Globe and Mailis Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.
Last year was the 10th in a row that Ontario’s economy grew more slowly than the national average.
The cumulative effect of this underperformance is a doubling in provincial debt and an intractable deficit that the government will promise unconvincingly to subdue in Thursday’s budget. Long the province that punched above its weight, Ontario is fast becoming a bigger Quebec, faced with managing its relative decline.
You wouldn’t know it by Toronto’s skyline, where new hotel towers bearing the Trump, Shangri-La and Ritz banners signal the city’s membership in an elite network of global cities where big deals and decisions get made. As such, Ontario is also a lot like California, where pockets of extreme wealth and economic dynamism co-exist among low-income immigrant communities and rusted-out manufacturing towns that have made both places studies in contrast.
Maintaining public services (improving them might be asking for too much at this point) will challenge Ontario’s leaders as never before. If the province is serious about taming the deficit, every program, including health care and education, must be subject to spending constraints and/or tax increases for which Ontarians remain unprepared. But with long-term prospects for economic growth of less than 2 per cent a year, what choices does any government have? Read the rest of this entry »
The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.
A giant 3D television displayed two separate animations of coloured rectangle s that appeared at seemingly random areas on the screen. The coloured rectangles — and they covered the entire spectrum of a rainbow — represented different mine areas, and appeared on screen in the order they should be developed.
The animation was a visual representation of mine scheduling and showcased the differences between a schedule that was put together manually, and another that was created by an algorithm developed at Laurentian University.
Scheduling ore extraction at a mine may seem like a mundane task at first, but tweaking the extraction order for peak mine performance can increase the net value of a mining operation by up to 20%.
Researchers at Laurentian’s Mining Innovation Rehabilitation and Applied Research Corporation (MIRARCO) developed a software solution called the schedule optimization tool, or SOT for short.
The technology helps mining companies save time and money before they start digging for minerals, and has been used by a number of companies, including Vale and Xstrata.
Lorrie Fava, MIRARCO’s program manager of ventilation and production optimization, said the program cuts down greatly on the amount of time companies need to dedicate to scheduling a new mine site. Read the rest of this entry »
The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.
Thomas Homer-Dixon is director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation and CIGI Chair of Global Systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Ont.
Ontario, we’re told, is Canada’s new rust belt. The high dollar is pummelling the province’s exports. Big manufacturers are fleeing. The Liberal government is slashing spending to maintain the province’s credit rating. And to top it off, it’s wasting money promoting green energy. There’s just one problem with this pop wisdom: It’s largely nonsense.
Ontario certainly faces huge challenges. Its main trading partner – the United States – is only now emerging from the economic doldrums that followed the 2008-09 financial crisis. And since that crisis, the world economy has been struggling with depressed consumer demand, wary investors and aggressive deleveraging by households, businesses and governments.
Ontario wasn’t ready for this new reality. From the early 1990s to the mid-2000s, a weak loonie made Ontario’s products artificially competitive outside Canada, so companies deferred investment in new factories and technologies. Read the rest of this entry »
The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.
Q: What exactly is CEMI?
A: The Centre for Excellence in Mining Innovation is a not for profit organization of about 10 people that was established to help bring innovation in the areas of exploration, deep mining, integrated mine engineering, environment and sustainability to the mining industry of Northern Ontario by directing industry funding to universities and colleges, existing research groups, and the supply and services sector.
It is widely recognized that the era of cost-cutting to survive low commodity prices is gone and the present challenge is to meet the continuing demand of the global economy for metals given the demographics of the industry.
Companies such as Xstrata Nickel, Vale, and Rio Tinto fully recognize that this can be accomplished only by implementing new ideas that will redefine how the mining industry of the future will operate.
Q: What is its mandate?
A: Well, it is the centre for excellence because the mandate is to deliver solutions that can be implemented in the fields of mining operations, exploration, and sustainability. Most metal mines in Canada are underground mines that are getting deeper and hotter, and this presents huge challenges. Read the rest of this entry »
The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.
The Centre for Excellence in Mining Innovation has made a few changes to prepare for its continued growth. Peter Kaiser, founding president during the startup phase of CEMI, has passed the leadership baton to Douglas Morrison, chair of Holistic Mining Practices, who joined CEMI in 2011 as vice-president.
Kaiser will not be going very far as he will continue to lead the Rio Tinto Centre for Underground Mine Construction, a division of CEMI. During the five years of his leadership the organization more than doubled the initial investment by the Ontario government and founding partners Vale, Xstrata Nickel and Laurentian University.
