Guest Blogger - James CoulterOn Tuesday, the Windsor Star proclaimed “Windsor Rated 7th in Innovation”. The Dave Hall story calls Windsor “one of the country’s leading cities for innovation”.
The ranking came from a report published by the Conference Board of Canada titled City Magnets – Benchmarking the Attractiveness of Canada’s Census Metropolitan Areas (CMA’s). I went to the CBofC’s website looking for the report. It’s behind a paywall, if you want to read the full report it’ll cost you $2400. However, there is a ten page summary that is free and I read it over. The report ranks 27 CMA’s according to several categories including; economics, housing, education and innovation. CMA’s were given a letter grade A, B, C, D, depending on how each fared against whatever criteria they used. The report sheds some light on economic and social trends in Canada and who the best, biggest and brightest star cities are. The overall top three were Calgary, Toronto and Vancouver, while the report had Saguenay, St. John, and Thunder Bay at the bottom. Remember my last post, big cities getting bigger, smaller cities getting left behind.
I found what the report had to say about cities and innovation. The top CMA was Ottawa/Gatineau. Make’s sense, lots of government research facilities, software companies a good university. In fact there is so much research and ‘innovation” going on in Ottawa/Gatineau that they scored AAA. No other category had any CMA scoring more than an A. Calgary and Toronto were distant B grades. According to the summary more than half the CMA’s scored no better than a D. At best Windsor’s 7th place is a C. It seems a little misleading to describe Windsor as “one of the country’s leading cities for innovation” when our C is so far behind the AAA of first place Ottawa/Gatineau.
For me, the big news was in the Star story. Dave Hall revealed a dirty secret about our city. According to the Star Windsor’s “educational rank is dragged down by the worst adult literacy rate among the cities surveyed”. For a city that wants to reinvent itself as a knowledge economy centre this is a huge problem.
The last paragraph of the summary says, “Although some indicators, like climate, are beyond the control of policy-makers, we believe that all levels of government should look at the results of this benchmarking study to help determine priorities. Canada’s future depends on it.” In Windsor, our priorities need to change to include literacy. In light of this report’s findings it is outrageous for the Mayor and Council to impose budget cuts on the city’s libraries. Save the $900,000 branding monies and use them for literacy campaigns and reading programs. Education and knowledge are priorities and we should demand that our city give us every opportunity to learn and better ourselves.
James Coulter is an Engineering Technologist with the School of Building, Design and Construction Technology at St. Clair College. His opinions are plentiful and may not reflect those of his employer or the teaching faculty at the college.
