Toronto ranks just behind Silicon Valley and New York City in terms of employment in communications technology in North America, but it needs to act quickly to maintain that position or lose it to emerging economies with a more aggressive approach, a City of Toronto report says.
Financed by the City of Toronto, the provincial Ministry of Economic Development and Trade and federal International Trade Canada, the report says that the greater Toronto Area employs about 148,000 people in 3,300 technology-related enterprises and has $30- to $35-billion in annual sales, but does not have a coherent plan to promote itself as a technology "cluster." Nor does it do enough to attract high-tech investment.
A number of other Canadian tech areas have set up tech-industry promotional organizations — the York Technology Association, the Mississauga Technology Association, Waterloo's Communitech and Ottawa's Centre for Research and Innovation among them — are vigorously working to attract investment and employers to their region. There is currently no similar group within Toronto.
The report, called An Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Strategy for the Toronto Region, was developed by ICT Toronto, a new partnership of a n umber of the area's tech businesses, which will act as an advisory group for the city.
"The ICT sector is vitally important to our economy," Mayor David Miller said in a statement. "This strategy will reinvigorate the industry in Toronto and help us to remain at the forefront of leading edge technology and investment."
ICT Toronto member Frank Maw, president of Alexander Consultants and former president of Motorola, told The Globe and Mail that three nations — Brazil, India and China — threaten to overtake the city shortly, and there are signs of increased engineering activity in Eastern Europe as well, especially in Poland and Russia.
For instance China, he says, "is graduating a larger number of engineers each year than are in our universities and work force in total."
The tech sector in Toronto is "buoyant," he said, but it "lacks a focus." Although employment remains steady, its position will eventually be eroded by competition from abroad and by the loss of jobs in other manufacturing sectors.
In February alone, he said, Southern Ontario lost about 50,000 jobs in all sectors. But "the tech sector will continue to grow if it is encouraged and nourished the right way."
The objective of the ITC Toronto study, he says, is to become the world's fifth-largest technology cluster by 2011.
The report lays out a five-year plan that recommends increased collaboration among business and the three levels of government (municipal, provincial and federal). It also calls for an increased sector profile to promote Toronto as a place to work and to invest in, increased competitiveness by giving business equal access to government support, and an increased number of businesses, especially by attracting new investors with a complete bandwidth and wireless infrastructure.
In practice, the report says that the targets for 2011 will include a 15-per-cent increase in industry-university research and commercialization projects, a regional marketing strategy for global awareness, a 15-per-cent increase in ICT research, a 25-per-cent increase in ICT research, a 15-per-cent investment increase and a 20-per-cent increase in employment in the sector.
The report also calls for an internationally competitive public-access wireless Internet service to be put in place. It has a goal of attracting at least five new ICT multinational companies to the region, and increasing by 10 per cent the annual rate of formation of new companies.
Mr. Maw says that ICT Toronto is currently raising funds from the government to develop a business plan, and after that will concentrate on raising money from ICT Toronto's industry partners to implement the plan.
The biggest priority, he says, is to invest in education. He noted that despite the bad odour in which the federal government was held, it has engaged in a "silent revolution," in which it poured "a lot of capital" into universities, especially "a phenomenal amount" into the University of Toronto.
Many of the emerging economies, he says, "have realized that the best way to improve their economies is to invest in education," he said. Moreover, the city has all the right elements for a dynamic tech sector: universities, diversity, a Bohemian culture and a good ICT base in telecom infrastructure.
