That's a great question. Thank you.
First, we need to have a decent level of broadband. For a federal program, it's important to have large cities, small cities, and remote and rural communities in it.
In Nova Scotia, for example, with i-Canada we've been creating i-Valley in the Annapolis valley. Ten quite small cities, led by Berwick, got together, have signed off, and are going to create a intelligent region.
Let me just say—this comes back to an earlier question about something that the federal government might do—that one of the programs the United States has introduced is the smart gigabit cities clusters program, called the “Smart Gigabit Communities” program. You may know that they've spent a lot of money in Columbus, Ohio—$40 million—to create an automated vehicle place, but the cluster idea is to encourage cities to come together as clusters and communities, small communities.
The government is giving them a couple of things in terms of using the research and education networks like CANARIE—you have one in Nova Scotia—and giving them access to that to create a high-speed broadband capability in certain districts such as Main Street or or start-up districts. They get the clusters together. In the States, they have 15 cities—not San Francisco or New York, but Kansas City and smaller ones. They give them some support, but then they say to all of them that got together that each of them has to develop two new broadband applications, and they have to agree to share those new applications with, in their case, the other 14 communities.
All of a sudden, you're getting some new applications. It could be in health care or in other areas, but you're spreading the wealth, if you like, or the program, to include a lot of communities. Now i-Canada is working on this, and we've created an area that we call the “Rising Communities Caucus”, and these are the smaller communities. That's what i-Valley in the Annapolis Valley is. Health care is only just one big area. There are a lot of other savings.
Six years ago, I was in Västerås, Sweden. A kid broke his arm, or thought he did. From his home, they clicked on the Red Cross icon on their TV. Up came a nurse. The nurse told him to step by the camera and to do this and that with his arm. She said that she didn't think it was broken but she would get the doctor. Imagine having this sort of diagnostics from the home, compared to jamming up the emergency sections and everything.
On the cluster idea, in addition, the Government of Canada has announced the smart cities challenge. They are going to do as the U.S. did, which meant $40 million for that one city. I think this cluster idea can help a lot of cities and create new applications.
