The technological and industrial history of Canada encompasses the country's development in the areas of transportation, communication, energy, materials, public works, public services (health care), domestic/consumer and defense technologies. That the 21st century has become the Internet Age is both literal and metaphorical. The technology that dominates this period of time is wireless technology, cloud computing, HD/3D TV, mega oil, "greentech" and nanotechnology. Most technologies diffused in Canada came from other places; only a small number actually originated in Canada. For more about those with a Canadian origin, see Invention in Canada.
Technology is a major cultural determinant, no less important in shaping human lives than philosophy, religion, social organization, or political systems. In the broadest sense, these forces are also aspects of technology. The French sociologist Jacques Ellul defined la technique as the totality of all rational methods in every field of human activity so that, for example, education, law, sports, propaganda, and the social sciences are all technologies in that sense. At the other end of the scale, common parlance limits the term's meaning to specific industrial arts.
Fields of technology
Internet
The Internet has become an essential part of daily life and is found in most Canadian homes, businesses and government offices. In December 2006, there were 22,000,000 Internet users representing 65.9% of the population and 7,675,533 Internet broadband connections. In 1988, the first .ca Canadian web address, upei.ca, was assigned by John Demco of the University of British Columbia (UBC) to the University of Prince Edward Island. The one millionth .ca address, krauslaw.ca was assigned in 2008 by the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, formed in 1998, to Brent Kraus of Calgary for the promotion of his law firm.magazine—Backbone: Business, Technology, Lifestyle, July/August 2008. p. 8. As of the end of 2010, Canadians, on a per-capita basis, were the most intensive users of Internet in the world.Michael Oliveira, "Canadians spend more time online than any other country", Globe and Mail, 28 December 2010
During this period, the web search engine became an integral part of use of the Internet. The first such programme, the "Archie search engine", was developed by McGill University student Alan Emtage in 1990. Since then, search engines, which have been mostly developed in the US, have evolved and become more versatile and powerful. Notable engines include Lycos (1994), Alta Vista (1995), Magellan (1995), Google (1998), Yahoo! Search (2004), MSN Search (2005), and Bing (2009). These Internet tools are available to web users from countries around the world, including Canada.
E-mail, a very popular feature of the Internet, predated that technology by decades. E-mail type functionality was a feature of a computer sharing technology developed at MIT in the US in 1961. It was also part of the US-developed Semi Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) component of the North American air defense system created in the fifties and sixties and which included a facility at RCAF North Bay, Ontario. However, it only became a publicly used service with the development of the Internet. A number of US providers now offer this worldwide service to Canadian users, including MSN Hotmail in 1996, Yahoo! Mail in 1997, AOL Mail in 2004 and Gmail in 2004.
The development of special software allowed the Internet to be used to make computer-to-computer phone calls. In August 2003, a service known as Skype became available to Internet users around the world including Canada. It has since become extremely popular.
Other web sites including those for social networking such as Facebook (2004), which as of 2008 has 17 million Canadian profiles, MySpace (2003), with 4.5 million Canadian profiles as of 2008, and Twitter (2006). Video and photo sharing sites such as YouTube (2005), with 14.5 million Canadian visits per month, and Vancouver-developed Flickr (2004), have become extremely popular in Canada."The not-so-private price paid for social networking", The Globe and Mail, 13 September 2008, p. A12. The popular Canadian-developed on-line dating service Lavalife went on line for the first time in 1997. In 2010, more than 2 million Canadians were members of LinkedIn, a social networking website, developed in the US in 2003 to enable workers to network for professional and career reasons. In recognition of the importance of the Canadian market, the company opened a Canadian office in 2010.Tavia Grant, Globe and Mail, LinkedIn set to open shop in Canada, 28 March 2010
The big Canadian banks, including the Royal Bank of Canada, the Toronto Dominion Bank, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and the Bank of Nova Scotia made their customer accounts available on line as the web gained prominence. On-line investing has grown in popularity in the new century. A number of Canadian firms offer sites for this service including, QTrade Investor, BMO InvestorLine, E*Trade Canada (now Scotia iTrade), TD Waterhouse, Credential Direct, RBC Direct Investing, CIBC Investor's Edge, Disnat, ScotiaMcLeod, National Bank Direct Brokerage, and Virtual Brokers.
Other businesses established a retail presence, notably Amazon.com in 1995, which became popular enough in Canada to merit a separate Canadian site, Amazon.ca, beginning in 2002. The Internet auction site eBay, launched in 1995, gave rise to a Canadian spin-off eBay.ca in 2000. PayPal has been operated by eBay since 2002, and is widely used by Canadians to cover the financial aspect of eBay transactions.
Most large Canadian corporations, including telephone and utility companies, now provide on-line customer billing.
