A Very Canadian Celebration of Building
A successful Toronto Tech Week sets high expectations for all of us.
A special segment of this week’s newsletter written by Zander Fraser, Head of Content at Build Canada.
Toronto Tech Week
A magical week in Toronto wraps up as thousands of builders from across Canada, and around the globe, find their ways back home.
Inspired would be an understatement. Over the course of seven different Toronto Tech Week events, I met builders with smiles on their faces and a new found passion for building, here at home.
While some were quick to pour cold water on the empty “vibes” of the week, Satish Kanwar had the right response: vibes create momentum, momentum creates change. Yes, there are many imperfections with Canada’s tech scene, but passion, creativity, and ambition are not among them. This week, Canada successfully demonstrated that it has the drive and the motivations necessary to compete on the global stage.
Build Canada x Ada CX: What it will take to build in Canada
On Tuesday, Build Canada teamed up with close partner Ada CX to host an event called “What it will take to build in Canada”
Lucy Hargreaves and Mike Murchison took stage to discuss the evolving Canadian AI ecosystem, the upcoming Federal AI strategy, and the threats posed to the Canadian tech landscape by Bill C-22.
You can look through all of the photos here; there’s a very good chance we got one of you if you were there!
Toronto Tech Week: Homecoming
Bravo, Canada. Homecoming was one hell of a Canadian tech celebration. We laughed, we celebrated, we built our motives together. The memories of this event will stick in my mind for weeks.
First, Tobi Lutke captivated the whole room with his opening segment. Very rarely do I go to an event with 2,000+ attendees that’s dead silent, fully engaged with the speaker. He spoke many quotable lines, but I’ll share one in particular that caught my attention: “…build to be the best everywhere, not to be the best in Canada”.
Later in the programming was a panel hosted by our own Co-Founder & CEO Lucy Hargreaves, on Sovereignty, featuring Kepler Communications CEO Mina Mitry, Dominion Dynamics CEO Eliot Pence, and Cohere Co-Founder Nick Frost.
You have to check out this opening video they used for this panel. I’m still not sure who the video editors were, but wow. Props to them. I had goosebumps watching…
A special shoutout to Satish Kanwar and the Toronto Tech Week team for wearing their hearts on their sleeves this week and showcasing our nation’s incredible talent to the world.
This week in Building Canada
May 31: On this day in 1997, the Confederation Bridge opened. At 12.9 kilometres, it is the longest bridge in the world crossing ice-covered water (see below).
June 1: The Massey Commission issued its landmark report on this day in 1951. The commission's recommendations led directly to the creation of the Canada Council for the Arts, the National Library of Canada, and expanded federal support for public broadcasting and universities.
June 2: The Battle of Ridgeway, featuring Canadian troops against Irish-American Fenian invaders, took place on this day in 1866.
June 4: On this day in 1962, Canada's Nuclear Power Demonstration reactor near Rolphton, Ontario sent the first nuclear-generated electricity to the Ontario grid. It was the prototype for the made-in-Canada CANDU reactor that would go on to anchor a global export industry.
June 5: On this day in 1956, Parliament voted to pass the TransCanada Pipeline bill, ending the most explosive parliamentary debate in Canadian history and setting in motion a 3,700-kilometre natural gas line from Alberta to Montreal, the longest pipeline in the world at the time, and built on the contested principle that Canadian resources should flow through Canadian infrastructure.
Confederation Bridge
The idea of a fixed link between Prince Edward Island and the mainland is almost as old as Confederation itself, as Canada’s 1873 promise to PEI upon joining included a commitment to reliable transportation access. For over a century that obligation was met by ferry, but the crossings were slow, weather-dependent, and regularly disrupted by winter ice. Proposals for a bridge or tunnel surfaced repeatedly through the mid-twentieth century, and the debate finally came to a head in 1988, when a plebiscite saw 59.4 percent of Islanders vote in favour of a fixed link.
A contract was awarded to Strait Crossing Development Inc. in December 1992, and construction began in the fall of 1993. All major components were prefabricated onshore, then floated into position across the Northumberland Strait. The total cost came in at $1.3 billion, roughly 30 percent over budget. The curved, 12.9-kilometre bridge opened to traffic on May 31, 1997, and remains the longest bridge over ice-covered water in the world.
The economic impact on PEI was immediate and dramatic. In its first year of operation, tourism spending increased 63 percent and visits to the Island topped one million for the first time in its history. The bridge transformed PEI from a place you had to make a special effort to reach into one you could visit on a whim, permanently reshaping its economy and its identity.
The definitive documentary about the building of the bridge is Abegweit, an NFB documentary by Serge Morin that is a day-to-day record of the construction. But this video by Strait Crossing is a neat look at the engineering behind it.
What else we’ve been reading
Canada slips into a technical recession as economic growth stalls. And a new study by the Fraser Institute reveals that investment in productivity-enhancing assets, such as factories, machinery, equipment, and intellectual property, remains below pre-2015 levels in Canada.
Prime Minister Carney announced this week that Canada has entered negotiations with Swedish defence company Saab to procure the GlobalEye aircraft platform. Then he went to New York and suggested Canada could help make America great again.
Pippa Norman of the Globe and Mail has a nice feature on the rebirth of Davie Shipbuilding as a player in Arctic sovereignty. And Canada will be building drones for Ukraine.
Canada has signed a deal to supply Germany with LNG from the B.C. coast. And Canada wants to boost trade with China by 50 per cent.
Former Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault announced his retirement as an MP this week. In celebration, the Western Standard expanded its lineup of Guilbeault jumpsuit swag.
Mildred Valley Thornton (1890-1967)
Prairie Grain Elevators and Rainbows, c. 1931
Born in Ontario in 1890, Mildred Valley Thornton trained at Olivet College and the Art Institute of Chicago before settling in Regina. Beginning in 1928, she devoted herself to portraiture of First Nations peoples, eventually amassing nearly 300 portraits painted with characteristic speed, most completed in under an hour. She also published Indian Lives and Legends in 1966 and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. A significant figure in Canadian art, her work remains under-recognized.
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Wish, there were more on what the conference achieved in place of what Collision used to do, also shared here.