Mayor John Tory pitches tech innovation for social good in Silicon Valley
Tory will tell expatriates it's never too late to come home as he tries to entice innovation back over the border.

Thestar.com
April 4, 2016
By Jennifer Pagliaro

While in the Silicon Valley, Mayor John Tory is looking to leverage technology innovation for social good while reminding digitally astute expatriates it’s never too late to come home.

On a three-day business mission to San Francisco this week, Tory told the Star he will also be requesting Twitter executives do more to prevent online harassment in Toronto.

Tory said expats he’s already met on his first day see a growing market in Toronto and beyond, but said the city and country needs to do more to draw them back across the border.

“They said the story of whether you can change the world from Toronto, which is why most of them say they came here, is not yet really known,” Tory said by phone Monday evening.

Tory will also co-host a reception Tuesday for expats, encouraging them to bring the skills they’ve learned home with them.

He said he’s been talking up maternity leave, health care, and Toronto being a safe city with mention of the divisive politics currently embroiling the U.S. contrasted to Canada’s barrier-breaking and down-to-earth political leaders.

As mayor, he said there’s a take-home list of discussions to be had with other levels of government, including about workers losing their U.S. green cards if the move back to Canada for an extended period.

On his first day in the Silicon Valley, Tory and other GTA mayors met with businesses that already have outposts in Toronto and Waterloo - including Google and Facebook - to talk about further expansion of their operations.

Tory described sprawling outdoor campuses with every amenity to keep employees happy in California, the scale of which he said has yet to take hold in the GTA.

A reception Monday night for venture capitalists and Canadian entrepreneurs is aimed at selling recent growth in the tech sector here.

With much of the current focus at the Canadian offices of large tech companies is on sales and policy, Tory hoped to encourage them to engage in development abroad as well.

Part of those talks included how the tech sector can become corporate citizens, including asking Google to bring a San Francisco tradition to Toronto - one that allows employees to use 20 per cent of their time working on their own projects and has seen partnerships with city hall to solve municipal problems.

“We’ve seen, you know, kind of glimmers of that in Toronto...But we really haven’t seen, you know, the kind of much more wholesale, expected as part of the life of the company,” Tory said. “I think it’s something to be emulated.”

Of his conversation with Google, Tory said he was heard and expects “we might be able to count on them as a leader to launch this thing on a broader basis in Toronto.”

Tory has frequently said while the city has some of the best ongoing development on issues like traffic management, there has been a “lack of will” to implement solutions. Tory has also recently raised the issue of cumbersome sign-up process for city youth recreation programs, promising to fix it as soon as possible.

“It’s way too slow and way too late, I mean, compared to what it should have been,” Tory said.

The mayor also plans to raise the issue of online harassment in a meeting with Twitter on Tuesday, what he pointed out has affected racialized communities as well as women in Toronto.

A recent trial of Twitter user Gregory Alan Elliott saw a judge clear him of all harassment charges against two Toronto women, which galvanized both sides of the debate.

Tory’s council colleagues have also recently been the target of some indecent comments, including those tweeted at Councillor Mary-Margaret McMahon over whether the popular Afrofest could again be held for two days.

Tory will be asking them to hold a roundtable in Toronto that includes representatives from those groups and Twitter executives, as they have in other cities.

“Criticism is one thing and the democracy of the Internet is a great thing, but there have been instances of harassment,” Tory said. “All I’m asking for really is that Toronto, which has one of the highest per capita Twitter user bases in the world, should have a roundtable.”

The rest of Tory’s trip includes meetings with other medium and large tech companies looking to expand in Toronto and continuing to talk about social good initiatives.

That includes a meeting Tuesday with Salesforce Ventures executive vice-president Vivek Kundra, formerly the White House’s chief information officer under the Obama administration.

On Wednesday the mayor will meet briefly with city officials and Mayor Ed Lee on the partnerships between government and the tech sector.