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Antiloop33rpm
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miketoronto
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Antiloop33rpm why bother about what? Trying to attact business to Toronto.
I don' tcare what you guys say. Toronto is just sitting back and letting the business leave for the 905, letting new business come into the region and not even look at the city, etc.
We need a development corporation first to focus on our downtown and go out there and attract business. And I would even agree with them going to points of the 905 and trying to attract business back to our core.
After our core gets on its feet again, then business will grow in the rest of our city. But when the core is in decline, business wil decline in the whole city.
Lets bring on the downtown Toronto development corporation, and get serious about bringing the jobs back.
First stop for the development corporation should be the CITY ABOVE TORONTO and get back all the business they sucked out of Toronto.
We gotta bring the jobs back, and make Toronto the centre again. It will have great benefits for the whole region. We may actually tie the region together for once, if more people are coming into the city each day. We will be able to get people to commute by transit again if they are coming to a common area like downtown.
We will see more taxes for the city, which will help our budget problems, etc.
We must get Toronto back up on its feet so that we will be like Chicago and NYC, where over 50% of regional jobs are within the central city limits and the downtown cores. We can do it, but Toronto has to be proactive.
I don' tcare what you guys say. Toronto is just sitting back and letting the business leave for the 905, letting new business come into the region and not even look at the city, etc.
We need a development corporation first to focus on our downtown and go out there and attract business. And I would even agree with them going to points of the 905 and trying to attract business back to our core.
After our core gets on its feet again, then business will grow in the rest of our city. But when the core is in decline, business wil decline in the whole city.
Lets bring on the downtown Toronto development corporation, and get serious about bringing the jobs back.
First stop for the development corporation should be the CITY ABOVE TORONTO and get back all the business they sucked out of Toronto.
We gotta bring the jobs back, and make Toronto the centre again. It will have great benefits for the whole region. We may actually tie the region together for once, if more people are coming into the city each day. We will be able to get people to commute by transit again if they are coming to a common area like downtown.
We will see more taxes for the city, which will help our budget problems, etc.
We must get Toronto back up on its feet so that we will be like Chicago and NYC, where over 50% of regional jobs are within the central city limits and the downtown cores. We can do it, but Toronto has to be proactive.
A
Antiloop33rpm
Guest
Antiloop33rpm why bother about what?
Why bother getting into this broken record discussion.
M
miketoronto
Guest
Antiloop33rpm when I have a passion and believe in something I am not going to back down, because people don't like it.
If you don't like the idea of Toronto being proactive and actually getting jobs back in the city, then fine.
But I do believe in it. I believe in a city that is not a bedroom community to the suburbs. I believe in a strong downtown where people come in from all over the region. I believe in a city where business wants to locate etc. I believe in a region that should see most of the jobs in the central city and not out in the middle of sprawl.
And if you don't like that, then to bad. I will stand by my words, and my beliefes that our city needs workers and we have to do what we have to do to get them back.
A city can't exist as a bedroom community. It needs JOBS, and it needs more then Tim Hortons jobs.
If you don't like the idea of Toronto being proactive and actually getting jobs back in the city, then fine.
But I do believe in it. I believe in a city that is not a bedroom community to the suburbs. I believe in a strong downtown where people come in from all over the region. I believe in a city where business wants to locate etc. I believe in a region that should see most of the jobs in the central city and not out in the middle of sprawl.
And if you don't like that, then to bad. I will stand by my words, and my beliefes that our city needs workers and we have to do what we have to do to get them back.
A city can't exist as a bedroom community. It needs JOBS, and it needs more then Tim Hortons jobs.
A
Antiloop33rpm
Guest
when I have a passion and believe in something I am not going to back down, because people don't like it.
I have no problems with passion. I know this is something you feel strongly about which is why instead of posting a snide comment to this thread I decided to delete my post. Truthfully, I just dont have the energy to get into this debate again, and not that is necessarily a bad thing, but, debating with you mike can really be frustrating at times.
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unimaginative2
Guest
Industrial leaders like Magna International, ATI Technologies and Research In Motion — maker of the renowned BlackBerry — went directly to 905 or the emerging "technology triangle" of Kitchener-Waterloo, Cambridge and Guelph.
Wait...what the hell is this supposed to mean? Is Toronto supposed to have first dibs on all corporate headquarters? RIM was founded by people from Waterloo in Waterloo. This isn't a loss to Toronto any more than a company founded in Japan is a loss to Toronto.