CEMI directs and coordinates step-change innovation in the areas of exploration, deep mining, integrated mine engineering, environment and sustainability for the metal mining industry. This year, CEMI’s cumulative program funding exceeded the $40-million threshold. Read the rest of this entry »
The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.
WALKERTON, ONT.— Three hours northwest of Toronto, a group of Ontario manufacturers is throwing the traditional rules of business out the window.
Business owners visit each other’s factories. They share secrets. They plan long-term hiring strategies, collaborate on research and development, and ponder productivity enhancements. They help solve each other’s problems on a shared website.
In years past – tumultuous years, given the surge of competition from China and the soaring Canadian currency – these small and medium-sized makers of furniture, flooring, doors and cabinets viewed each other as direct competitors. Now, 30 business owners gather every few months in small boardrooms to share ideas.
The companies formed a cluster, a concept first coined by Harvard University’s Michael Porter two decades ago that has since been adopted in countries from Germany to China. While some clusters have emerged in Canada – tech in Waterloo, aerospace in Montreal – manufacturing clusters remain relatively rare in this country. Read the rest of this entry »
The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.
But is it possible to force-feed clusters, or to shift a city’s existing
cluster mix? James Milway, executive director of the Martin Prosperity
Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Business, said
the most effective move is “to take what you’ve got and make the best of
it.” Local educational institutions need to turn out skilled graduates
that the existing clusters need, he said, and “if the government can
prod that along, that’s great.”
Mike Tims is clearly in the sweet spot. The company he chairs, Peters and Co., is an investment bank that operates at the intersection of two of the most vibrant sectors of the Calgary economy – resource extraction and financial services.
Those two industry “clusters” are crucial to Calgary’s success, as they bring together a complex group of players whose interaction, competition and collaboration accelerate productivity and innovation.
Canadian cities are increasingly recognizing the need to nurture and refine these business hubs, getting leaders, educational institutions, and government agencies together to spur them along as they compete for economic activity with other municipalities in North America and around the world. Read the rest of this entry »
The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.
Mining analyst Sudol said the high-tech nature of mining
in 2011 is not well understood. “We all talk about high
tech in Kitchener-Waterloo and Silicon Valley in California
and we are sort of ignoring an extraordinarily interesting
concentration of mining technology, research and education
in Sudbury.”
The same thing killing jobs in southwestern Ontario is creating them by the thousands in Northern Ontario.
The industrialization and urbanization of China, Brazil and India is causing the flight of well-paid industrial jobs to those emerging economies. The fallout is unemployment in Ontario’s industrial sector and unemployment rates soaring to 9.8% in London and 10.8% in Windsor.
But the loss for the south is a gain for the north.
Unemployment is low in places such as Kirkland Lake and Sudbury. Mines and mine-related businesses are clamouring for workers.
“The industrialization and urbanization of China, India and Brazil and many other developing countries will be ongoing for many generations to come,” says respected mining consultant and analyst Stan Sudol. Read the rest of this entry »
The Toronto Star, has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.
The role of the provinces would be to target subsidies
at emerging industries (Premier Dalton McGuinty’s green
energy program is an example) and regional clusters
(biotechnology and life sciences in Toronto, high-tech
development in Waterloo, mining technology in Sudbury).
(Carol Goar – Toronto Star Editorial Board)
For roughly 30 years, Ottawa has been pouring taxpayers’ dollars into Canada’s “innovation gap” — and achieving precious little.
The government spends roughly $5 billion a year to induce business to invest in research and product development. Cabinet ministers regularly exhort corporate leaders for their unwillingness to use their earnings to leap ahead of their global competitors. Conferences are held, reports written.
Yet according to the latest statistics from the Organization for Economic Growth and Development, Canada remains at the back of pack in terms of private spending on research and development (16th out of 27 industrial countries).
This record of failure calls for a “fundamental reordering of how innovation, research and development are funded in Canada,” says the Mowat Centre in a provocative new study. Read the rest of this entry »
Established in 1980, Northern Ontario Business provides Canadians and international investors with relevant, current and insightful editorial content and business news information about Ontario’s vibrant and resource-rich North. Ian Ross is the editor of Northern Ontario Business ianross@nob.on.ca.
The Long Harbour Development Corp. in Newfoundland wants to import the expertise of Sudbury’s mining supply and services companies.
The community is the site of Vale’s $3-billion hydromet processing facility, currently under construction, and it will process nickel sulphide concentrate from Vale’s Voisey Bay Mine in Labrador. The development corporation wants to identify suppliers so when the facility goes into production in 2013, they are ready to meet the supply and services requirements.
