AMO tackles globalization - embracing technology

NRU
Aug. 22, 2017
By Dominik Matusik

Ontario's municipal governments need to take full advantage of global trade opportunities and new technologies. Agricultural, forestry, and manufacturing experts at this year's Association of Municipalities of Ontario annual conference emphasized the role municipalities play in ensuring these sectors thrive.

Through regulatory policy and infrastructure investment, municipalities will need to prepare for the rise of high-tech agriculture, Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security Evan Fraser told NRU.

"There is a huge amount of innovation happening in farm and food processing," Fraser says. "A large number of us think that the same kind of scale of change that we think is going to hit the transportation sector with self-driving electric cars [will also hit the agriculture sector]."

"Technologies with that potential for disruption are also being applied in farms and feed lots, and dairy barns and food processing facilities-smart tractors, robotic milkers, things like that. These technologies represent a huge opportunity ... to reduce agriculture's environmental impact. They represent a huge opportunity economically for Canada."

Fraser explains that the agriculture sector is poised to grow in the coming years, and the provincial government, as well as municipalities, needs to make regulatory changes and infrastructure investments to fully take advantage of this growth.

"This is going to require a significant change in infrastructure and training. So to take advantage of this opportunity, we're going to have to be prepared," he says.

Fraser cites two examples of changes municipalities will have to make in the future. For rural municipalities, he sees broadband internet as a crucial infrastructure investment. For urban municipalities, it will require zoning changes to allow for vertical farms and other innovations, as well as a change in health standards to accommodate algae protein and edible insects as food sources.

Ontario Forestry Industry Association CEO Jamie Lim told NRU that this technological revolution has, in many ways, already occurred in her industry.

"We're already there," she says. "If you went into a new sawmill today, you'd be blown away. Where there used to be people having to manually grade every piece of lumber, for example, now there's a computer that, in nanoseconds, assesses all the cuts that can be made out of a log and does the grading. It's amazing the automation that's taking place not only in the manufacturing of our products, but also in the harvesting."

Lim stresses that increased automation will not reduce the job-generating potential of the industry, which creates three indirect jobs for every direct forestry job created. She says that the major barrier to growth of the forestry industry is provincial policy, which is centred on reducing lumber harvesting.

"Municipalities across the province continue to work with us to ensure that government develops public policy that respects all three pillars of sustainability. Policy that recognizes that people matter and mainstreets matter."

Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters president and CEO Dennis Darby said that municipalities are at the forefront of manufacturing and trade. In his presentation he emphasized their role in the upcoming NAFTA renegotiation.

"To ensure the future prosperity of our communities and to keep manufacturing jobs here at home, we need to make sure that Ontario manufacturers have access to the tools they need to take advantage of the opportunities created by a new NAFTA. To attract investments and skilled people and to compete on the global stage. The reality is Ontario is not attracting enough investment."

Darby concludes that municipalities, through such things as building permits and infrastructure support, have an enormous amount of influence over the manufacturing sector.