A
AlvinofDiaspar
Guest
Here is an interesting report to look into, from the City of Toronto:
www.toronto.ca/legdocs/20.../it010.pdf
AoD
www.toronto.ca/legdocs/20.../it010.pdf
AoD
A
AlvinofDiaspar
Guest
T
TdotTrickyRicky
Guest
The second post is an interesting read. I am not as concerned with flat employment numbers if this is as a result of economic restructuring away from manufacturing and towards more knowledge based employment.
Beyond the pure "space" numbers a more significant study would be to look at employment on a sector by sector basis and see how we compare with our domestic and international peers. Not just in size but in innovation and growth. This kind of sounds a little aggressive but Toronto should really aim to dominate domestically in most economic sectors, if not we should really be looking at how to do so. Domestic competition however is not enough and we should really be thinking about first continental and then global competitiveness.
One indicator statistic I am interested in watching is the number of Americans moving to Toronto. You will really be able to tell that Toronto is becoming more competitive on a continental basis if you start seeing more and more american's moving here. The fact that this is not currently the case is in my opinion a direct reflection of our lack of competitiveness vis a vis US metropolitan regions. We are at best only comparable and better then our peers only in a few select categories.
Beyond the pure "space" numbers a more significant study would be to look at employment on a sector by sector basis and see how we compare with our domestic and international peers. Not just in size but in innovation and growth. This kind of sounds a little aggressive but Toronto should really aim to dominate domestically in most economic sectors, if not we should really be looking at how to do so. Domestic competition however is not enough and we should really be thinking about first continental and then global competitiveness.
One indicator statistic I am interested in watching is the number of Americans moving to Toronto. You will really be able to tell that Toronto is becoming more competitive on a continental basis if you start seeing more and more american's moving here. The fact that this is not currently the case is in my opinion a direct reflection of our lack of competitiveness vis a vis US metropolitan regions. We are at best only comparable and better then our peers only in a few select categories.
E
Ed007Toronto
Guest
I'd like to see how we are doing with firms from outside North America. We should be encouraging firms that need a North American presence but don't want to deal with the ever tightening US border to set up here.
A
afransen TO
Guest
Not to mention that we really, really need to reduce our reliance on the US. They are trainwreck waiting to happen, and as it stands, we're the dame tied to the tracks in front of it...
T
TdotTrickyRicky
Guest
It's not as if sector groups aren't making noise about competitiveness and taking action (like the Mars biomedical initiative, recent IT group report, new film studio etc.) but we really have taken success for granted in the past and need coordinated objectives and lobbying for clear objectives from government.
An issue with regard to public construction contracts, I have a number of friends in the construction industry and they have expressed to me that the City of Toronto is seen as difficult to work with, city employees are considered lazy and incompetent and in particular the city does not administer it's payments properly. In contrast the region of Peel is considered the best municipality to work with (the municipality of York the worst). This matters because contractors price their bids accordingly.
I found this article describing some successes in the K-W region.
A place that doesn't hold back its best
By GREG KEENAN, GORDON PITTS and HEATHER SCOFFIELD, Globe and Mail Update
Waterloo, Ont. — Shoemaker Street traverses an industrial park in Kitchener, where there's no one left making shoes. The once-vital textile industry is a shadow of its former self. The last tire making factory in the onetime rubber capital of Canada will soon shut its doors.
Welcome to Waterloo Region, smack in the eye of the Category 5 hurricane battering the country's manufacturing sector.
The soaring dollar, surging commodity prices, globalization and crises at the two largest U.S. auto makers have exterminated more than 117,000 manufacturing jobs in Canada in just 12 months. Eight plants have shut or are doomed in Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge. Massive layoffs have walloped other large industrial employers. About 3,400 jobs have evaporated in furniture making, textiles and auto parts — industries whose high-paying jobs created a solid, middle-class existence for generations.
This kick in the stomach would have staggered other, less resilient communities.
Kitchener-Waterloo, however, bounds ahead, leading the country in economic activity and demonstrating the get-on-with-it fortitude displayed by legions of entrepreneurs going back more than a century. The jobless rate actually fell last month to 5.2 per cent, among the lowest rates in the country.
Call it the Waterloo Way. It's a cultural and economic model that provides a beacon as Canada enters a new age of embattled manufacturing accompanied by massive investments in energy. It's the blueprint for how other communities can become economic warriors in the global battle for jobs and growth. It holds the key for Canada's economic survival and perhaps dominance.
