecture" that supports the next generation of technology companies with the people and services they need to prosper.

Harvesting Talent

The 2001-02 downturn of the telecom sector had an unexpected impact on education in Ottawa. As telecom moved from regional darling to regional dog, enrollment in secondary school science and math programs plummeted, which soon translated into lower science and engineering enrollment at the university level. The tech sector recovered but interest in science and engineering education did not. By 2006, Ottawa's tech clusters were flagging the problem as serious and asking OCRI to develop a solution.

In 2008, OCRI worked with the Ministry of Education to introduce a Specialist High Skills Major for grades 11 and 12 focusing on ICT. In the same year, OCRI also introduced a High School Technology Program at two area secondary schools. Over the course of one term, students participated one day per week in classes on computer hardware, networking, team building and technology career opportunities. The entire program was built around social computing and the open source community. Equipped with XO laptops provided by participating companies, students worked in school and in consultation with technology firms to create software projects of their own. The first year was successful enough to justify expanding the program to four schools in 2009.

To further increase interest in STEM at the secondary level, Ottawa has also developed TechU.me. The program provides access to real-world, curriculum-based challenges, aiming to equip high school students with enhanced critical thinking and technology skills for their future careers. TechU.me also employs a group of skilled mentors to guide and assist their students. Since the program’s launch in 2012, 5,000 students have participated, and Ottawa high schools have seen a 35% increase in computer science enrollment.

Another program, Winning Innovation Networks for Schools (WINS), connects tech companies with students to graphically demonstrate career opportunities in the community. The first WINS project sent 100 students and fifteen teachers on site visits to four employers in the cleantech and medical device sectors. The next project will invite biology classes to help local medical device companies work on technology challenges identified by the companies, from sleep sensors to neurological rehabilitation.

While OCRI has focused on secondary school, Ottawa's colleges and universities have rolled out new programs to serve an economy undergoing continuing change. The University of Ottawa now offers cross-faculty courses in entrepreneurship and e-business, as well as a Graduate Certificate in Modeling and Animation for Computer Games. Carlton University created a Bachelor of Engineering in Sustainable and Renewable Energy and partnered with Algonquin College on a Bachelor of IT. Algonquin meanwhile launched its own School of Media & Design for Animation and partnered with OCRI on an Ontario Youth Apprenticeship Program, which grants secondary school students college credit for high skill majors.

The community has given equal attention to the "last mile" between the end of education and the start of employment, when the most talented students face a choice of where to start their careers. TalentBridge is an OCRI program that provides entrepreneurially-inclined university students with government-funded part-time jobs, working under experienced mentors, at local technology companies. The companies get the benefit of fresh thinking and new energy, while students gain business experience and often make the move into full-time positions with the companies.

Ottawa serial entrepreneur Terry Matthews has created the Wesley Clover Affiliate Program, named for his investment firm. Wesley Clover works with local universities to identify the brightest and most motivated new graduates, puts them through a "boot camp" training program for 9-12 months, and then pairs them with industry leaders in specific vertical segments. The aim is to introduce a new product into the market within 12 months of team formation. From 2007 to 2016, the program has expanded its portfolio of affiliates and startups to include more than 100 companies with over a 90% success rate.

Entrepreneurial Production Line

Capitalism's great benefit is the efficiency with which it moves resources out of unproductive uses and into productive ones. Ottawa attempts the same trick with entrepreneurial talent, through a range of programs designed to identify potential entrepreneurs, give them support and training, and point them toward success.

OCRI's Business Accelerator targets high-potential companies and offers them coaching, market analysis, support services, and access to OCRI's global network of investors for six months to a year. It aims to help young companies shift into high gear through market entry and financing. When they do, they can also take advantage of OCRI Global Marketing, which maintains relationships with Canada's representatives throughout the world.

Lead to Win identifies seasoned managers of technology companies who have been turfed out by corporate downsizing and helps them launch new technology-based businesses. The program originated in 2002 during the telecom recession and was revived when the latest downturn struck in 2008. Applicants accepted into the program receive training on business ecosystems, entrepreneurial management, and success factors for start-up tech companies. Those who start businesses are connected to strategic customers, sales opportunities and resources including financing. Out of the 61 participants in 2009, over 60% launched businesses, and in 2014, those five-year-old companies generated over $19.3 million in revenue. Lead to Win was ranked among UBI Global’s top ten North American business incubators in 2015.

