Such stuff as high-tech dreams are made on
Stratford’s bid to become a hub shows small cities what’s possible
STRATFORD, ONT.— Ask Dan Mathieson to stand in the middle of a busy intersection holding an iPad and he’ll readily comply.
The mayor of Stratford, Ont., population 30,000, will do pretty much whatever it takes to push his small city’s economic agenda forward.
In this case, he’s trying to illustrate the power of the city’s publicly-owned Wi-Fi network and its role in Stratford’s bid to become Ontario’s first live test bed for driverless cars.
“It’s a technology-based world today,” Mathieson says in an interview in his office in city hall, built in 1898 in the Victorian “Picturesque style.”
“We want to make sure our residents don’t feel they have to move to a larger centre to be part of that.”
By declaring Wi-Fi a public service, much like garbage collection and water filtration, Mathieson says the city can attract a different kind of employer and create more jobs.
RBC has opened a $300-million data centre here. Starwood Hotels is experimenting with its first “distributive call centre”— a virtual reservation system that relies on people who can connect from home.
The University of Waterloo agreed to open a satellite campus that will be home to 500 students this fall.
Even the Stratford Festival is digitizing its vast body of work — dozens of live performances — to reach a wider audience and create teaching materials for the classroom.
“We were one of their first clients with big demands that they were able to start supporting,” says Anita Gaffney, executive director of the Stratford Festival and president of Invest Stratford, the city’s economic development agency.
“It was imperative for our business to start sharing our work on a digital platform.”
But it’s the mayor’s latest bid to expand the local economy beyond the arts, agriculture and auto parts — making it the role model for the connected community of the future — that is attracting wider attention.
The Ontario government announced in the fall of 2015 it would begin allowing driverless cars on public roads under certain conditions.
But a live test would require the kind of digital infrastructure that would allow the vehicles to communicate with each other and with traffic signals and the road. Where to do that? Stratford raised its hand. “We’re already pretty well down the road in setting that up,” Mathieson says of the city’s digital network. The city had other advantages, too. A little off the beaten track, Stratford is still within easy reach of Highway 401, several research universities and auto assembly plants, he argues.
And like Goldilocks, it’s just the right size, he says. Not too big, not too small.
“It doesn’t make sense for another city to reinvent the wheel to get themselves into that position,” he says, referring to bids by other autocity mayors for consideration.
The province is reviewing Stratford’s proposal. It could be several months before a decision is made, Ontario’s Economic Development Minister Brad Duguid said in a recent interview.
It wouldn’t be the first time Stratford has undergone a makeover.
Indeed, the city has a long and storied tradition of changing direction, says Mathieson, a Stratford native. Originally home to North America’s largest locomotive repair yard, the decline of the railway industry left the city scrambling for another source of revenue.
Stratford-born journalist Tom Patterson came up with the idea of creating a Shakespearean festival. The city already had the name associated with Shakespeare’s birthplace, complete with a meandering river running through it.
The civic leaders of the day gave Patterson $125 to go to New York City and try to get actor Alec Guinness and director Tyrone Guthrie to participate. They agreed.
Thus, in 1952, the annual Stratford Festival was born. It has gone on to become a major tourist attraction, generating $140 million in economic activity, $65 million in taxes and 3,000 direct and indirect jobs, according to the Conference Board of Canada.
The city took another leap forward in the early 2000s after the province deregulated local hydro utilities. Many of the utilities also owned fibre optic assets that were put into separate entities.
A lot of the fibre optic companies were eventually sold to Atria Networks, a private sector initiative that became part of Rogers Communications Inc. But Stratford resisted the call.
“We said no. We think the digital sidewalk is a utility we want to ensure is available to everyone in our neighbourhood,” says Paul West, who works in business development at Stratford’s data infrastructure company, Rhyzome Networks.
“We think ownership as a city through a profit-based model makes sense. That’s what stands out in the Stratford’s story.”
In 2011, Stratford went a step further, creating a W-Fi cloud over all 12 square kilometres of the city.
Now, the network provides low-income residents with a low-cost alternative to the cable and telecom giants. It provides access to theatre tickets and restaurant information for the half-million annual visitors to Stratford. And it connects medical offices, hospitals and some municipal services.
The city’s publicly owned Wi-Fi is also the reason the Automotive Parts Manufacturers Association of Canada is backing Stratford as the ideal location to test self-driving vehicles.
“They’ve already installed 400 (communications) towers around the city. That saves us a few million dollars,” says association President Flavio Volpe. “A lot of other auto mayors would like to do this, but Stratford is small enough that you can partner with them.”
Grant Courville, a director of product management at QNX Software Systems, calls Stratford “the connected capital of Canada.”
“I really mean that in the sense that it’s a smaller city that has truly invested in a connected infrastructure,” he adds in a telephone interview from Ottawa, where the company is headquartered.
A division of BlackBerry Inc., QNX makes the software that runs infotainment and telematic systems in about 40 million cars around the world. Its best known product would be General Motors’ OnStar navigation and communication system.
QNX could be one of the big winners in the global race to equip cars with more features that allow them to operate more autonomously from the driver.
Having a local test facility, where customers could come and look at the products and services being created in Ontario would be a huge plus, Courville says.
“If we want to foster innovation and attract talent and really be at the forefront of the shift in the auto industry, it’s absolutely imperative that we have that here,” he says.
“If we don’t do this, it will happen elsewhere, in the U.S. or Europe, because it’s no longer a matter of if, it’s a matter of when,” Courville adds.
Back outside Stratford city hall, Mathieson is high-fiving a group of school kids who have recognized him as the mayor. “He’s my Dad,” one of them brags, though it’s clear he’s making that up.
“We’re fortunate to have a mayor like Dan Mathieson. He’s got a great vision for the city. He’s working to get a lot of different sectors working on digital platforms . . . including automotive,” says Gaffney.