Canada's Dynamic Cities

As the fastest-growing tech market and second-largest finance hub in North America, Toronto is attracting the world. The Greater Toronto Area is also Canada's largest life sciences cluster that employs nearly 30,000 people. More than 200 languages are spoken in the city. Waves of immigration over the last 50 years have made Toronto the biggest city in Canada and the fourth biggest on the continent.

Montréal’s mix of European culture and new world cool gave it a vive la difference attitude that shines through in its art, music, film, dance, food and fashion. More recently, the city’s spirit of innovation has also turned it into an AI hotbed, housing the world’s largest concentration of deep learning academic researchers. Montréal is also a global aerospace centre, a top-five city for video game production and the most sustainable destination in North America.

Vancouver sits between the Pacific Ocean and the 26 individual peaks that make up the North Shore mountains. Natural resources, as well as finance and insurance, are major industries in Vancouver, but the city’s relationship with nature has created a vibrant cleantech scene and made the city a leader in the hydrogen industry. Canada’s fastest-growing major metropolitan area, Vancouver offers a quality of life like nowhere else.

The Western spirit that helped build Calgary is very much alive and well. You hear it in the music. You see it in the streets. You experience it every July at the world-famous Calgary Stampede. And you feel it in the entrepreneurial attitude. It’s why Calgary has been Canada’s energy capital and a major player in agribusiness and natural resources for almost 100 years—and why more recently it has become a cleantech hub and a growing life sciences centre.

Per capita, Ottawa’s digital industry sector is larger than Silicon Valley’s. Today it trades in life sciences, software development, communications, aerospace defence systems, cyber security, smart mobility and retail technology. The intellectual prowess of Canada’s capital city is in large part due to its exceptional post-secondary options; around half of Ottawa’s adult population has a post-secondary education.