“What happens in Kitchener-Waterloo in knowledge creation and dissemination and creation of high-value innovation is a metaphor for the 21st-century Canadian economy,†says David Johnston, president of the University of Waterloo, an institution that is a fairly recent, but critical contributor to the region's success.
It's vital that other parts of the country pay attention to the successes in this community of about half a million people, adds Tom Jenkins, chairman and chief strategy officer of Open Text Corp., one of the leading high-tech companies in the region.
“If you're a community in Canada, the reason you're interested in this is the same reason you're interested in your children's education — it's because this is the future,†Mr. Jenkins says.
One essential ingredient lies beneath Waterloo Region's historic ability to shrug off economic shocks and advance to new and leading-edge activities: Culture. The building blocks were laid by hard-working Mennonites who flooded into this part of Southwestern Ontario in the 1800s and were followed by successive waves of immigrants from Germany and elsewhere who embraced change.
Generations of entrepreneurs have adopted an attitude of: “If something new comes along, why aren't we involved in it?†notes Larry Smith, an adjunct associate professor at the University of Waterloo who is an expert on the subject.
The area has been at various times the furniture capital of Canada, the button capital, the shoe making capital and the rubber capital. It's an automotive capital with the expanding presence of Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada Inc. on the northern edge of Cambridge. Food processing has been a mainstay for more than 100 years. There's diversification beyond manufacturing with a large financial services component through Manulife Financial Corp. and other insurance companies.
Luck helps, too. It's just an hour from Toronto and the key financial backers of new ventures. The U.S. border and the big market for products that have been made here for more than 150 years is not much farther.
The industrial history of the area — and central Canada — is written in yellow brick on a drive up King Street. The Bauer mattress factory is being demolished and the old Kaufman shoe plant is being transformed into the Kaufman lofts. Krug Furniture, Rumpel Felt and Huck Glove — stalwarts of the community for a century or more — still survive.
While they march on as foot soldiers of the old economy, Waterloo's remarkable ability to thrive during seismic economic change is being tested as never before.
It's passing the test, leaving behind shirts, boots and steel-belted radials and rolling into the new economy — world-leading BlackBerry wireless communications devices at Research In Motion Ltd., solar panels at ATS Automation Tooling Systems Inc., digital imaging systems at DALSA Corp.
In the northern part of Waterloo, within the shadow of the University of Waterloo, sits one of the keys to that transition. There, a 15-minute drive from where descendants of Mennonite settlers still cruise the countryside in horse and buggy, Open Text, RIM and others in the burgeoning high-tech sector form the base that is turning the area into the knowledge capital of Canada.
For the moment, RIM, ATS and DALSA are also manufacturing in Waterloo Region, adjusting to the soaring Canadian dollar and resisting the siren call of China, where hourly wages are measured in pennies, and India, where engineers are a dime a dozen.
To explain why those companies grew up there and why they're thriving, Mr. Jenkins points to “the alchemy†of Waterloo, a co-operation between business, governments and educational institutions. “There is an environment here where if you're an entrepreneur in this town, you're treated with great respect, and I mean from everybody,†he says.
That's a lesson learned hard and painfully in other Canadian cities, where economic development has often been stymied by cultural, social or political divisions. Kitchener-Waterloo operates on a consensus that growth need not run roughshod over environmental or community goals and that successful business people are not pariahs, but can be heroes. The community is also action-oriented — it actually does things, rather than engage in endless debates about change.
The roots of Open Text and its growth to a $414-million (U.S.)-a-year company exemplify the tripartite co-operation between entrepreneurs, government and the University of Waterloo that serves as a model for other Canadian cities.
The software developer grew out of a 1984 contract professors Frank Tompa and Gaston Gonnet won to help Oxford University develop search engines and software to put the Oxford English Dictionary on-line. Ottawa chipped in with a $1.7-million (Canadian) grant, the university provided the equivalent of another $1-million or so and the first two employees were co-op students.
That's another area where Waterloo led the country — pioneering the co-op program where students spend four-month terms working at companies.
The university was founded by entrepreneurs who feared a looming shortage of technical graduates.
They created an institution that reflected a pragmatic and unique structure. While other centres of higher learning developed around arts programs, the University of Waterloo was born with an engineering, computer science and mathematics focus, and the co-op program, which has generated practical experience and jobs for thousands of graduates.
