TORONTO

If Canada wants to boost its global stature as an innovation nation, the Toronto-Waterloo Corridor will be a great place to do it – once it offers true physical and digital connectivity.

As it stands now, the corridor “doesn’t exist” because it is a series of innovation “bubbles” hindered by lacklustre transit links and second-tier Internet infrastructure, a Toronto conference heard today.

The comments came during the opening panel at CityAge, an urban-affairs gathering of leaders in business, government and academia, at Toronto’s MaRS Discovery District. They were made by Drew Bradstock, a former Google product manager and now an executive at Index Exchange, an advertising technology company with operations in Toronto, Waterloo Region, New York, San Francisco and London.

The panel, which included Kitchener Mayor Berry Vrbanovic, was titled Building the Corridor: Our Infrastructure Opportunity.

While acknowledging that the Ontario government’s pledge to provide two-way, all-day GO train service between Toronto and Waterloo Region by 2024 is “a step in the right direction,” Vrbanovic said he’s been hearing from local tech leaders on the need for high-speed rail to move workers through the corridor. He said he is eager to learn more about how the federal government’s $120-billion infrastructure plan, which includes public transit upgrades, might meet this need.

“The ability to move that talent through that corridor is absolutely critical” to building Toronto-Waterloo into a top-ranked tech hub, the mayor said. “If we want to compete in a global economy, where talent moves so easily from country to country, we need to make these investments.”

Aside from faster and more-frequent inter-city rail service to enable tech workers to live at one end of the corridor and work at the other, panelists discussed the need for better integration between all modes of travel, given that most Canadian tech companies sell heavily into the U.S. and other international markets.

“If you’re a tech firm, often a first step is to open a satellite office in the U.S.,” said Bradstock, who is based in Toronto and travels often to Index Exchange’s other locations.

As for digital infrastructure in the corridor, “I think it’s sadly lacking,” Bradstock said. He said innovation hubs like Communitech – which helped Index Exchange establish an office in Kitchener, to tap into local engineering talent – can play a key leadership role in advocating with governments for improved fibre connectivity.

In an interview after the panel discussion, Bradstock recalled his five and a half years working at Google’s Kitchener engineering office, to which he commuted by car from his former home in Oakville.

“I didn’t make the move to Waterloo because my wife worked in downtown Toronto,” he said. “I loved Kitchener-Waterloo, but her commute back into the city was untenable.”

In his own case, when he joined Google, Bradstock had to immediately think about how he was going to get to work each day, and said the same consideration has been top of mind for many of his Google and Index Exchange colleagues.

“The reality is, it continues to be a nightmare,” he said. “I would have loved to have taken the train,” but there was, and is still, no morning rail service into Waterloo Region from the Greater Toronto Area.

Bradstock said a system that “was designed to suck talent out” of Waterloo Region hindered Google’s ability to recruit people from Toronto, who could have lived there and commuted in if there had been a morning train available.

“When we looked at expanding the office out there, it’s actually been difficult, because other than people who went to Waterloo or Laurier or grew up there, getting people to move out there was next to impossible,” he said. “People who were young and liked the city – the city, meaning Toronto – didn’t want to consider it.”

At his Index Exchange office in Toronto, Bradstock has an employee who commutes in from Waterloo Region, but ended up buying a car and taking his chances on Highway 401 due to less-than-optimal GO train schedules and its relatively slow service between Kitchener and Toronto, which takes about two hours.

“The reality is, he’s going to find a new job rather than spend four hours on the train,” Bradstock said.

Development of the Toronto-Waterloo Corridor “will actually be driven by the firms that want to bridge Toronto and K-W,” he said, adding that companies could help speed change by telling their governments that they won’t expand locally without better inter-city links.

Bradstock said awareness among Toronto companies of the importance of building bridges into Waterloo Region is growing, “because of Communitech and other organizations. And I think if that awareness starts spreading out, you’ll get it.”

Later in the day, Toronto Mayor John Tory took the podium to reiterate his support for the corridor, and called on higher levels of government to acknowledge it as “a dynamic region that’s driving the country’s growth” anchored by “the only global metropolis in the country.”

Tory, who spoke forcefully for the Toronto-Waterloo region during a CityAge event in San Francisco this past April, said this part of Canada is at a moment in time when governments are working well together, and when the eyes of the world are on it for its progressive social values and welcoming culture.

“It represents a huge opportunity that we can’t miss, because we’re not going to be the flavour of the month forever,” Tory said, emphasizing that it’s a regional opportunity, not just one for Toronto.

“We’re Canada, we’re Toronto, we’re Ontario, and our competitors are in other countries and city-regions,” he said, and not in neighbouring communities.

The CityAge conference continues through today and tomorrow morning.