I am a scientist and an entrepreneur, and for me, finding the right institutional partners to work alongside in Canada has been a constant working priority. Over the past year and a half, that has meant talking to a great many people who had no obligation to spend time on us. Federal officials, provincial officials, the York Region team, and economic development offices in well over twenty Canadian cities all sat down with us, answered our questions, sent us to the right colleagues, and treated our work seriously. None of them owed us that. All of them gave it.
Universities deserve a separate line. The University of Toronto, the University of Guelph, and York University each gave us conversations, contacts, and patience at a stage where we had very little to show in return. Researchers and program officers wrote us back the same week. Faculty offered to introduce us to people they knew, and then actually did so. That kind of welcome is not free. We notice it, and we are grateful for it.
Inside that very generous picture, there is one experience we would like to mark. We came to Canada with two related projects: a high-technology medical-robotics business, and a rare-disease nutrition and artificial-intelligence company my wife co-founded. A letter we sent to the office of Markham Mayor Frank Scarpitti was answered with unusual speed and warmth. The Mayor met with us, walked us through the City of Markham in considerable detail, and his team in the City's Department of Economic Growth, Culture and Entrepreneurship followed through with specific recommendations on registered office and location, introductions across the local supply chain, and pointers to several adjacent companies whose work could complement ours. My wife was part of those conversations from the start. We have since met the Mayor three more times, and every meeting has given us something concrete to take away. The municipal team is exceptionally effective, and they think from the perspective of the company they are speaking with, not from the perspective of a process they have to push through. We left those meetings with things we could act on the same week, and we did. My wife, who had originally chosen a registered address outside Markham for her own company, revised that decision after the meetings and now bases her work in the city as well. Moving a registered office is not a casual change. The reason was straightforward: this team had earned that level of trust.
Some of what we felt in person turns out to be visible in public numbers. By the City of Markham's published profile and Conference Board of Canada data, Markham generated CAD 20.6 billion in GDP in 2025, hosts more than 1,500 high technology companies, more than 650 corporate head offices, and close to 9,900 businesses in total. Among working age residents, 48.7 percent hold a bachelor's degree or higher, well above the provincial average. Public data, but they help explain why the people we met inside the municipal team behaved the way they did. The city has been investing in being a place where companies want to be, for a long time, with patience.
This letter is a personal one, and it is not meant to compare any city against another. The cities and partners we have worked with across Canada have been, almost without exception, generous with their time. Many of them deserve a thank you we have not yet had the chance to write. This particular letter was for Markham, and for Mayor Scarpitti together with the team in the City's Department of Economic Growth, Culture and Entrepreneurship, because their response in a moment when we needed it was unusually clear, unusually fast, and unusually useful, and we did not want to let that pass without saying so.
Citation: City of Markham, "Markham Economic Profile 2025," July 2025. Available at https://markhambusiness.ca/files/Economic-Profile-2025-july.pdf. GDP figure attributed to the Conference Board of Canada. Education statistics drawn from Statistics Canada via the city profile.