The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.
Coinciding with the launch of a Vital Signs report that identified challenges for children and youth in Greater Sudbury, participants in a panel discussion suggested promoting the city as a centre for mining innovation as a means of employing and retaining young people.
Launched Tuesday, this year’s Vital Signs report found while overall local employment levels increased slightly between 2012 and 2013, the unemployment rate for those aged 15 to 24 was 13.5% — up 21.6% from 2008.
The poverty rate for children 17 years and younger increased between 2011 and 2012, according to the report, from 15.4% to 16%.
The overall poverty rate was also up slightly in 2012.
To mark the launch of this year’s report, the Sudbury Community Foundation hosted a panel discussion at the Willet Green Miller Centre focusing on the potential impacts of making Sudbury a centre for “mining intelligence,” or a “mining cluster,” as it was often called on Tuesday.
The panel was moderated by Dick DeStefano, executive director of the Sudbury Area Mining Supply and Service Association (SAMSSA), and composed of Brian Jones, vice-president of business innovation at the Centre for Excellence in Mining Innovation (CEMI); Kirk Petroski, president of Symbioticware Inc.; Don Duval, CEO of the Northern Centre for Advanced Technology (NORCAT); and Greg Baiden, chair of Penguin Automated Systems Inc.
All five encouraged mayoral and council candidates in the Oct. 27 municipal election to foster the city’s maturity into a mining innovation centre.
“I think we really need to engage the 20-year-olds, the 30-year-olds, and to create an excitement, to create a buzz for innovation, technology and mining,” said Petroski, who helped found Symbioticware six years ago.
“I think it’s really important for governments to create a platform, whatever that may look like, to enable the private-sector entrepreneurial leaders and champions to really build a brand in the community,” added Duval, NORCAT’s CEO since 2012. “Listen to them. If you were to come up with an economic policy to really drive job and wealth creation, if you don’t have 100 startup entrepreneurs around that table to tell you how they live and breathe and do it, as a small to medium enterprise, you don’t have the right cohort.
It’s amazing how many municipal, provincial federal economic policies are derived from not those type of people. Whatever the answer looks like, it’s nuanced at a community level, but that to me is a key recommendation, as far as what I would tell council. You need to get the right people around you to tell you how it really works on the ground.”
“I think it’s very simple – you have to create the environment for businesses to flourish,” said Baiden, whose Naughton-based company specializes in robotics and automation and can boast several high-profile, international clients. “Today, the taxes that are in the city are ridiculous, the cost of building is ridiculous, the amount of stuff that we have to do just to get a permit to put something in place, is just too costly. Somebody in the city should learn how to play Sim City and follow it in our own city, because if they can beat Sim City, then they finally know how to run a government.”
In Vital Signs’ Mining Innovation section, the report identified significant decreases in industrial emissions since the 1970s, recently-announced plans to upgrade Glencore’s Falconbridge smelter, Vale’s Clean AER Project and innovations in deep mining, exploration, eco-friendly initiatives, transportation and engineering as highlights.
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