Canada has not been immune to the economic downturn of the past year. Even so-called recession proof industries have felt the effects of the decline, including pharmaceutical manufacturing. None of the business stories in Canada have had quite the affect on the psyche of high tech and cleanroom junkies as the demise of Nortel Networks, which filed for bankruptcy protection this past January. What was once the darling of the communications industry, and the anchor of the Canadian tech sector as Bell-Northern Research, is no more. During its court protection, it shed its most valuable assets to foreign suitors, namely Nokia Siemens Networks, and is thus no longer the Canadian tech giant. Some would argue that Nortel’s loss is a fatal blow to the Canadian advanced technology sector. Others disagree and believe that new innovation will replace the older supply chain paradigm of tech sector growth — and spawn high tech start ups that will fill the void of the demised tech icons. So where is this new innovation?

One could easily point to RIM, the Waterloo, Ontario company that produces the BlackBerry® wireless device which virtually launched the era of the smart phone. Though RIM has catapulted itself onto the high technology arena, it is not the research powerhouse that Nortel once was. RIM reported 2008 R&D spending at about $685 million versus Nortel, who spent $1.85 billion in R&D in 2007. RIM has spurred development of supply chain partners and has become the cornerstone of Ontario’s high tech transformation as the province transitions from the largest concentration of automotive manufacturing in North America to a technology and knowledge-based economy. That is a tall order for a region that has lost over 200,000 manufacturing jobs over the past few years. Other tech companies that have helped to fill the void in this region include COM DEV, a global leader in the engineering and production of custom-designed space hardware, and Dalsa, manufacturers of digital imaging and machine vision CCD and CMOS products for applications such as semiconductor and industrial inspection.

In other provinces, innovation has led to not only replacing some of the traditional economic generators, but has paved the way towards a new generation of manufacturing and technology. In British Columbia, Photon Control manufactures opto-electronic products in their cleanrooms and has become a world leader in optical sensing technologies. In Alberta, Dynamic Source Manufacturing, a Calgary-based electronics manufacture, has recently been certified to ISO’s medical standard 13485:2003 to provide medical device manufacturing.