The co-op program is world renowned. Just ask Komex H20 Science Inc., an environmental firm in Los Angeles that hires University of Waterloo students for work terms. The company has purchased a condo to house the students and provides them with two essentials for beachside Southern California living — a bicycle and a surfboard.
Another crucial decision by the university founders helped incubate hundreds of spin-off companies — allowing researchers to retain the intellectual property rights for anything they developed.
“The key is to give people incentives to think about what might be put to use,†says Doug Wright, the first dean of the engineering school and later president of the university in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The relatively small size of the region also means business leaders are constantly rubbing shoulders so they can toss around ideas and learn from their peers.
“If you happen to be in an industry that's more challenged, then it's a way of really getting access to ideas that you may not otherwise have ... whether it's on the tobogganing hill or whether it's the mayor's art night,†says Jan Chaplin, president of Cambridge-based Canadian General-Tower Ltd., a member of the fifth generation of the Chaplin family to run the company, which began life in the 1860s as a wagon wheel maker. Today, it's a leading producer of swimming pool liners, a major Canadian-based presence in plastic auto parts and a testament to the agility of manufacturers in Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge.
Such transitions have not been seamless, but they occur because the community accepts that this is the way of business. People just get on with it, Mr. Wright says. In Waterloo Region, wagon wheel makers morph into auto parts producers, shoe makers become telecom operators and television manufacturers invest in digital projection systems for the 21st century. A wireless e-mail pioneer explores the frontiers of science itself.
Until now, the process of change and adaptation has been pushed along by the casual sharing and incubation of ideas and best practices. But that is about to become more formal with the opening of the Accelerator Centre, a stone's throw from Open Text in the University of Waterloo Research + Technology Park.
It's another example of the three-way co-operation. The federal and Ontario governments donated $13.4-million each to the research park, while Waterloo Region and the City of Waterloo each kicked in $6.7-million. The university supplied 400 acres of land.
The $4-million Accelerator Centre will be an incubator for high-tech startups from the university or even private research labs to help them make the jump to commercial success. It offers startups help to obtain financing, suites in the building and mentoring through a council of entrepreneurs that includes RIM founder Mike Lazaridis, who studied at the University of Waterloo.
The support from government goes well beyond money, Mr. Jenkins points out. “I have situations where I have 20 people who want to move to the city and the mayor has come and given them a talk about Waterloo. He's driven to Toronto to do that.â€
There are many threats to Waterloo maintaining its skill at riding the waves of economic change —complacency, failure by governments to maintain the infrastructure and the tendency of companies that flourish in Canada's small economy to get swallowed up by global players.
The end of Dofasco Inc., Ballard Power Systems Inc. and wine maker Vincor International Inc. as Canadian companies points to one issue for policy makers trying to determine where the economy is headed.
But focusing on making sure thriving companies stay in Waterloo or even remain Canadian is the wrong argument, in the eyes of Mr. Jenkins.
“What we need to do is not get focused on keeping that steel mill, or keeping that RIM, or keeping that Open Text, but creating the environment from which more will spawn,†he says.
“The single best way to keep a RIM in Canada is to educate and reward and enourage Canadian-born entrepreneurs or immigrants that have chosen Canada as their home.â€
An issue with regard to public construction contracts, I have a number of friends in the construction industry and they have expressed to me that the City of Toronto is seen as difficult to work with, city employees are considered lazy and incompetent and in particular the city does not administer it's payments properly. In contrast the region of Peel is considered the best municipality to work with (the municipality of York the worst). This matters because contractors price their bids accordingly.
I found this article describing some successes in the K-W region.
A place that doesn't hold back its best
By GREG KEENAN, GORDON PITTS and HEATHER SCOFFIELD, Globe and Mail Update
Waterloo, Ont. — Shoemaker Street traverses an industrial park in Kitchener, where there's no one left making shoes. The once-vital textile industry is a shadow of its former self. The last tire making factory in the onetime rubber capital of Canada will soon shut its doors.
Welcome to Waterloo Region, smack in the eye of the Category 5 hurricane battering the country's manufacturing sector.
The soaring dollar, surging commodity prices, globalization and crises at the two largest U.S. auto makers have exterminated more than 117,000 manufacturing jobs in Canada in just 12 months. Eight plants have shut or are doomed in Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge. Massive layoffs have walloped other large industrial employers. About 3,400 jobs have evaporated in furniture making, textiles and auto parts — industries whose high-paying jobs created a solid, middle-class existence for generations.
This kick in the stomach would have staggered other, less resilient communities.