Helping Hand

Ottawa's success in technology has yet to produce a substantial private venture capital sector ready to fund start-up and early-stage companies. National and provincial programs fill some of the gap. Ontario Centers of Excellence offer up to C$250,000 for market readiness and proof-of-concept programs. An Investment Accelerator Fund offers investments of up to C$500,000 to help launch high-potential technology ventures. The Emerging Technologies Fund matches private-sector investment up to C$5 million in early-stage companies, while the Next Generation Jobs Fund supports R&D and commercialization in new industries such as cleantech, biotech, ICT and digital media.

Funding from government finds a match in the nonprofit sector, which draws from foundations and private industry. Ottawa is home to the Canadian Photonics Fabrication Center, the Carleton University Visualization and Simulation Lab, the NRC Institute for Research in Construction and Ottawa Hospital Research Institute. Sustainable Development Technology Canada has allocated a total of C$425 million to 171 projects at local tech companies focusing on climate change, air and water quality, and soils research.

Ottawa’s government also aims to help Ontario and the nation as a whole accelerate Canada’s medical industry. The Medical Device Commercialization Centre (MDCC) recently received $14.9 million in federal funding to be used to link medical device innovators, such as universities, colleges, research institutes, hospitals and corporations, with users, including investors, hospitals, healthcare systems and, of course, patients. MDCC’s experts will be providing assistance with many different areas of development and delivery, including analyzing and confirming clinical market needs, advancing and optimizing prototypes and other solutions, testing and clinical trials, obtaining regulatory approvals and licensing, and even launching devices to market. As of today, the Centre’s experts are in the process of assessing 500 different medical technologies with the hope of advancing at least 20 of them to revenue generation and clinical use.

Will cleantech, biotech, 4G wireless and gaming provide the next boom to Ottawa's economy, perhaps to be followed by the next bust? In recent years, high-tech has edged out the Federal government as the single largest contributor to Ottawa's GDP. The new diversity of its industries, and the intense collaboration among business, government and education, promise a future even more exciting than its past.

In the News
Read the latest updates about Ottawa.

Want to know more about Ottawa?
Ottawa was featured in the Intelligent Community Forum book Seizing Our Destiny.

Population: 1,111,700

Website: ottawa.ca/en

Smart21 2010 | 2016 | 2017

Top7 2010

The largest French-speaking city in North America, the Montréal Metro Area is home to more than a tenth of Canada’s population. The region was hit by the decline of heavy industry in the Eighties, and launched a large-scale transition of its economy to ICT, aerospace, life sciences, health technologies and clean tech. Together, these clusters contain more than 6,250 companies employing about 10% of the workforce.

Becoming Smarter

A Smart City plan introduced in 2014 is the most recent contributor to this transition. It focuses on further build-out of the city’s wired and wireless broadband infrastructure, as well as deploying technology to make city services and systems more efficient and creating a collaborative ecosystem involving business, institutions and citizens.

The city owns its own electric utility, which has contributed to an 81% Internet penetration rate, with most connections at high speed. Current plans call for build-out of free WiFi across the 17 square kilometers of the central city. An open “citizen laboratory” already invites participation in incubating social technologies. An aggressive train-the-trainer program operates from 85 centers to equip community leaders with digital skills, which also help the significant portion of the population who struggle with basic literacy, a legacy of the city’s industrial past.

Montréal en Histories

The city of Montréal has 161km of fiber optic cable, which will more than double over the next two years. That network provides the backbone for MTL WiFi, which offers 8 Mbps per user and gained 50,000 unique users in its first month of deployment. The rollout began in Montréal’s historic district and provided the digital infrastructure for the Montréal en Histories project. Funded by the city and executed by producers of the famed Cirque de Soleil—which was founded in Montreal and still has its center of operations there—the project memorializes important periods in Montréal’s history in the form of videos projected at night on the walls of buildings throughout the Old City. Interested passersby can use a phone- and tablet-based app to activate the videos and delve more deeply into the content. One striking video addresses racial history with two side-by-side tales: one of black slave girl accused of setting a catastrophic fire who was tortured and hanged on little evidence, and another on the early career of Jackie Robinson, who played for Montréal and received the strong backing of his teammates in the face of public discrimination.

