I’m sure you’ve heard it before. Saskatoon is rapidly becoming a force to be reckoned with when it comes to leading-edge work in natural and applied science fields. There’s the National Research Council’s Plant Biotechnology Institute, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s research centre, Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, and of course, the Canadian Light Source. All of these exciting ventures promised to give Saskatoon a reputation as an outstanding “science city.” It seems that those promises are being delivered on.
A report released this week by the Scotiabank Group shows that Saskatoon has the strongest annual percentage growth in its science workforce so far over the last ten years. Only Kitchener-Waterloo managed to match the growth seen here. The report, Smart Cities: High-knowledge Industries and Regional Prosperities show that Saskatoon is in fact ahead of the national average when it comes to the percentage of the workforce that earns their income from natural and applied sciences. In 1996, only 4.4% of Saskatoon’s population worked in science-related fields. Today, 7 % of our population or 8,900 people do just that.
You’ve got to hand it to Saskatoon people. They can typically be counted on to do things with a sense of pride that yields positive results.
Norm Fisher
Royal LePage Vidorra
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