Mississauga’s talent base a big business draw

The City of Mississauga is fortunate to have an abundance of highly talented and skilled residents. Mississauga has 21 universities and colleges within commuting distance and it is benefiting from the skills sets of new immigrants. That’s good news for potential employers. It indicates a talent pool in which companies can easily draw upon to successfully build their business.

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Supplement: May 1, 2006

Canadian cities in the fast lane

Technology is changing urban environments with updated options from voting to paying for parking

Rapidly developing communications and software technologies mean tomorrow’s Canada will look and feel markedly different for the Canada of yesterday. Cities across the country are embracing new systems that make everyday life more livable, and these fast cities are setting the pace for the rest of the world.

Take ubiquitous Internet access for example. Toronto has cemented its position as one of the fastest cities in Canada as, thanks to Toronto Hydro Telecom, the local hydro utility’s telecommunications arm, large parts of the downtown area will shortly be blanketed with Wi-Fi access. It is providing access in a six square kilometre area from Jarvis Street West to Spadina Avenue, and from Toronto’s historic Front Street area north to Bloor Street.

The initiative, which will provide high-speed 802.11g access, is built on an agreement last year by the City of Toronto to sell street lights to a Toronto Hydro subsidiary. Two business conditions drove the project. “We have a massive fiber-optic network that is being used at two per cent capacity—it’s massively under used,” said Toronto Hydro Telecom president Dave Dobbin. This network will link access points on street lamps to the wider Internet.

The second element in the move is Ontario legislation that will see smart electricity meters installed in all homes by 2010. These will help regulate electricity usage on days of peak demand. Toronto Hydro decided a mesh network would be the easiest way to manage those meters, and it was just a short step from there to providing public Wi-Fi access.

“Now we are playing with the idea of allowing buildings to hook in to the network,” Dobbin said. Local campus environments or shopping malls could also link to the network.

Move to e-government
But Wi-Fi networks are not the only way to bring a city into the 21st century. Thanks to companies like Vancouver-based Verrus and Calgary-based New Parking, an increasing number of Canadian cities are enhancing the public infrastructure with mobile phone technology. These companies enable members of the public to pay for parking meters simply by typing a code into a cellphone. Residents in the cities of White Rock and Richmond in B.C. and Saskatoon, Sask., now no longer have to worry about not having enough change.

These initiatives are all private commercial projects which use technology to enhance the public infrastructure of a city. In many cases, though, the cities themselves are also playing a strong role in bringing new technology to bear.

The city of Markham in Ontario, for example, has been experimenting with online voting since first introducing it in 2003. It has approved Internet voting for its municipal elections this year. In the meantime, the city of Mississauga, near Toronto, has created an eCity program offering an online services portal to both businesses and consumers. The city is also working hard to encourage an influx of technology businesses, having installed a high-speed secure fiber-optic ring to help bolster the local infrastructure for ICT companies. The city has 3,912 companies in its ICT cluster, having grown this group by 118 per cent over the last eight years.

Mississauga is heavily courting outsourcers from India who want to set up nearshore operations. These are Canadian offices, designed to take advantage of lower employment costs and land prices here, while bridging the linguistic, cultural and time zone divide between Indian developers and U.S. customers. Mississauga wants to promote its status as a fast city by both importing immigrant staff and retaining professionals locally who can then work for customers across the border, boosting the local economy without haemorrhaging skills.

Mississauga mayor Hazel McCallion recently attended a conference organized by Nasscom, India’s National Association of Software and Service Companies. “The Greater Toronto Marketing Alliance just returned from India and our mayor led that mission, and our focus was the ICT sector,” said Susan Amring, economic development manager for the City of Mississauga. Ontario has also opened an investment office at the Canadian high commission in that region, giving people a greater understanding of the opportunity to track Indian investment in the province.

“We found that companies were interested in our messages, but the smaller and medium sized ones seemed to need more help with coming here and they are looking for partners,” Amring said. “We encourage them to come to our area and we would set up meetings for them.”

Extending wireless
Innovation is also occurring in some outlying areas. Companies like Nortel and Bell are working to pilot enabling technologies for smaller rural towns such as Chapleau. The two companies are creating a wireless mesh network for the 3,000-strong Northern Ontario community which will provide a platform for other services, including online multimedia content.

In the meantime, Bell and Rogers have teamed up on Inukshuk, a joint-venture using longer-range WiMax-like technology to deliver network access to rural communities across the country. Canada has a reputation for democracy and equality. In tomorrow’s digital landscape, maintaining parity between urban fast cities and rural environments will be an important part of that.

Nova Scotia continues forward
Nova Scotia has been recognized as a province which understands technology innovation leads to economic prosperity. That direction was underlined in an interim report prepared by the Premier’s Advisory Council on Innovation. The Council recommended the province focus on six areas, among them Information and Communications Technology (ICT).

The report argues that communities should not measure progress by the number of broadband connections only. “The focus within ICT recently shifted toward broadband access. While expanded availability is important, this is only one element of a successful strategy for the exploitation of ICT in the innovation process. Nova Scotia’s ability to increase its quality of life will be determined more by how we use ICT, rather than how much we use it.”

To further its ability to effectively use technology, the province’s Information Economy Initiative has placed more than $90 million in computers, software, Internet connections, technical support, professional development and infrastructure and research support into schools, universities and communities.

Of particular note, the Initiative helped fund a Dalhousie University graduate program in electronic commerce, the first degree of its kind in Canada. Dalhousie also hosts the hub of a high-speed research network that links St. Francis Xavier, Acadia and Cape Breton University.