Knowledge is Power

The metro area’s universities graduate more students from higher education than any other Canadian city. Over 415,000 students earned an undergraduate or graduate degree there from 1998 through 2008. Montréal institutions also received more than 160,000 registrations for e-learning in the 2011-12 school year, while a specialized program is training hundreds of teachers in the use of digital technologies. This educational foundation feeds into the region’s fast-growing knowledge economy, which is a major focus of policy. Montréal operates six Learning Labs specializing in areas from transportation to healthcare and urban planning, and has deployed an online collaboration system to engage its ICT cluster (some 5,000 companies) in more open innovation. Accelerator programs and co-working spaces foster an expanding start-up culture, with the arts and media playing a significant role; Cirque de Soleil is a Montréal company.

Youth Fusion

Youth Fusion is an inspiring program that targets youth at risk of dropping out of Montréal’s schools. Gabriel Bran Lopez, an immigrant from Guatemala, founded the program as a serious, long-term effort to engage such students and help them achieve their highest potential in the future workforce. Youth Fusion places univer­sity students in classrooms for 30-40 hours per week to help students learn robotics, fashion de­sign, cinema, entrepreneurship, video game technology and a variety of other topics. The program pays these university students for their time and effort with fundraising from local businesses, who are eager to see more future employees trained in the skills they need.

Youth Fusion programs are organized as contests running over several months, culminating in selection of winners, often by judges from local industries. Through their work, the students learn French, math, art, leadership and teamwork—and also learn that they can enjoy being in school. The program was originally intro­duced as a pilot in 2 schools with 7 university coordinators and has grown to include 200 university coordinators working in 92 schools with 40 corporate supporters and partners across the province. Youth Fusion was recently named the most effective charity in Canada, generating C$16 in social value for each C$1 investment.

Quartier de l’innovation

Montréal’s innovation quarter, the Quartier de l’innovation (QI), was launched in May of 2013 by two universities: the École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS) and McGill University and is now evolving to include Concordia University as well. The QI is an innovation ecosystem in the heart of Montréal designed to boost the city’s potential for creativity by combining the strengths of many education institutions and businesses in one place.

To create such an ecosystem, Montréal is making use of the dynamic community that has already grown in the area. Home to many artists and cultural and non-profit organizations, the area also houses close to 100,000 students between the three universities. The QI also boasts 250 companies employing 20,000 people with the largest concentration of information technology and multimedia workers in all of Canada. As it continues to grow, the QI helps the nearby area grow with it by drawing new businesses and residents, leading to a total of $6B in property development and municipal investment since its inception.

The QI’s main strategy is integration of key segments in the sector: the industrial segment, the education and research segment, the urban segment and social and cultural segments. The quarter facilitates connections between these four segments, helping organizations from each of them form strong relationships with the others to further innovation. As entrepreneurs and new companies move into the area, the QI works to aid in cross-pollination of ideas and in helping them get off the ground. The area currently houses six startup incubators, including the Centech (technological entrepreneurship center) and the CEIM (Montréal business and innovation center). The CEIM offers customized management support and related services for startups in information technology, new media, life sciences and clean industrial technologies, while Centech provides support for ventures in manufacturing technology.

The history of technology development in Montréal Metro has created a fragmented sector consisting of many small companies. The city’s economic future depends on helping those small-scale innovators to collaborate in building a bigger future, while preserving the culture and beauty that attract 3.5 million visitors to the area each year.

In the News
Read the latest updates about Montreal.

