“A few of your other speakers have talked about the artificial intelligence community here in Montreal. So that’s actually big news for medicine, because particularly for research, artificial intelligence with the combination of big data, I know these are kind of coined terms, but are essential for actually accelerating and improving research protocols.

Right now it can take years to develop drugs or technologies that need to be or that can be integrated into the medical field. With having a bustling kind of startup community here in Montreal, they’re gonna be looking for places to test their artificial intelligence or their technologies. And Montreal has two billion-dollar hospitals in the downtown core, which are juggernauts on the research side of the business, both for Canada, but internationally as well.

So having the AI community, and even the video game community has its applications in surgery, in terms of how to manipulate certain things on a screen, and for surgeons to practice kind of virtual reality surgeries, in terms of training. There’s so much of this research going on elsewhere as well, but in Montreal it’s a great place to have these kind of neighbors, if you will, to help advance particularly medicine, per se.

I’ve also heard of Lufa Farms. There’s a big industry, or I would say a trend, in terms of urban agricultural development. I’m not sure of the CEO’s name, but again, he studied here in Montreal, decided to stay. And his products do sell for a premium, but what’s great, again in Montreal, is culturally, people aren’t sensitive to a bit of a premium to pay for socially-conscious ideas like agriculture. Vegan restaurants, I would even put that. I mean, in Montreal it always comes back down to food, right?”