Blayne Haggart, Associate Professor of Political Science at Brock, wrote a piece recently published in the National Post about Toronto’s proposed Quayside community.

Haggart writes:

Toronto’s proposed Quayside community was supposed to be a brag-worthy global showcase for what a smart city, “built from the internet up,” would look like.

Instead, the joint partnership between Waterfront Toronto and U.S.-based Sidewalk Labs is five months into a 12-month, $50 million negotiation and consultation process. Those involved in Quayside have been surprised by the concerns raised about the project and the resistance to it.

A public meeting last month — only their second in five months — failed to fill in basic details about the nature of the partnership, including how the for-profit Sidewalk Labs would actually generate income from the project.

Perhaps most surprisingly, officials at the meeting revealed that they were still privately negotiating the most fundamental components of their partnership, namely what data would be collected, who would control and own this data, where it would be stored and how it would be used.

The two sides are also negotiating who will control the intellectual property (IP) that comes from a project that has been designed to produce lots of IP.

Continue reading the full article here.