Population: 1,650,000

Website: ville.montreal.qc.ca

Intelligent Community of the Year 2016

Smart21 2014 | 2016

Top7 2016

For most of the 20th Century, the city of Moncton was the transportation hub of Atlantic Canada, a region made up of the four provinces bordering the Atlantic Ocean. The Canadian National (CN) railroad had its repair shops in the city, and a cluster of transport-dependent employers, such as the Catalog Center for the nationwide Eaton's department store chain, formed to take advantage of fast, convenient access to the national rail network. CN employed 5% of the workforce and its purchasing generated thousands more jobs.

In the 1980s, however, Moncton experienced the perfect economic storm. CN announced in 1985 that it was closing down the Moncton Shops facilities in a drive to boost productivity. The Eaton's Catalog Center also closed as the department store business model fell under attack, and several local factories fell prey to the period's rapid de-industrialization. A once-proud transportation cluster found itself facing not only economic upheaval in the short term but serious worries for the future. Because rail and transportation had dominated its economy for so long, Moncton's workforce was educated for an era of manual work, not the emerging knowledge economy. The city's downtown had a high vacancy rate and, due to lack of investment, the community's physical infrastructure was in decay.

Moncton’s historic motto is "Resurgo," Latin for "I rise again." As the Eighties came to a close, it was an open question whether Moncton would ever be able to rise again.

Collaborative Leadership

ICF has identified strong collaborative leadership as a critical factor in the success of Intelligent Communities. The Moncton story explains why it is so important.

Moncton responded to the crisis by organizing a series of regional economic development planning exercises beginning in 1989. The first planning process, Symposium 2000, brought together local government and business leaders not only from Moncton but from the neighboring city of Dieppe and town of Riverview, as well as provincial and federal agencies. But it was not just a talking shop. The government and business leaders came prepared to make deals, and they reached agreement on a series of big steps. They formed and agreed to fund the Greater Moncton Economic Commission, the first regional economic development agency, and subsequently approved its first strategic plan. They forged a partnership between local and provincial government to focus on attracting new business to the region and made individual commitments to infrastructure investment. Most important, they formalized collaboration among Moncton, Dieppe and Riverview on sharing the management of municipal services such as water and policing, and on joint development of projects like the Greater Moncton International Airport. This collaboration reduced the costs of government in the region while focusing everyone on pursuing new economic opportunities.

Call Center King

In the late Eighties, the hot opportunity turned out to be the call center. Both outbound and inbound call centers experienced a boom in this period, and Moncton had the potential to benefit because of its low costs and one special attribute: it has one of the highest rates of bilingual workforce in Canada, with half of the population speaking French and English. Both leadership and collaboration played a role in what happened next. The incumbent carrier NBTel (now Aliant Telecom), proved willing to step up to meet new requirements. The first Canadian carrier to build a 100% digital network in the early 1990s, Aliant created a suite of services to support call centers, including the leasing (rather than purchase) of costly switches and systems for home-based employees. The provincial government joined forces with Moncton to actively promote the city as a place to base telecom-intensive service and IT operations. The province helped the city to attract call centers for over two dozen national and international firms including ExxonMobil, UPS, FedEx and the Royal Bank of Canada. By 1994, call centers had become a major source of new jobs, exceeding goals set in 1991. But the 1994 plan recognized that success in call center development was not enough; the next step was to focus on "knowledge businesses" – natural and applied sciences, business and finance, computer programming and information systems.

More partnerships ensued. Moncton tapped the resources of national and provincial government agencies, including the Atlantic Innovation Fund and the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation, to spur attraction and start-up of knowledge-based businesses. A New Brunswick R&D Tax Credit helped companies justify location of scientific research facilities in the Greater Moncton area. The Greater Moncton Strategic Partnership linked local government with universities, colleges, local media and leading-edge companies to fund talent-attraction marketing in order to feed the rising demand for qualified people.

With the call center business continuing to attract companies including Fairmont Hotels, Rogers Communications and Lottomattica, Moncton increasingly saw homegrown ICT businesses prosper, from the Atlantic Lottery Corporation and Red Ball Internet to Vimsoft and PropertyGuys.com. By 2006, almost 45 out of every 1,000 workers in the Moncton Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) worked in customer service, information or related clerk positions, compared with an average of 12 for Canada. Moncton had witnessed a 300% increase in employment in ICT companies, a 153% increase in employment for graphic designers and illustrators, and a 43% increase in jobs for writers and translators. While New Brunswick suffered a net loss of 3,900 people from 2001 to 2006, the Greater Moncton area gained 6,800.

