Toronto tech boom poised to bring good and bad

High-tech companies’ interest in Toronto will bring jobs but also job losses and uneven benefits.

Thestar.com
May 11, 2017
By David Rider

Toronto is on the cusp of a tech boom that will bring residents benefits but also a “dark side” that city officials, academics and businesses need to jointly overcome.

That conclusion from a “Smart Cities” panel came Wednesday amid news Uber will make Toronto a hub for driverless car research and Google’s parent firm has applied to build a high-tech neighbourhood on the downtown waterfront.

“This is a really big deal. We are in a moment,” Sara Diamond, OCAD University president, said in an post-panel interview about huge international interest in Toronto and the Golden Horseshoe as centres of digital innovation, artificial intelligence, machine learning and more.

Factors helping make the region a magnet for business and talent include political and economic stability, a huge university and college research capacity, established tech sector with dozens of incubators, receptive governments, high quality of life and - particularly compared to the U.S. now - an embrace of cultural diversity.

“It’s the texture of living here,” said Diamond, an information technology researcher, adding new tech blood will bring, along with jobs and spending, help harnessing big data, analytics, sensors and more to figure out how to improve the quality of life of GTA residents and beyond.

OCAD students helped the City of Toronto use data to improve the recreation registration process. The same technology can be aimed at transit, housing and more to assess problems and show policy changes to address them.

But Diamond and others on the panel, hosted by the Toronto Region Board of Trade, acknowledged the boom won’t be all robotic rainbows and cyber sunshine.

“Be careful what you strive for because there’s a dark side to it as well,” including job losses triggered by disruption and, if left unchecked, uneven distribution of benefits disadvantaging low-income residents, Mike Williams, the City of Toronto’s general manager of economic development, told the business audience.

The tech boom is expected to be focused downtown where Waterfront Toronto is redeveloping sites with ultra-high-speed broadband. Neighbourhoods most in need of jobs are in the city’s northeast and northwest corners.

An influx of international capital will do nothing to dampen house prices, already a major problem for low-income Torontonians including students and artists.

Diamond revealed she and the heads of Toronto’s three other universities will soon announce a new initiative about the affordability of student housing, following a similar joint initiative aimed at student transportation.

“We’ve brought together the four universities’ phenomenal research capacity, very much based in data analytics, to look at innovative strategies around affordability for student housing within the GTA,” she said. “We’ll work with the city and other partners on that. You’ve got that capability right now for Toronto to rise up.”

Panelists, who also included Carl Bodimeade, a senior vice-president at Hatch Infrastructure, and Rob Meikle, the city’s chief information officer, agreed with conclusions of a new report that more collaboration and co-ordination is needed to maximize tech’s benefits and see them spread as widely as possible.

Mayor John Tory introduced the discussion, saying he is committed to releasing city data on an open platform and ending a “visible lack of enthusiasm, and anxiety about what happens when you make this data available.”

In the 2014 mayoral election, Tory promised to double the number of city data sets released annually from 175.

Open-data advocates including Mark Richardson say that promise has not been kept. “We’re now almost back at election time, but they’re barely adding one data set every two or three weeks,” he said in an interview.

The city is under-investing in smart technology, with resulting costs including paying too much for paving, while “giving the appearance of being good managers,” he said.

Tory’s office replied in a statement: “Rather than rushing bad data out the door, staff have been working to release meaningful data sets while developing an open data master plan which will be released in September 2017 along with an open data portal.”