Montreal’s quiet expansion of urban surveillance
We are being watched every day. Transit and CCTV cameras record our every movement. License-plate readers keep tabs on our cars. AI systems identify us based on our walk.
And the list goes on.
The more we enter the digital age, the more technology expands and specializes in urban police forces. So, new methods for the deployment of available resources have been utilized. These methods are what we call surveillance tools.
What does it mean to be a "modern" city in the year 2026? It's not only about the height of our skyline or how fast the LRT might go anymore for Mississauga. It's about a quiet, digital infrastructure that has become a part of our everyday lives. From the way we access local arts to how we unwind after a long commute on the 403, technology is acting as the new bridge between community and convenience. This digital renaissance is transforming Canada’s seventh-largest city into a model of 21st-century living, where high-tech meets high-touch.
Building digital equity in Calgary
In summer 2025, The City expanded its Affordable Hardware Access (AHA) Program. The City worked with Technology Helps Foundation and United Way of Calgary and Area to help more people get access to computers. The goal is to make digital access fair and reduce the gap between people who have technology and those who don't.
Weiterlesen: CA: Alberta: Calgary: Smart city story: Affordable Hardware Access (AHA)
For more than two decades, downtown Brantford has been shaped by the students who live, work and learn there. In December, that presence became even more visible as Wilfrid Laurier University User Experience Design Master’s students unveiled smart-city concepts designed to make the city’s core safer, more connected and more welcoming.
The community presentations at One Market marked the culmination of a semester-long civic innovation project developed in collaboration with the Workforce Planning Board of Grand Erie aimed at improving safety, accessibility and user experience in the city’s core.
The plug was pulled five years ago on a Google plan to build a digitally connected neighborhood in Toronto. The innovative opportunities it suggested — and the privacy questions it raised — have not gone away.
Five years ago this month, Sidewalk Labs, then a sister company of Google, pulled the plug on plans to build a high-tech city neighborhood of the future on the lakeshore of Toronto. Pitched as a digitally hyperconnected community where everything from parking to waste collection to air conditioning would be built “from the Internet up,” the plan collapsed under the weight of concerns about what Google would do with troves of new data about people’s everyday lives.
Weiterlesen: CA: Ontario: Toronto: Lessons From a Failed Tech Urbanist Dream