In 2008, the call center sector paid more than C$290 million in payroll and generated a total of C$765 million in regional economic activity. But newer businesses were also making an impact. The community's hospitals have become catalysts for an emerging life sciences cluster focusing on medical informatics, bio-markers and bio-statistics. The Atlantic Cancer Research Institute is the largest in Atlantic Canada. L'Université de Moncton is well known for research on cellular lipid metabolism and is home to New Brunswick's only medical school, while private company DDx Health Strategies is pioneering in remote support for the pharmaceutical industry and MedSenses offers health care e-learning solutions. A local entrepreneur went from working as a video game repair technician to creating a state of the art video lottery machine system. Global lottery giant GTECH acquired this Moncton grown company in 2004 and was itself acquired in 2006 by Italy's Lottomatica, which chose to maintain production of the systems in Moncton. The result has been a gaming cluster, which now includes a unit of Oracle and a significant number of homegrown companies and development centers for multinationals.

Moncton ploughed economic growth back into infrastructure, building a new City Hall, widening bridges and roads and opening up parcels of land to development of corporate headquarters, call centers and media studios. One of the most satisfying milestones was the opening of the Emmerson Business & Technology Park on the brownfield site that had been home to CN's Moncton Shops. The developer, Canada Lands Company, put C$50 million into cleanup and redevelopment of the 249-acre site, which also includes the CN Sportplex and residential units.

Connecting to the Internet Age

Greater Moncton's latest plan, Vision 2010, calls for updating the region's economic development for the Internet age. In 2007, Moncton partnered with Cisco and Hewlett-Packard to install the first free outdoor wireless mesh network in Canada. In a mesh network, data traffic is handed off between wireless nodes, most of which operate without a landline connection. This reduces the cost of cabling but requires high-quality design and a large number of nodes to succeed. City workers installed the entire system, mostly on lampposts and traffic signals, in three days across six city blocks. The network has since been expanded selectively to local parks, shopping districts and the Magnetic Hill concert site, where it supports e-commerce for local merchants as well as communication and Web browsing. The City has even created a Community Access mobile WiFi service that allows it to deploy coverage for special events on demand.

But mobility is not just for sporting events and concerts. Moncton's municipal buses also offer free WiFi. By making it convenient for bus riders to access broadband, the new service has increased usage of public transit, with positive impacts on both emissions and congestion. In response to demand, the bus fleet is scheduled to grow from 27 to 52 buses by the end of 2010.

Moncton is also deploying ICT to improve municipal services. A van equipped with high-speed data collection technology evaluates the condition of pavement on city streets and feeds information into the city's Asset Management System. The city has also installed 20,000 wireless meter-reading devices in its water system. They measure water flows so precisely that they can detect leaks within the household, which saves citizens money while promoting conservation. Building inspectors and other outside workers are taking laptops on the road and connecting securely into city systems to access information and file reports.

One constant amid these waves of changes has been the process by which Moncton built and continues to build its broadband future. Community leaders in government, academia, institutions and businesses continue to connect and collaborate to a remarkable degree. From 2004 to 2008, the chair of the City Council's Prosperity and Economic Affairs Committee was the founder and chair of the public-private Moncton Technology Planning Group (MTPG). Members of MTPG have been board members of Enterprise Greater Moncton. The Mayor of Moncton and senior staff also sit on the Board of Enterprise Greater Moncton, and are involved in MTPG as well as the city's Prosperity and Economic Affairs Committee, of which the past chairman of the Chamber of Commerce is a member. Representatives from provincial and national government agencies also have representatives in most of the groups. In some places, having such a tightly knit leadership group becomes a barrier to progress by reducing transparency and stifling new ideas. But in Moncton, it seems to have been key to the successful fight back from the economic brink and the continuing effort to build a strong, diverse and prosperous community.

In the News
Read the latest updates about Moncton.

Want to know more about Moncton?
Moncton was featured in the Intelligent Community Forum book Brain Gain.

