Ontario: Global Gateway to North America

Two major announcements are showing the world that Ontario is the destination of choice for the world’s most innovative companies.

On Tuesday, we joined officials from Mumbai-based Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to launch TCS PacePort Toronto. The company’s fifth global research and co-innovation centre will help Canadian companies bring digital innovations to life faster. Toronto joins New York, Pittsburgh, Amsterdam and Tokyo in a network of PacePorts around the world that bring academia, entrepreneurs, and investors together to drive innovative new products and services.

TCS has been in Canada for 30 years. It knows well how our innovation ecosystem has evolved into a North American powerhouse. Technology, innovation, intellectual property management, and commercialization are key drivers to enhance our economic competitiveness and increase labour productivity. Ontario boasts the second largest IT cluster in North America. With more than 320,000 IT workers and 24,000 tech businesses, our universities pump out 63,500 stem graduates every year, waiting to grow and innovate even more.

With a concentration of world-renowned research institutes, Ontario has access to top researchers and institutes who work collaboratively with businesses to create innovative game-changing solutions. It is not surprising that 48 per cent of all IT graduates call Ontario home. All of these factors combined, have garnered the attention of the world.

On Wednesday, Belgium-based Umicore announced their plan to build North America’s first of its kind industrial-scale cathode and precursor materials manufacturing plant in Loyalist Township, just west of Kingston. These are essential materials in the production of EV batteries that, with Ontario’s support, become a piece of the puzzle to create a beautiful picture of Ontario’s EV revolution.

It is generational in scope, representing a major step towards Ontario’s goal to develop a vertically integrated battery supply chain in the province, able to support large-scale EV production in North America. And just as the move to electric vehicles has made Northern Ontario, with its access to key minerals, a new piece of the EV puzzle, eastern Ontario and the workers and their families who call that part of the province home, can now participate in Ontario’s new auto industry.

With Premier Ford’s leadership, we’ve made it our mission to make sure the world knows Ontario is the place to build their business in North America. We’ve done that by getting our own house in order, cutting red tape and reducing the cost of doing business by almost $7 billion a year.

And we’ve engaged early and often, with trade missions to key markets, including India, Japan, South Korea, and Silicon Valley. We’re also heading to the U.K. to the Farnborough International Airshow from July 18 to 22. These missions are promoting Ontario companies, and the province itself, as a place to launch North American operations. They’re highlighting our access to highly skilled and educated workers and leading innovators, a cost-competitive business environment, a dynamic and collaborative?innovation ecosystem, and a global jurisdiction consistently ranked among the best places to live and work in the world.

Paired with the $14 billion in announcements made by automakers and EV battery manufacturers over the past 18 months, along with dozens of other companies choosing to invest in Ontario, it’s clear that as companies look to the future – their future – they’re choosing Ontario. ?

Our government will keep building on this. We’ll keep working with municipal partners, the federal government and industry — doing everything we can to make setting up a new and innovative company easier and more efficient here than anywhere else.

Vic Fedeli - Ontario’s Minister of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade