A city and a technology: The role of government in the growth of the high-technology industry in Ottawa, Canada to 1984 (Ontario).

摘要

After 1945 the high technology industry became a major employer in Ottawa providing the nation's capital with companies such as Northern Electric, Bell-Northern Research, and Mitel which became symbols of what it was to be innovative and worthwhile in a modern economy. Governments at all three levels sought, at different times and in different ways, to promote this growth. In the nationalist heyday of the 1960s the federal government wanted a domestic high technology sector in Ottawa and elsewhere as part of a national industrial policy. The Ontario government, on the other hand, made little significant effort to foster research and development in Ottawa. Differing ideologies between the two levels of government explain their differing policies on high technology.; At the municipal level, the City of Ottawa did not make high technology companies a target in its industry location policy. It was left to the tiny Council of March Township, west of the City of Ottawa, to see the potential of high technology as a basis for community prosperity. In March Township a small municipal council boldly transformed a rural township into Kanata, the heartland of Silicon Valley North. Local business associations developed a new pattern of business-government relations around the high technology sector. Coming later to the task than might have been expected, Ottawa's post-secondary educational institutions eventually accepted a role in preparing their students to work in high technology.; By the 1970s Canadian business and government were far apart in their preferred policy options with regard to economic growth. Fitful flirtations with technological nationalism on the part of the federal government gave way to an acceptance of foreign investment and foreign ownership in the Canadian economy. Research and development, except in Ottawa, remained at remarkably low levels in Canadian industry.; Ottawa's companies were leaders in the first stages of modern high technology but they were unable to move to the second stage in which computers became personal communication machines available to a large segment of the population. Ottawa's high technology sector provided a model that was not imitated elsewhere in the country.