The Government of Canada has been especially notable in establishing a very diverse and friendly on-line presence for the public. Initially, the basis for this service was a suite of technologies referred to as the Government Enterprise Network (GENet). In the fall of 2003, the government began to replace these with improved technologies known collectively as the Secure Channel Network (SCNet), which made available a wide range of services. For example, in recent years it has become possible for Canadians to file their yearly income tax returns using an Internet service provided by Revenue Canada known as NETFILE.
The Internet has also become an important source of information, marked by the popularity of such sites as Wikipedia and Google Earth. Wikipedia, an on-line encyclopedia, was established in the US in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and presently has over 5,000,000 articles in English and a large number in other languages. Many articles have been contributed to both the English and French language versions of Wikipedia by Canadians, and many of these relate to important aspects of Canadian life. There are thousands of Canadians who use the service every day in both English and French. Google Earth, a virtual globe, is an on-line feature offered by Google since 2005. It provides aerial views of the Earth and is viewed by thousands of web users, many of which are Canadian, every day. Another Internet information service, the telephone directory Canada 411.ca, has become very popular since introduced in recent years. This has led to the delivery of the residential paper telephone book, introduced to Canada in 1878, being cancelled in major cities in 2010.Krashinsky, Susan. Globe and Mail, "Hanging up on the phone book", 6 June 2010
In 2010, the Government of Ontario announced its intention of beginning to offer on-line Internet gambling to the residents of Ontario in 2012. It will join the PlayNow.com Internet gambling site established by the government of British Columbia in 2010.Globe and Mail, "Ontario bets big on online gambling", 10 August 2010
The Internet has been the target of cyberattacks over the years. One of the most notable attacks was made by 15-year-old hacker Michel Calce, alias "Mafiaboy", from the home of his parents in Montreal. Using a technique known as "distributed denial-of-service" (DDoS), he paralyzed the websites of Yahoo, CNN, E*Trade, Dell, eBay and Amazon in February 2000.Genosko, Gary. "Hacking and Cracking", The Globe and Mail, 25 October 2008, p. D 14
Digital communication / HD TV (Delivery) Star Choice (Shaw Direct) of Calgary, Alberta, and Expressvu Bell Satellite TV of Montreal began offering Canada-wide direct-to-home digital satellite television service in 1997. As of 2008, they had 900,000 and 1.8 million subscribers respectively. Star Choice broadcast the first high-definition television programme in Canada in 2000 and began broadcasting HD full-time in 2004. HD channels have been continuously added since that date. In April 2009, Star Choice changed its name to Shaw Direct. By 2009 satellite-delivered Bell TV was delivering 45 HD channels.
Rogers Cable, Canada's largest cable company, began to offer its Digital Television service in 2001. Video on demand (VOD), a technology that allows digital cable subscribers to order and watch movies at a time of their choice, has been available to Canadians since 2002, the year that Rogers Communication Inc., began to offer its Rogers on Demand service. By 2009 the service was available to 3.5 million homes. Shaw Communications Inc., Canada's second-largest cable company offers a similar service. Rogers introduced personal video recorders (PVRs) to customers in 2003.
The CBC began broadcasting digital over-the-air HDTV in 2005. A national government regulatory body, the Canadian Radio, Television and Telecommunications Commission, has stated that all over-the-air TV broadcasting will be digital by August 2011.
During this period, efforts to convert over-the-air AM and FM radio to digital technology failed. A technique known as Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) (see Countries using DAB/DMB), was introduced to Canada in November 1999. However the technology never caught on, partly because of the chicken and egg phenomenon. When the technology was introduced, there were few listeners equipped with DAB receivers, and this, in turn, provided little incentive for broadcasters to convert their very successful AM and FM operations to DAB. DAB came to an end in Canada in 2010. However digital satellite radio has been successful. Two Toronto-based companies, Sirius Canada and XM Canada introduced direct-to-home/car, digital satellite radio service in December 2005 and by 2008 had 750,000 and 400,000 subscribers respectively. In 1999, Telesat launched the first of four Nimiq direct broadcast satellites which provide the space-based satellite transmitters for these services.
In 2003, Bell Canada introduced an improved speech recognition system for its 310-2355 customer routing service in Ontario. Bell Canada users speak with the programme through "Emily", a young female-sounding artificial voice.Bell Canada Enterprises website In 2005, Skype, a voice-and-video-over-Internet technology became available to users around the world, including Canadians. The technique, which bypasses the traditional telephone network, allows people to use the Internet as a type of telephone and to both talk to and see each other during calls. It is used mainly for long-distance communication.
The proliferation of multiple communications technologies has itself created the need to combine them effectively, resulting in a new technology, unified communications. This technique blends instant messaging, e-mail, voice mail, short message service, web-conferencing, fax, audio, video, cellphone, VIOP and other telecommunications services into a single system. Cooke Aquaculture Inc. of Blacks Harbour New Brunswick uses just such a system, developed by Cisco Systems Canada Co. to manage its fish farm operations.
Digital media (content) Digital media were first introduced to Canada in the 1980s, when the CD and DVD became popular with consumers.