Thank you, Madam Chair, and I have to tell you that I think I took the wrong turn and I'm in your riding near Richmond Hill.
It's my pleasure to be here today. Thank you.
This is my 23rd year of direct involvement in digitally driven urban transformation, commonly called “smart cities”. I'm here today as the co-founder and chair of i-Canada, a national not-for-profit consortium of cities, towns, and rural districts in Canada, all striving and sharing information on becoming some of the world's leading smart or intelligent cities. Our council of governors has 68 members who are mayors or CEOs of institutions in business.
It was in 1994 that Singapore was an intelligent island, we had Smart Valley in Silicon Valley, and I was the co-founder and vice-chair of Smart Toronto. I had just completed four years as chair of the steering committee and then board chair of CANARIE, which at the time was Canada's very new, very high-speed national communications infrastructure connecting our universities, education, and research communities. Today, CANARIE continues as one of the world's most advanced high-performance national broadband systems.
I say all that just to say that I've been in broadband communications pioneering for many years.
I'd like to make four points today.
First, I'm using “smart cities” as a generic term to include smart, intelligent, sustainable, and resilient, to use just a few of the many words that are being spread around in describing tomorrow's transformed communities.
My second point is that smart cities are not just an engineering program or project. I say this as an experienced engineer from McGill. They are equally a social project, including culture, entertainment, social and digital inclusion, community collaboration, and citizen convenience. This is also a major export opportunity, in which the U.K. government believes they can capture $100 billion in exports. We haven't even addressed this nationally yet.
If I may suggest this, communications need to be included every time any of you say the word “infrastructure”, as most Canadians, including many politicians, think only of roads, bridges, transit, etc., when talking about infrastructure. We in Canada are woefully behind the world in our communications, and I hate to tell you, but in order to do it right and become a leader, the bill is $60 billion of capital costs. I don't say this easily, but a billion or two billion here and there is not going to make us a world leader.
The good news is that this capital cost can be recovered in five years, because this would produce an annual saving of $15 billion in our national health care costs alone with world-class communications. By the way, the global standard now, the new standard for broadband in many cities—these are large cities—is a billion bits per second, or what commonly called a gigabit per second. This is at a time when our CRTC has just raised our standard from 5 million—not a billion—to 25 million bits per second. They've been talking more about rural, and that's okay, but we have to get with the program.
My third point is that at the federal level our government is becoming interested in smart cities five years after the U.K. and the European Economic Community, and four years after the U.S. national government. The good news is that we can learn from other countries while creating our own innovative initiatives, but this transformation is a long journey in the whole smart city thing, and we can still win many benefits because we have many pearls of excellence in Canada in the smart city world. We just had two announced as finalists—out of seven—in the annual Intelligent Community Forum's Intelligent Community of the Year selection. Now we need to string them together to create a necklace of excellence and place Canada in our deserved place among the world leaders in our future communities.
Merci.