Innovation reigns supreme in the Great White North
Canada has transformed itself into a Tech hub & its capital Toronto has become a growth engine for innovation and tech-related jobs in North America as evident from a recent survey by the CBRE group. As reported by Bloomberg, Toronto was the fastest-growing tech job market with 28,900 tech jobs created, 14% more than in 2016, for a total of more than 241,000 workers, up 52% over the past five years. The creation of such a vibrant & continuous tech community has been attributed to the availability of the right pool of talent, diversity, education and tech-friendly environment.
No wonders when the Blockchain/Crypto movement gathered steam in 2017, relatively cheap & reliable electricity with the combination of cold temperatures made Canada one of the favorite places for Bitcoin miners. Toronto’s Hut Eight proclaiming itself to be Canada’s largest miner; operates one such facility in Drumheller of Alberta Province. Similar facilities have cropped up in other Canadian Provinces of Quebec, Manitoba & British Columbia. The Canadian city of Calgary in the Province of Alberta recently also launched its own ‘Calgary Digital Dollar,’ which is a digitized version of the local currency which was introduced back in 1996.
The innovation spirit is apparently now spilling over to smaller communities in the country and I will be talking about one such community of about 36,000 people 60km north of the biggest city of Toronto. The small town of Innisfil has been at the forefront of this innovative spirit. Innisfil was recently in the news — that it would be accepting digital currencies for property taxes starting from Bitcoin. I will come back to that later, but before let’s take a brief look at another innovative tech partnership that the town embarked upon last year.
In one of the first of its kind, the ride-hailing company Uber entered into a partnership with the town of Innisfil, which creates an alternative to the traditional Public transit system. According to a CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) report 3,400 users completed more than 26,700 trips in the first eight months of the service saving the town $8 million — would there have been an equivalent door-to-door bus service used.
The town achieved this by subsidizing the rates for rides within the community with a small flat rate ($3) for public spots. The partnership has produced a good response from the residents and both parties intend to expand the partnership in the coming days with the data collected from the rides during the pilot.
More recently Innisfil town council voted to introduce the payment of property taxes via the Crypto kingpin Bitcoin. The one-year pilot is a result between the town and a Toronto-based digital assets platform Coinberry Pay.
The Crypto platform will be able to collect the Cryptocurrency funds and convert them into Canadian funds to be transferred to the City through a digital wallet starting in April. In a similar move last year, the state of Ohio in the United States became the first to allow the businesses to pay 23 different taxes using Bitcoin (using an online portal).
This is a bold move by a small town considering the Canadian QuadrigaCX trading platform controversy. Investigators have been unable to determine what happened to $190 million worth of Crypto funds with the suspicious death of the co-founder last December. Not a direct adoption of Cryptocurrencies, but certainly a huge step towards digitization by such a small community.
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