Making Canadian Cities Smarter!

What innovative data based technology solutions would you implement in your city to improve the lives of your fellow residents for a chance to win a $50 million federal grant for your city? That is the question the federal government posed at the end of 2017 when it initiated a competition challenging all municipalities, cities and First Nation communities across Canada to get smarter for a chance to win four grants valued at total $75 million. The premise being that our communities need to adopt best practices in data driven networked technologies and methods to offer enhanced services for residents; making the cities more vibrant, full of rich experiences and further enhancing our quality of life. What is the smart cities challenge and why should your municipality participate? What are some self-assessment questions municipalities should ask themselves to start the conversation and how to start the application process? The competition deadline is April 24th and the time to start is now.

Why do our cities need to become smarter?

Canada is a large country with a small population scattered throughout its vast land mass and resources. Since the founding our brave spirit, innovative thinking and early adoption of technologies have been the catalysts enabling our large agriculture, natural resource and energy exports and our major industrial base despite having a small population. Whether it was the hydro-dams and rural electrification efforts, extraction of energy and mining resources, railroad, TransCanada highway or the telephone network our communities have grown, and industries spread far and wide harnessing this vast land because we readily adopted technology providing access to modern infrastructure and services regardless of location. This strategy has worked giving us an envied quality of life. We would be wise to stick to this formula as we look into the future of computing and automation. As networks and computers have gotten faster and instruments that measure and collect data have gotten intelligent there are connected-technology solutions that can help our cities and municipalities work smarter and bring faster, quicker and enhanced services to the residents. Those municipalities that adopt the newer technologies will not only function more efficiently and keep taxes rates in check but more importantly create vibrant, safe and smart communities giving the residents tools, time and a framework to be innovative and more productive. This in turn will help the municipalities to attract top talent, start innovative businesses and keep the next generation from moving away, and keep pace with the fast-developing Asian cities that are leaping ahead in urban planning and technology deployment. 

The Smart Cities Challenge

To seed this thinking Infrastructure Canada initiated the smart cities challenge in November 2017 with an investment of $300 million over the next 11 years towards grants to the best projects that demonstrates the proven concepts using data and interconnected technology. To award the grants the government decided to go with a new outcome based funding model that promises to deliver meaningful results in a measured way to Canadians because it shifts the traditional emphasis on process and outputs, towards one where payments are tied to the achievement of measurable economic, environmental and/or social outcomes. The first of the awards include four grants as summarized below. 

• 1 prize of up to $50 million - Open to all communities, regardless of population
• 2 prizes of up to $10 million each - Open to all communities with populations under 500,000 people
• 1 prize of up to $5 million - Open to all communities with populations under 30,000 people

The finalist communities will be awarded with some seed money to pilot test their ideas to prove the concepts. The finalists from that round of effort will be awarded the grant funds to implement their smart cities proven pilots at scale. Infrastructure Canada states that depending on the winning proposals scope and the work involved, the implementations could take anywhere between 2-5 years. After the first round of competition has been implemented it is expected the competition processes will be repeated two more times over the next 11 years for another set of grants.

Process and Timeline

The overall process stages are shown in the chart and the timeline is listed below.

• Application deadline: April 24, 2018
• Announcement of finalists: Summer 2018
• Announcement of winners: Spring 2019

Who can Participate?

Regardless of size all communities have an opportunity to improve the lives of their residents through innovation, data and connected technology. This includes the Indigenous communities (First Nations, Inuit, and Métis) across Canada. The intent is for the municipalities to develop their smart cities approach with help from their communities and residents so that any projects that get put forward already have residents buy-in and they solve real problems and achieve meaningful outcomes for residents as they have been tested and vetted through a process of public input, usability and refined over that process to get to the implementation stage.

Getting Started with Self Assessment

If you are a city, municipality or a First Nations community leader you have an opportunity to take advantage of the incentives and support being offered from Infrastructure Canada to get your residents involved in this momentum by engaging them to get a grassroots movement underway, and together brainstorming some innovative ideas for improving the city services and future needs of your residents. To get you started here are some basic self-assessment questions to pose to your municipality as well as some low hanging fruit to consider implementing as a start:

• How could technology improve on the existing processes whether it is public reporting of road potholes or streetlight outage reporting?
• Does your city allow paying of the parking/speeding ticket on the spot when a ticket is given saving time for those who accept the charge and wish to pay?
• Does your municipality or community have an app to report in repairs or road/bridge maintenance issues?
• Are there municipal assets that are not being fully utilized that can be monetized with better utilization increased?
• Does public transit make sense in all areas where a ride-sharing service may be cheaper and better? Is there a public transit app with location tracking so residents can track when the bus or train is coming?
• Do emergency response teams have all the information from maps to neighborhoods and family demographics to be able to better respond to distress calls?
• Is there Wi-FI network access in popular public areas to allow people to work in parks and enabling them to report any issues whether it is maintenance, cleaning or garbage pick-up?

If you're a resident, then check with your city/municipality's website or call in to their city’s information line to see if they are responding to the challenge or have any smart city initiatives. I know the City of Calgary has a great effort undergoing in this regard, you can visit their page. I’ve noted links below to some major cities that are participating in the smart city challenge. This list is not meant to be comprehensive, it is simply a sampling of cities across the country. 

• City of Vancouver
• City of Calgary
• City of Edmonton
• City of Winnipeg
• City of Toronto
• City of Hamilton
• City of Ottawa
• City of Montreal
• City of Fredericton
• City of Saint John

Application Package and More Information

The application package can be found on Infrastructure Canada website at this link here

For more information about the Challenge please visit Infrastructure Canada page

You can also contact via email Infrastructure Canada with any questions regarding the process

If your city does not have an initiative underway consider approaching your city hall to make inquiries to make them aware and see if it would consider participation. The future livability and the quality of life in your city depends on it. I hope that you will respond.

About the Author: Ahsan Upal is the national business development leader for Canada with Burns & McDonnell. He has led engineering, project management and regulatory teams for major electrical distribution, transmission and oil/gas pipeline projects across Canada and the United States including competitive P3 Private-Public-Partnerships. Ahsan is also the national chair of Industry for IEEE Canada.

References:

Some information and images in this article are taken from the Infrastructure Canada website