“I am a matchmaker,” said Joe Bennett, executive director of the Long Harbour Development Corp. “I want to take advantage of the experience of the suppliers in Sudbury and see if we can create a marriage between organizations in Newfoundland who might want to do a joint venture, or partnership, or sub-office, with someone who is already experienced in dealing with Vale on the supply side and hopefully get a leg up.” Read the rest of this entry »
The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.
If you’re a student or a professor at the University of Waterloo, any intellectual property that you create there belongs to you. This unusual policy has helped make Ontario’s Waterloo Region a leading patent generator. It has also sparked local successes such as smart-phone giant Research In Motion Ltd. and software developer OpenText Inc., both university spinoffs.
“They basically have evolved from student days into incredible multinationals,” says John Jung, chief executive officer of Canada’s Technology Triangle Inc., the public-private economic development agency for the Waterloo Region.
Encompassing the cities of Cambridge, Kitchener and Waterloo, the region has long understood the value of close ties between business and academia. Its almost 60,000 full-time students – Waterloo’s two other key schools are Wilfrid Laurier University and polytechnic Conestoga College – are a vital source of talent for local companies.
Through the University of Waterloo’s decades-old co-op system, Canadian and international students apply their knowledge in the real world. The region’s three major postsecondary institutions have representatives on the Technology Triangle board, alongside business leaders. Read the rest of this entry »
August 25, 2011 – The Northern Centre for Advanced Technology Inc. (NORCAT), has been awarded the NASA Group Achievement Award for outstanding efforts in support of the 2010 International Lunar Surface Operations InSitu resource Utilization Field Test (ILSO-ISRU). Specifically this distinction is awarded in recognition of the quality of results and level of impact on NASA programs, effective management of cost and schedule, customer satisfaction, capacity for future contribution and the development of innovative approaches in responding to unforeseen crises.
In addition to technical contributions such as the drill and sample acquisition system for the NASA RESOLVE lunar water prospector testing and fuel cell system design for the lunar water utilization experiment, NORCAT’s role during this ILSO-ISRU field exercise was as overall field mission lead and coordinator. Read the rest of this entry »
The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.
Matthew Mendelsohn is the director of the Mowat Centre at the University of Toronto. John Austin is the nonresident senior fellow, Metropolitan Policy Program at Washington, D.C.’s Brookings Institution. To learn more, visit www.greatlakessummit.org.
Regions are becoming more important because capital and talent tend to cluster
geographically so that employers have easy access to potential partners and
employees. Clusters emerge in regions that possess natural, cultural and place-
defining attributes that make them attractive places to live and work. They also
emerge near centres of public and private research and education.
(Matthew Mendelsohn and John Austin)
In the first in a five-part series ahead of the Mowat Centre and Brookings Institution Summit on the Future of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence region, starting next week in Windsor and Detroit, two experts argue that with proper governance, the Great Lakes region could be the success story of the century ahead.
Regions will be just as important as nation-states in ensuring the wellbeing of communities in the coming decades. The Great Lakes-St. Lawrence region – made up of the eight states and two provinces (Quebec and Ontario) that surround these great waters – has everything necessary to succeed in this new world.
Regions are becoming more important because capital and talent tend to cluster geographically so that employers have easy access to potential partners and employees. Clusters emerge in regions that possess natural, cultural and place-defining attributes that make them attractive places to live and work. They also emerge near centres of public and private research and education. Read the rest of this entry »
Published in the Ontario Mineral Exploration Review by the Ontario Ministry of Northern Development and Mines in 2007. www.omicc.ca
National, provincial and regional governments are continually searching for new tools to improve the economic prosperity of their citizens. Prosperity is a widely used term in government documents, reports and position papers. Evidence from both the developed and developing world is that economic prosperity is created, not inherited.
For example, some countries and regions rich in natural resources remain poor, whereas other countries and regions with little in the way of a natural endowment have and continue to enjoy a higher standard of living. Inherited comparative advantages such as natural resources, geographic location, or a supply of labour are becoming less important in achieving prosperity.
According Harvard professor Michael Porter, renowned for his pioneering work on competitiveness and cluster theory, “A nation can be prosperous and productive in virtually any field. What matters is how a nation competes, not what industry it competes in…we must stop thinking that traditional industries are bad and that the nation must move into high tech”.
“A nation can be prosperous and productive in virtually any field. What matters is how a nation competes, not what industry it competes in…we must stop thinking that traditional industries are bad and that the nation must move into high tech”.(Harvard Professor Michael Porter)
