“You’ve seen those signs that say, ‘In emergency, break glass.’ Well, it’s time to break the glass,” warned Carolyn Rogers, senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, in a recent speech on Canada’s sluggish economic growth. Inflation, high costs of living, and insufficient growth rates continue to dominate Canada’s political narrative. Since 2019, Canada’s economy has grown by an intolerably slow rate of roughly 1.5 percent a year. That’s faster than European states like the United Kingdom and Germany, but much less than the United States.
Within the overall gloomy picture, Canada’s digital sector has been one of the few bright spots. Since 2019, the output of the information and communications technology sector has grown by 21 percent. Data processing was up by 52 percent, and computer systems design was up by 39 percent.
In particular, within Canada’s digital sector, mobile application development and support has turned out to be a vibrant source of growth. Apps are no longer just about playing games or scrolling through social networks. Instead, people are using apps to connect with their health-care providers, interact with their cars, and for banking and shopping. At the same time, mobile apps have become increasingly important to all sorts of businesses—apps to track trucks, to monitor energy systems and forestry operations. The Progressive Policy Institute has estimated there are 385,000 “App Economy” jobs in Canada as of April 2024, up 47 percent since 2018.