Kitchener-Waterloo, however, bounds ahead, leading the country in economic activity and demonstrating the get-on-with-it fortitude displayed by legions of entrepreneurs going back more than a century. The jobless rate actually fell last month to 5.2 per cent, among the lowest rates in the country.
Call it the Waterloo Way. It's a cultural and economic model that provides a beacon as Canada enters a new age of embattled manufacturing accompanied by massive investments in energy. It's the blueprint for how other communities can become economic warriors in the global battle for jobs and growth. It holds the key for Canada's economic survival and perhaps dominance.
“What happens in Kitchener-Waterloo in knowledge creation and dissemination and creation of high-value innovation is a metaphor for the 21st-century Canadian economy,†says David Johnston, president of the University of Waterloo, an institution that is a fairly recent, but critical contributor to the region's success.
It's vital that other parts of the country pay attention to the successes in this community of about half a million people, adds Tom Jenkins, chairman and chief strategy officer of Open Text Corp., one of the leading high-tech companies in the region.
“If you're a community in Canada, the reason you're interested in this is the same reason you're interested in your children's education — it's because this is the future,†Mr. Jenkins says.
One essential ingredient lies beneath Waterloo Region's historic ability to shrug off economic shocks and advance to new and leading-edge activities: Culture. The building blocks were laid by hard-working Mennonites who flooded into this part of Southwestern Ontario in the 1800s and were followed by successive waves of immigrants from Germany and elsewhere who embraced change.
Generations of entrepreneurs have adopted an attitude of: “If something new comes along, why aren't we involved in it?†notes Larry Smith, an adjunct associate professor at the University of Waterloo who is an expert on the subject.
The area has been at various times the furniture capital of Canada, the button capital, the shoe making capital and the rubber capital. It's an automotive capital with the expanding presence of Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada Inc. on the northern edge of Cambridge. Food processing has been a mainstay for more than 100 years. There's diversification beyond manufacturing with a large financial services component through Manulife Financial Corp. and other insurance companies.
Luck helps, too. It's just an hour from Toronto and the key financial backers of new ventures. The U.S. border and the big market for products that have been made here for more than 150 years is not much farther.
The industrial history of the area — and central Canada — is written in yellow brick on a drive up King Street. The Bauer mattress factory is being demolished and the old Kaufman shoe plant is being transformed into the Kaufman lofts. Krug Furniture, Rumpel Felt and Huck Glove — stalwarts of the community for a century or more — still survive.
While they march on as foot soldiers of the old economy, Waterloo's remarkable ability to thrive during seismic economic change is being tested as never before.
It's passing the test, leaving behind shirts, boots and steel-belted radials and rolling into the new economy — world-leading BlackBerry wireless communications devices at Research In Motion Ltd., solar panels at ATS Automation Tooling Systems Inc., digital imaging systems at DALSA Corp.
In the northern part of Waterloo, within the shadow of the University of Waterloo, sits one of the keys to that transition. There, a 15-minute drive from where descendants of Mennonite settlers still cruise the countryside in horse and buggy, Open Text, RIM and others in the burgeoning high-tech sector form the base that is turning the area into the knowledge capital of Canada.
For the moment, RIM, ATS and DALSA are also manufacturing in Waterloo Region, adjusting to the soaring Canadian dollar and resisting the siren call of China, where hourly wages are measured in pennies, and India, where engineers are a dime a dozen.
To explain why those companies grew up there and why they're thriving, Mr. Jenkins points to “the alchemy†of Waterloo, a co-operation between business, governments and educational institutions. “There is an environment here where if you're an entrepreneur in this town, you're treated with great respect, and I mean from everybody,†he says.
That's a lesson learned hard and painfully in other Canadian cities, where economic development has often been stymied by cultural, social or political divisions. Kitchener-Waterloo operates on a consensus that growth need not run roughshod over environmental or community goals and that successful business people are not pariahs, but can be heroes. The community is also action-oriented — it actually does things, rather than engage in endless debates about change.
The roots of Open Text and its growth to a $414-million (U.S.)-a-year company exemplify the tripartite co-operation between entrepreneurs, government and the University of Waterloo that serves as a model for other Canadian cities.
The software developer grew out of a 1984 contract professors Frank Tompa and Gaston Gonnet won to help Oxford University develop search engines and software to put the Oxford English Dictionary on-line. Ottawa chipped in with a $1.7-million (Canadian) grant, the university provided the equivalent of another $1-million or so and the first two employees were co-op students.