Population: 125,000

Labor Force: 75,600

Website: www.moncton.ca

Smart21 2009 | 2010

Top7 2009

Kingston is one of Canada’s oldest cities, founded at a strategic intersection of lakes and rivers, with an historic waterfront and an employer base of Federal and Provincial agencies that attracts more government grants per capita than any other city in the nation. It has been ranked Canada’s third best place to live and smartest city, thanks to deployment of an open-access community broadband network supplemented with investment in the Eastern Ontario Regional Network bringing 10 Mbps service to rural neighborhoods. More than 90% of Kingstonians now subscribe to broadband. But the economy’s heavy dependence on public sector spending makes Kingston vulnerable to decisions made far away, and local government has developed a multi-faceted strategy to diversify its economy while maintaining the culture and quality of life that residents treasure.

Building Innovation

It is aided in this undertaking by the presence of Queen’s University, a top 10 research institution and St. Lawrence College, a 2-year institution with schools of business, computer and engineering technology, health sciences and skilled trades. Queen’s University founded an office in 1987, called PARTEQ Innovations, to identify intellectual property and support its commercialization. PARTEQ went on to build Innovation Park, where academic, business and government researchers work to pioneer new technologies and bring them to market.

Innovation has a particular focus in Kingston. The public, business, education and government have rallied around a goal to make environmental sustainability its focus. Local government launched a community planning process that resulted in Sustainable Kingston, a plan that gave rise to a nonprofit of the same name. As a result, most research and commercialization focuses on greentech and cleantech, from the Federal GreenCentre Canada research lab to a Fuel Cell Research Centre and High-Performance Virtual Computing Lab. Successful businesses are also pioneering in automation, life sciences and health technologies. In addition to sustainability, the city launched a Kingston Culture Plan in 2010 to increase the impact of the city’s already sizeable arts and culture economy, both for its own economic value and its attractiveness to creative professionals. City leaders see these efforts as steps in social transformation, helping a community that is already satisfied with its lot in life to seize the vast potential of the broadband economy.

Population: 123,363

Labor Force: 90,000

Website: www.cityofkingston.ca

Smart21 2009 | 2014

Top7 2014

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: 536,917

Website: http://investinhamilton.ca

Smart21 2016 | 2018 | 2020

Top7 2018 | 2020

At a time when governments around the world are becoming deeply involved in managing their economies, Fredericton owes its place among the Top Seven Intelligent Communities to decisions to reduce the role of government in the local economy.

In colonial days, Fredericton served as the anchor of a vibrant regional economy based on trade with America's New England states. But over time, economic power gradually concentrated in the nation's geographic center, leaving the eastern provinces to become "branch office economies" dependent on decisions made elsewhere. It became so common for people to move west in search of economic opportunity that Frederictonians called it "goin' down the road."

Fredericton is the capital of the province of New Brunswick and public-sector employment shielded the community for many years from economic decline. Then in the mid-1980s, the Canadian Federal government began running large deficits and responded by offloading public costs onto provincial and municipal governments. By the 1990s, Fredericton found itself with a government that was too large, a private sector too anemic to support it, and a doubtful future.

Building a Knowledge Economy

Local government responded in 1992 with an economic development strategy called Vision 2000. It called on Fredericton to build an economy based on its unique human and economic assets, and to stop looking to others to save the day. The study itself was probably less important than the people who participated in developing it. They included city officials, university leaders, the Chamber of Commerce, real estate developers, the region's telecom firms, the hydro-electric utility and a representative of a small group of software investors.

The universities had long played a major role in Fredericton's economy and culture. The University of New Brunswick (UNB) is Canada's oldest English-language university and the first to create a computer science faculty and offer forest engineering programs. Saint Thomas University is Canada's only university focusing exclusively on teaching the liberal arts. The Maritime College of Forestry Technology is a business-government co-op that supports excellence in the management of one of Canada's most important natural resources. Through Vision 2000, the university sector began to engage in serious ways with both local government and the private sector. In 1994, UNB partnered with the city to develop the Knowledge Park, offering office space for knowledge-based businesses. The project plan emphasized quality of life with, in addition to office space, wooded areas, walking trails, and both daycare and pre-school facilities onsite. By 2007, the Park held three completed buildings totaling 90,000 square feet (8,360 m²) with a fourth 90,000 sf building under construction, and tenants included tech companies such as CGI, SkillSoft and Q1 Labs as well as the Wyndham hotel chain and the owner of the University of Phoenix, the Apollo Group.

