Montreal Tech Watch

The Canadian Foundation for Innovation, CFI, has announced yesterday $26.3 million funding to help universities and research facilities, in the fields of “environmental science, natural resources and energy, health and related life sciences, and information and communication technologies”. The funds will provide “infrastructure support for 136 projects at 40 universities, enabling 192 high-calibre investigators to conduct their research in world-class facilities”.

This sounds great and I would have praized it until I saw that in Montreal, McGill gets the lion’s share of the funding. 18 projects were accepted, while there is only one for UQAM. It’s not much better for UdeM either or other french-speaking universities. They also mentionned information and communication technologies (ICT) yesterday, but everything goes into  medecine, chemistry and physics. I only saw one exception in Québec which is Entrepôts de ressources d’apprentissage multimédia (ERASME), carried by Université de Québec, Télé-Université.

Now my next question is CFI trying to turn Montreal into a R&D center for medecine, or is it just that there is no undergoing research project in ICT in Québec? This is blindness for me, because ICT is one the rare industry in Montreal and in Québec who is growing and providing more and more jobs for Montrealers.