Death on the St Laurent
You could have a steam train
If you just lay down your tracks
You could have an airplane flying
If you bring your blue sky back.
- Slegdehammer, Peter Gabriel
Who killed Canadian Digital Sovereignty?
We had sovereign Canadian tech – well, sovereign insofar as markets are “sovereign”. Which is to say they are not really, but that’s a story for later. But dammit ATI was based in Commerce Valley Dr, Markham, ON. RIM was based in Waterloo, ON. Matrox is based in Blvd St Regis, Dorval. We had "Canadian" GPUs and smartphones.
And yes, Canada had a chip powerhouse in Markham. Despite Mike Harris' greatest efforts in the amalgamation of Toronto, the sprawling lights of suburban Markham shone brighter than the Greater Toronto Area.
Two Ontario companies and one Quebec company were at the forefront of high-performance parallel computing, the smartphone boom, and digital communications. It was the ATI Radeon graphics cards that at one point gave Nvidia serious headaches in the PC industry. RIM’s BlackBerry was once the leading smartphone manufacturer even with the iPhone release. Matrox was a computer hardware manufacturer for clients like the US military and sold display cards to various vendors before it was swept up in the winner-takes-all graphics card hype of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Canada lost ATI in 2006 to AMD when the CPU giant swallowed the GPU behemoth. RIM slowly faded away like HTC and Nokia as Android phones from Samsung ate their margins away. ATI’s brand was killed in 2010 when AMD decided to retire it, and RIM is now BlackBerry Limited, writing software for cars and various safety features in hardware. These days, Matrox is making video wall products found in an airport near you and producing cards for broadcasters.
It is often repeated that American competition got the better of them, but I find it hard to believe when these companies had reached the heights they did. Research in Motion used to boast 80 million active users in BlackBerry Messenger, ATI had contracts with Microsoft’s Xbox and Nintendo Wii and Qualcomm’s Adreno chips is based on a collaboration with ATI. Meanwhile Matrox used to operate massive production facilities to manufacture their chips in-house.
How did Canada lose two GPU giants and a smartphone trailblazer?
In the coming articles I will describe a tale that spans the St Laurent and Lake Ontario. It is a tale of Canadian engineering, but also of free trade, the 1995 Quebec referendum, and hype economics. It is also a tale of Canadian shrewdness and Canadian capital competing against Silicon Valley and global labour.
Perhaps Canadian tech was murdered like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas: it was about to be made and join the ranks of US big tech only to be killed before it could cement its position. Or maybe it was like Santiago Nasar in Chronicles of a Death Foretold, where everyone knew that Canadian tech would be murdered except for Canada itself.
This is NOT an Agatha Christie novel. It is NOT a Rian Johnson movie starring Daniel Craig.
It is a novel that will take you from Highway 404 to Dollard-Des-Ormeaux. If you catch the GO train on time, it will take you to Waterloo. Waterloo, Ontario, not the London subway station.
