Not just manufacturing, Vaughan mayor eyes knowledge economy as city projected to reach 6.5% GDP

'Vaughan’s emerging sectors make it well poised to head into 2022,' says Mayor Bevilacqua

Yorkregion.com
Dec. 3, 2021
Dina Al-Shibeeb

Vaughan is known for its manufacturing, but its mayor wants to shake if not -- reinvent -- a whole new city, hint: Knowledge economy almost like its neighbouring Markham where IBM calls home.

“Vaughan’s emerging sectors make it well poised to head into 2022,” Mayor Maurizio Bevilacqua said, citing how the city is “seeing notable growth in the health and health technology sectors and knowledge industries.”

As the city’s projected GDP is expected to reach 6.5 per cent, or an equivalent to a $1.58 billion increase as it caps 2021, surpassing once again the nation’s income, Bevilacqua announced that the global life science tools company LGC Group is going to relocate its research chemicals subsidiary in Toronto to Vaughan during his annual luncheon on Oct. 13.

In the email, Bevilacqua said the U.K.-based TRC/LGC is “making a significant investment of more than $100 million to facilitate the expansion, relocation, and consolidation of its current five GTA sites to a custom-built 185,000-square-foot facility in the (Vaughan Enterprise Zone) VEZ.”

Home to Adidas’ headquarters in all of Canada, the VEZ -- projected to accommodate 60,000 jobs over the next 20 years -- is considered to be part of Vaughan’s “significant city-building initiatives” that are undergoing.

The VEZ is on par with the city’s emerging downtown core, also known as the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre (VMC), and the Vaughan Healthcare Centre Precinct (VHCP), which will transform an 82-acre parcel of land at Jane Street and Major Mackenzie Drive -- in collaboration with York University and ventureLAB -- to bring about health-care innovation.

Attracting skilled workers has long been a Vaughan dream.

In 2019, the City of Vaughan released its Economic Development and Employment Sectors Study, where it described how talent attraction and retention “cannot be simply about employment opportunities.”

The report spelled out the need for skilled workers to require “housing options, transportation, access to amenities, and ultimately attachment to the community if they are to be retained,” which Vaughan is arduously trying to achieve.

While the mayor continuously boasts of Vaughan having a relatively high educational attainment with 70.3 per cent of the population 25 years and older having a post-secondary degree, the report said that the city’s share of the total workforce employed in occupations considered knowledge-based is 27.7 per cent, considered to be lower than any of the comparable communities in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area, which average at 39.1 per cent.

The report also said that Vaughan must garner an understanding of how it should be engaging with its local businesses and supporting their exports in hopes of boosting foreign direct investments. This explains Bevilacqua’s mission to Israel in 2019 and recently reigniting his ties with the mayor of the Israeli city of Ramla.

Before the pandemic, Vaughan and its business chamber were also aiming to visit the U.K. following Brexit.

The emerging sectors of health and health technology sectors and knowledge industries are budding after Vaughan’s $22.61 billion economy in 2020 saw some decline from 2019’s $24.12 billion due to the pandemic.

However, Vaughan’s manufacturing, transportation, warehousing, and wholesale trade still came to the rescue when it funneled more than $9 billion into the city’s GDP in 2020 alone.

The city also said that Vaughan’s projected growth for 2022 is expected to outpace York Region, which is projected to increase by 5.5 per cent; the province, estimated to increase by 4.5 per cent; and the country, set to grow by 3.8 per cent.

Like the city itself, Pierre Desrochers, associate professor of geography at the University of Toronto, said it’s all about “location, location, location,” in reference to Vaughan’s proximity to Pearson airport.

“Honestly, what would be more remarkable is a mayor that would be hard to fail in Vaughan,” said Desrochers, who pointed to the “NIMBY problem,” using the acronym for “Not in My Backyard” to describe citizens who don’t want to see further intensification.

“If Bevilacqua and other people in Vaughan are willing to let things happen, then things will spontaneously happen,” the professor said. “Any politician with a YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard) attitude would succeed there I guess.”