Atlantic premiers and federal ministers met in Moncton a few days ago to review the Atlantic Growth Strategy’s progress and discuss how they can maximize the benefit of the recently announced oceans supercluster in Atlantic Canada.
As one of Canada’s five new innovation superclusters, the ocean supercluster holds tremendous promise for driving jobs, investment and growth.
Similar to the Atlantic Growth Strategy, this supercluster encourages greater collaboration between provinces and aims to break down the silos between industries operating across the Atlantic provinces. These include marine renewable energy, fisheries, aquaculture, oil and gas, defence, shipbuilding, transportation and ocean technology.
By enabling industries to work together and by harnessing emerging technologies, this supercluster will digitize and optimize marine operations, maximize sustainable approaches to resources, and increase safety for those operating in marine environments.
A sustainable and profitable ocean economy is what we are after here.
With the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development estimating that the ocean economy will provide 40 million jobs and double its contribution to global value creation by 2030, Canada must seize the moment.
To help make this happen, the ocean supercluster will work collaboratively and on a global scale across multiple sectors of the economy to co-invest in projects focused on autonomous systems, sensors, data collection and analysis and more.
It will develop new partnerships between industries to bring innovative and integrated technology solutions to the Canadian and global markets.
And what better place to build an innovative ocean supercluster than in Atlantic Canada?
It’s already home to world-class companies, researchers, scientists and entrepreneurs.
Together, these bright minds will find amazing tech solutions to Canada’s big challenges in the ocean economy. They will grow Atlantic Canada’s economy along the way.
The expected end result is more than 3,000 new jobs and $14 billion added to the economy over 10 years.
But that growth won’t be limited to Atlantic Canada. The economic transformation inspired by these superclusters will have spill-over benefits for the rest of Canada.
Local communities will grow, jobs will be created and Canada will showcase our innovations to the world, improving our competitive position in the economy of the future.
The sheer magnitude of the opportunity — for the ocean economy and for other sectors — is why our government took an active role in challenging industry to come together with universities, colleges and not-for-profits to come up with the best pitches for Canadian superclusters. We committed to investing up to $950 million in their ideas on the condition they match it dollar for dollar.
That is how you galvanize communities, improve the standard of living, create good middle-class jobs and grow the economy.
Navdeep Bains is the minister of innovation, science and economic development and the member of Parliament for Mississauga–Malton.
http://thechronicleherald.ca/business/1551563-bains-ocean-supercluster-the-wave-of-the-future