Thank you.
Good morning. First I'd like to introduce Travis Peter. He's also presenting with me. We're from the City of St. Albert, and we're representing the Alberta Smart City Alliance. We're both pleased to be here. Thank you for this opportunity to address you on behalf of the alliance. We're really hoping that we can add some value to this topic, and we'll offer some suggestions near the end.
In my opening comments, I would like to discuss Alberta's current context, share a few examples of communities actively engaged in smart city projects, comment on some broad challenges we see, and offer our recommendations for your consideration.
In Alberta today, despite economic conditions, many communities are growing rapidly, and infrastructure continues to be a key priority. A strategic approach may not often be there, but communities are adopting technologies to improve efficiency, to have better services and quality of life, and to make economic development gains. We also see promising academic activity in pure and applied research, and we're very pleased by the recent interest from Alberta's provincial government.
We have communities such as the City of St. Albert, which my colleague and I are proud to call home, that are acting as demonstration sites. St. Albert is a mid-sized community of 65,000 residents but is considered a national smart city leader. The city realized that its future competitiveness was connected with its ability to innovate and therefore developed a unique Smart City Master Plan, with over 70 strategies to guide and align its efforts into the future. In doing so, city officials engaged over 2,000 residents, community groups, and other stakeholders. St. Albert has built a strong foundation for the future, with dozens of completed smart city projects, and it co-founded the Alberta Smart City Alliance, along with academia and industry.
Some of the specific projects that St. Albert and other Alberta communities are pursuing are quite exciting.
For example, St. Albert is working to install intelligent transportation systems to optimize travel through the community, integrate controls and sensor arrays to assess and manage infrastructure in real time, and build and expand its municipal fibre optic network.
The City of Edmonton is also working in some of these areas. In addition to leading Canada in its open government and analytics programs, Edmonton is partnering on regional transit digital payment services and is offering new digital public services and applications.
In a rural context, Parkland County is aggressively expanding broadband connectivity to all parts of its community through wireless tower infrastructure. Even a small community such as Nanton is working with industry to ensure door-to-door fibre optics connectivity.
These and many other examples demonstrate the great potential across Alberta. We have included St. Albert's Smart City Master Plan in our written submission to provide additional context if necessary.
Notwithstanding examples such as these, the Smart City Alliance sees three key challenges for broader adoption from a smart city perspective.
First, we feel that we have a lack of digital infrastructure. We believe that Canada's economy requires borderless and contiguous connectivity, with national attention not only to rural broadband issues but also to urban areas that require significant improvement to ensure global competitiveness. We also cannot afford to be building core infrastructure without future-ready technology components.
Second, we see that smart cities suffer from fragmentation. We believe that collaboration and partnership models in this area are inconsistent, that investment planning and execution are tactical and siloed, and that slow rates of technology adoption can be attributed in part to low understanding or low capacity to advance these projects.
Third, policy and support frameworks are missing. There is currently no national strategy on smart cities. There is a lack of long-term and dedicated funding to support integration and infrastructure, and incentives for regional and shared applications are missing. The interests of the private sector do not always align with those of the public, and we believe that policies could help change that paradigm and recognize the social capital advantages.
To address these challenges, we have identified three recommendations.
First, we believe that amendments to the Canadian digital strategy are required. This strategy should cover all sectors and focus on digital economy readiness, ubiquitous and borderless connectivity, smart cities, and the Internet of things. In doing so, the strategy should also have a sensitivity to the realities of communities of all sizes.
Second, we recommend the incentivization of a regional smart city strategy focused on solving problems rather than just putting the technologies in place.
Finally, we would encourage long-term and dedicated funding for reliable and connected digital networks, technology integration with infrastructure, local test beds, and applied research in the municipal context. These supports, potentially through the expanded national smart cities challenge, in addition to other municipal infrastructure programs, are critical to address the capacity and infrastructure issues we have noted above.
Thank you.