It was the small group of software investors, however, who probably had the biggest impact. They saw Vision 2000 as an opportunity and used the government's clear show of support to form the first informal executive network in the community. Their timing was good. As provincial and local government froze hiring and began to downsize, the best and brightest civil servants left to start "knowledge sector" businesses in technology and services. They found support both from private investors and programs introduced by the provincial and Federal governments, including the Atlantic Innovation Fund, the BREAKTHRU Business Plan Competition and the Industrial Research Assistance Program.

The Vision 2000 plan was updated in 2001 and then every three years after that. It began to target development in specific sectors such as e-learning, aerospace training, health, network security and multimedia games. The 2004 plan included a bold statement of purpose: that economic development should focus first and foremost on supporting locally owned firms and give second place to business attraction. That commitment was no doubt made easier by a track record of success. In 2005, the knowledge sector employed more people than did the provincial government for the first time in history.

But Fredericton's government, under the leadership of Mayor Brad Woodside, refused to leave all the innovating to business. Following the 1992 study, Fredericton launched a set of business process improvement programs to streamline and make more efficient a government that clearly had too many moving pieces. To further drive the process, the city entered the ISO-9001 quality management process, which forced it to understand, clarify and document everything government did. In May 2004, Fredericton passed its audit and became one of the few ISO-9001 certified cities in North America.

To support its focus on growing local business, Fredericton launched a series of awards for business excellence and contributions to quality of life, which targeted small and micro businesses as well as mid-size and large companies and the entrepreneurs who built them. The city also began to focus on a weakness becoming increasingly apparent as the Nineties gave way to the new century.

The Broadband Barrier

As demand for Internet connectivity rose across Canada, Fredericton found itself a "have not" community. Carriers focused investment in the same geographic center that had so long dominated the Canadian economy and showed no interest in upgrading dial-up service in the "outer provinces." After lobbying proved unsuccessful, Fredericton decided to form its own telecommunications company. e-Novations was established as a co-op. It obtained funding commitments from 12 founding members – including the city, the universities, business users and the region's largest Internet Service Provider – and used it to build a fiber ring connecting to their facilities. It then pooled their demand and purchased broadband capacity in bulk. Each member paid for a minimum guaranteed bandwidth, but had the ability to tap any unused bandwidth in the system on demand. Because networks tend to have substantial idle capacity, e-Novations immediately reduced the members' cost and established a new competitive price point in the region. By mid-2002, e-Novations had a stable fiber ring and positive cash flow but struggled with how to meet demand from new prospective members outside the downtown core. The answer proved to be point-to-point microwave links to such facilities as the local airport, which could be set up quickly and at lower cost than fiber to the premises. When commercial carriers became members of e-Novations in order to resell broadband to their small business and residential customers, it was clear that the community network model was a success.

In 2003, Fredericton took the next step. Using its fiber ring as a backbone, the city deployed almost 300 WiFi access points throughout downtown and the business corridor, in public facilities and retail malls. Rejecting the idea of hot-spots, Fredericton sought to blanket the area with overlapping coverage zones. It branded the result the GoFred Zone: an area covering 100% of the city in which access to broadband wireless is absolutely free. As Fredericton's Mayor Brad Woodside puts it, "We don't charge you to walk on our sidewalks. Why would we charge you for broadband?"

Fredericton's rich broadband offerings have created a growing culture of use for broadband and IT in daily life. The city Web site offers an online database of city services, and allows residents to register for recreation and meeting space online. Parents view school announcements and homework assignments over the Internet and can participate remotely in meetings of the school board. They access the FredKid.com online portal, created entirely by Fredericton families, to learn about programs and services available to support them. The Harvest Jazz and Blues festival, one of the largest music events in eastern Canada, attracts over 80,000 fans to Fredericton each year. It takes more than 800 volunteers to produce it, and they rely on a Web-based volunteer management system to make it happen. Fredericton is also home to the National Adult Literacy Database, a nonprofit that provides Internet-based literacy and core skills training to five million users a year.