That's another area where Waterloo led the country — pioneering the co-op program where students spend four-month terms working at companies.
The university was founded by entrepreneurs who feared a looming shortage of technical graduates.
They created an institution that reflected a pragmatic and unique structure. While other centres of higher learning developed around arts programs, the University of Waterloo was born with an engineering, computer science and mathematics focus, and the co-op program, which has generated practical experience and jobs for thousands of graduates.
The co-op program is world renowned. Just ask Komex H20 Science Inc., an environmental firm in Los Angeles that hires University of Waterloo students for work terms. The company has purchased a condo to house the students and provides them with two essentials for beachside Southern California living — a bicycle and a surfboard.
Another crucial decision by the university founders helped incubate hundreds of spin-off companies — allowing researchers to retain the intellectual property rights for anything they developed.
“The key is to give people incentives to think about what might be put to use,†says Doug Wright, the first dean of the engineering school and later president of the university in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The relatively small size of the region also means business leaders are constantly rubbing shoulders so they can toss around ideas and learn from their peers.
“If you happen to be in an industry that's more challenged, then it's a way of really getting access to ideas that you may not otherwise have ... whether it's on the tobogganing hill or whether it's the mayor's art night,†says Jan Chaplin, president of Cambridge-based Canadian General-Tower Ltd., a member of the fifth generation of the Chaplin family to run the company, which began life in the 1860s as a wagon wheel maker. Today, it's a leading producer of swimming pool liners, a major Canadian-based presence in plastic auto parts and a testament to the agility of manufacturers in Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge.
Such transitions have not been seamless, but they occur because the community accepts that this is the way of business. People just get on with it, Mr. Wright says. In Waterloo Region, wagon wheel makers morph into auto parts producers, shoe makers become telecom operators and television manufacturers invest in digital projection systems for the 21st century. A wireless e-mail pioneer explores the frontiers of science itself.
Until now, the process of change and adaptation has been pushed along by the casual sharing and incubation of ideas and best practices. But that is about to become more formal with the opening of the Accelerator Centre, a stone's throw from Open Text in the University of Waterloo Research + Technology Park.
It's another example of the three-way co-operation. The federal and Ontario governments donated $13.4-million each to the research park, while Waterloo Region and the City of Waterloo each kicked in $6.7-million. The university supplied 400 acres of land.
The $4-million Accelerator Centre will be an incubator for high-tech startups from the university or even private research labs to help them make the jump to commercial success. It offers startups help to obtain financing, suites in the building and mentoring through a council of entrepreneurs that includes RIM founder Mike Lazaridis, who studied at the University of Waterloo.
The support from government goes well beyond money, Mr. Jenkins points out. “I have situations where I have 20 people who want to move to the city and the mayor has come and given them a talk about Waterloo. He's driven to Toronto to do that.â€
There are many threats to Waterloo maintaining its skill at riding the waves of economic change —complacency, failure by governments to maintain the infrastructure and the tendency of companies that flourish in Canada's small economy to get swallowed up by global players.
The end of Dofasco Inc., Ballard Power Systems Inc. and wine maker Vincor International Inc. as Canadian companies points to one issue for policy makers trying to determine where the economy is headed.
But focusing on making sure thriving companies stay in Waterloo or even remain Canadian is the wrong argument, in the eyes of Mr. Jenkins.
“What we need to do is not get focused on keeping that steel mill, or keeping that RIM, or keeping that Open Text, but creating the environment from which more will spawn,†he says.
“The single best way to keep a RIM in Canada is to educate and reward and enourage Canadian-born entrepreneurs or immigrants that have chosen Canada as their home.â€
A
afransen TO
Guest
I think it's pretty impressive that UW has become the lynchpin of K-W's economic success given that the university in not quite 50 years old. It's also pretty impressive that UW has managed to build a faculty of mathematics that excels in so many fields, when math at many universities gets filed under 'arts'. It's kind of sad to consider that UW could be accomplishing more if it had better funding. It didn't have the luxury of a large, wealthy alumni base such those of U of T, York, Western or Guelph until fairly recently.
U
unimaginative2
Guest
It may not have had an expansive alumni base, but it has always benefitted tremendously from the generosity of the Waterloo Region community at large, whether they are actual alumni of the university or not. In addition, the university has started receiving notable donations from its abundant overseas alumni, particularly in Hong Kong.
A
afransen TO
Guest
And $100 million from David Cheriton, of Google fortune.