Are Northern cities smart or dumb?

• Date: 01 December 2017
• Author: Robinson, David

What will we do about our dumb Northern cities? All around the world, competitors like Waterloo and Toronto, Barcelona and Helsinki are bragging about getting smarter. New York and London are supposedly the smartest cities in the world. India's prime minister has promised to build 100 smart cities. China plans to make every Chinese city smart.

So should Northern Ontario join the bandwagon? Would a Smart Northern City strategy increase employment, cut the cost of living and keep young people in the North? Maybe. But not having a strategy might be a recipe for disaster.

We know, thanks to a report by the Fraser Institute (penned by former Laurentian economics student Steve Lafleur), that Toronto and Ottawa got 98.6 per cent of all new net jobs in Ontario between 2008 and 2016. Our Northern cities lost jobs. Ontario's smart cities are pulling in jobs while the rest of us seem to be going nowhere.

The truth is that cities almost everywhere are...