Slide 3 of 23
Notes:
To orient Canada to take full advantage of these profound changes, the government has established the goal of making Canada the most connected nation in the world by the year 2000. But why? Why connect Canadians?
We believe that connectedness is an essential “enabler” for knowledge-based growth, both as an economy and as a society. The economic advantages of being at the leading edge of the information highway are relatively straight forward, but worth repeating, while the social benefits may be more profound but less well understood:
- Connecting Canadians will create jobs and growth in leading edge applications, and strengthen productivity performance in traditional industries;
- Connecting Canadians will allow us to restructure paradigms of learning, particularly lifelong learning, to allow Canadian workers to attain and maintain leading edge human capital skills;
- Connecting Canadians will allow us to redefine the nature of local economic development as “smart communities” go global, and break down traditional disparities between urban and rural;
- Connecting Canadians will allow us to “connect” the increasingly disconnected in our societies – the elderly, the disabled, the remote – enriching us both socially and economically; and,
- Connecting Canadians will allow governments to redefine how they provide services to their citizens, and how they interact with them. <<CLICK>>