Imagine Fredericton

Fredericton continues to grow and is predicted to increase its population by 50% over the next 25 years. To ensure the growth process goes well for everyone, the city launched the Imagine Fredericton initiative in 2016. Imagine Fredericton was a multifaceted initiative that directly engaged the community to determine how to manage residential and employment growth in the coming years and what areas are of particular value to the public. The initiative included many different engagement opportunities from open houses and a variety of online tools to a three-day City Summit, one-on-one conversations and an “Imagination Station.” These activities aimed to provide citizens with an understanding of how Fredericton has grown to date, its existing assets, and the key challenges and opportunities it faces.
Imagine Fredericton resulted in a list of nine community goals for the city:

• Sustainable and Efficient
• Green and Healthy
• Welcoming and Supportive
• Strong and Diverse Economy
• Culturally Rich and Diverse
• Vibrant Downtown and Riverfront
• Complete Neighborhoods and Distinctive Places
• Complete Transportation System
• Safe and Inviting Public Realm

These goals will provide a roadmap for the city’s upcoming Growth Strategy and the new Municipal Plan in coming years. Since establishing them, the city has already designed three distinct growth scenarios for public discussion and analysis. These scenarios were presented for community feedback, which showed a clear preference for growing the city in a more compact, efficient way than before, balancing growth on the north and south sides of the Saint John River and maximizing growth in the Urban Core, where an estimated 8,000 more residents can be housed. With this feedback, Fredericton can focus on providing the best path forward for its citizens based on their preferences and future needs.

Connecting the Community Through Digital Projects

Beginning in 2018, Fredericton has implemented several core projects to engage with the local community and enhance quality of life. Digital Fredericton is the city’s 5-year strategic transformation plan to become more flexible, efficient, transparent and responsive government. The plan includes moving core government systems to the cloud for easier, more efficient access and usage and establishing more e-Government services and research programs to identify community needs and improve the overall experience. Digital Fredericton also includes establishment of an Open Data Portal to allow citizens to access up-to-date information and local entrepreneurs to develop e-service applications for citizens.

To collect data for public use in the Open Data Portal, the city has partnered with eleven-x to deploy Internet of Things (IoT) sensors throughout Fredericton. These sensors monitor occupancy and utilization of wheelchair accessible parking throughout the city, air and noise pollution levels in multiple areas and water consumption, and all of this data is made available to the public through the Open Data Portal. Sensors are also in place to monitor the water level of the Saint John River to help respond to flood conditions in as timely a manner as possible.

A Remarkable Transformation

The combination of smart strategy, hard-working private entrepreneurship and cooperative public investment in information and communications technology have completely transformed the economy of Fredericton over the past fifteen years. More than 70% of New Brunswick's knowledge industries call Fredericton home and, on a per capita basis, the city hosts the largest engineering cluster in North America. The population of Fredericton grew 14.5% since 1992 but the labor force grew 22% over the same period and average household income has jumped 13.5% since 2003. The community has added 12,200 new jobs in the past decade, and seen two of its companies win the nation's top innovation award.

And being a political capital still doesn't hurt. Fredericton's aerospace training cluster serves Canada's largest military training base, located near Fredericton. After a nationwide search, Canada's National Research Council Institute for Information Technology established the first headquarters facility outside Ottawa in Fredericton, where its e-business facility offers local companies access to cutting-edge skills from more than 50 researchers and technicians. Sixteen companies in its incubator have attracted more than C$25 million in venture capital. What distinguishes Fredericton is its success in streamlining government and stimulating a robust private sector without sacrificing the advantages that come with its political position.

In the News
Read the latest updates about Fredericton.

Population: 62,234

Labor Force: 31,505

Website: www.fredericton.ca

Smart21 2006 | 2008 | 2009 | 2020 | 2021

Top7 2008 | 2009