Fredericton, New Brunswick

FREDERICTON, NEW BRUNSWICK population and residential housing.While experi- encing the upside of having the world-renowned University of New Brunswick in its midst, stability of government and academic services, and being an urban center drawing people from the rural setting, Fredericton is not complacent. City lead- ers see it as the groundwork for making future investments. “Our Smart City application didn’t highlight technology,” says Shaw. “It highlighted those things we can do in the whole community from an investment perspective in a Smart City meth- odology. So, we partnered with St. Mary’s First Nations to make this joint application, and we also reached out to 250 people in the City for feedback on how they envisioned a Smart City. The responses were amazing.We’ve recognized for some time that if you engage your citizens in a meaningful way, the output and the decisions you get to make are much richer and stronger.” Fredericton has been classed in the top seven Intelligent Communities in the world, more than once, yet a lot of its accomplishments fly under the radar. Shaw admits, “We don’t brag enough; even with our basic population growth strategy. We’re fully embracing population growth through immigration and repatriation retention.We work hard on settlement to make sure we’re an inclu- sive community where newcomers feel like part of the community and call this place ‘home.’We put all of those related agencies in a task force model to identify gaps quickly and have every- body’s input when decisions have to be made.” Ignite Fredericton is a catalyst agency to iden- tify City services that are weak or non-existent and try to fill them through business counselling, networking support, immigration services, invest- ment attraction, partnership with Opportunities New Brunswick, and local market growth through export programs. The organization has helped many companies to either locate, start, or grow in Fredericton. “We describe the services we provide as align- ing what we do to the requirements of an en- trepreneur’s journey,” says Shaw. “They start with an ideation, grow, and end up reaching maturity. Micro brewing is a great local example. The sec- tor is booming–we have 14 or 15 in the area, so that’s moved into a tourism activity, into manufac- turing, farming.We can’t produce enough hops in the province right now to serve our own industry. Who would have thought 20 years ago, we’d need