This is part four of The Logic’s in-depth series exploring how Canada is faring in the global competition for tech talent, as economies reopen and companies and governments jockey for advantage in a remote-work world. Read the rest of the series here.

OTTAWA — The emptied-out floors in a new downtown office tower that used to be Shopify’s headquarters in Ottawa testify to how quickly the company’s May 2020 decision to be “digital by default” took effect.

Before the pandemic, its workers and their branded bags and fleeces were downtown fixtures a few blocks from Parliament Hill. The e-commerce giant succeeded BlackBerry as the crown jewel of Ottawa’s tech industry, just as BlackBerry succeeded Nortel, each of them in turn a centre of gravity bringing in big brains and paying that talent good money.

Shopify still has a less flashy Ottawa office, but 170,000 square feet of its former headquarters went up for grabs a year ago. In its news release announcing its financial results for the first quarter this year, instead of listing its location as “Ottawa, Canada,” Shopify began saying it could be found at “Internet, Everywhere.”

Or, in some cases, Calgary. Shopify has about 100 workers in Calgary, despite having no actual address there, said Brad Parry, interim CEO of Calgary Economic Development.

The rise of remote work has changed the game for agencies like Parry’s, in ways they’re still coming to grips with. Attracting a head office or a major outpost doesn’t necessarily mean numerous jobs will come with it. So local business-development groups are helping their existing firms expand, emphasizing industries—like manufacturing—that are tied to specific places; and trying to maximize their appeal to workers, not just bosses.

“We have a huge opportunity to make sure that not only do we want to have headquarters here, but we also think it’s a great place for people who want to work remotely—who have the luxury or ability to work remotely—who can set up shop here in Calgary, and work for companies that are in Toronto, or Ottawa or Vancouver,” Parry said.

Calgary, like all of Alberta, has suffered from years of low oil prices. But that means its housing costs have stayed stable (albeit with a recent uptick) while they’ve soared in much of the rest of the country.

“[People say,] ‘Hey, you know what, I can come here and I can buy a house,’ or ‘I can own some land,’ or ‘I can own my condo outright versus having to go into another marketplace and live in 500 square feet,’” Parry said.

The energy and agriculture industries are Calgary’s mainstays, and head offices there are certainly still a draw, he said—if you’re an entrepreneur, the physical presence of decision makers you can visit is appealing and will be more so once COVID-19 is behind us.

But relative affordability, the Rockies on the horizon and a new downtown revitalization plan are attractive to workers, and that matters more than it used to.

The president of Invest Ottawa, the capital city’s economic-development agency, acknowledged Shopify’s decision was a bit of a blow.

“​​Shopify is a great company, and they’re a company that has grown incredibly fast,” said Michael Tremblay.

But Shopify is somewhat unusual in that it has no physical products that tie many of its workers to particular locations, he said.

Another of Ottawa’s strengths is autonomous vehicles and the software that runs them, he said, anchored by BlackBerry and its QNX operating system and the local outpost of Ericsson.  Testing and dealings with regulators like Transport Canada and Industry Canada require physical facilities and presences; Invest Ottawa helped run an autonomous shuttle-bus test around a federal office campus last year, and Tremblay said a trial of smart-intersection technology on a city street is in the works.

“If you want to attract somebody to a city like Ottawa, which is not a Tier 1 city—it’s a great city, but it’s a smaller city—you’re going to have much higher success if you reach out to people that have in some way had some connection to the city,” Tremblay said. “Either they went to school there, they’ve got a family there, they’ve maybe at some point in their career found their way working in a company there. Whatever it is, there’s a connection of sorts.”

To that end, Invest Ottawa has built a database of tech workers with five to seven years of experience and one of those connections to the city, he said, and targets the 12,400 people in it for recruitment. One virtual event in June aimed at 5G software engineers had five participating companies, including Ericsson and Ford, and 500 “direct engagements” with potential hires, he said.

A test centre for autonomous vehicles—cars and trucks, but also drones and farm equipment—and related technology from cybersecurity to cloud computing is another draw, a physical place Invest Ottawa can show off to potential recruits and investors.

Location still matters, agreed Tony LaMantia, the head of the Waterloo Economic Development Corporation in southwestern Ontario, especially for companies whose work is tied to physical products.

“You can’t take advantage of an ecosystem if you’re remote,” he said. “If you’re in auto tech, and you’re a local company, man, you really want to be working with Toyota in Cambridge, don’t you, and be part of that supply chain?”

But, he said, “we know who the anchor companies are, and rather than scouring the globe to find that elephant-sized deal from time to time, we have to really focus our efforts on helping local companies scale.”

LaMantia said his agency has tried to help Waterloo’s existing firms evolve, for the customers they supply or the international corporate families they’re part of. He cited the Kitchener, Ont., operation of PWO, a vehicle-parts manufacturer that has gone from stamping out parts to designing them.

“They go from essentially a commoditized kind of work to knowledge-based, higher-value-added production, and they’re going to Dearborn, Mich., to sell that technology,” he said.

Wooing particular companies hasn’t been part of the Vancouver Economic Commission’s strategy except in limited cases, said Shivam Kishore, its manager of economic transformation.

“If we do undertake targeted attraction for investments, that is very much a data-driven process based on the needs and requirements of the ecosystem,” he said. The economic commission wants Vancouver’s businesses to be resilient against climate change, for example, so it set out to attract green-building companies—but to support Vancouver’s existing industries.

In general, Kishore said the Vancouver agency focuses on maximizing the capabilities of the city’s existing workforce, for instance, by opening pathways to tech leadership for women, immigrants and Indigenous people.

“We are a minority city [and] we want to make sure that the economy, the functioning economy, reflects that very much,” he said.

In Montreal, the economic-development agency has an ace in its hand: the Quebec government offers a raft of tax credits to attract tech firms—up to $25,000 per employee per year for “e-businesses,” for instance, and 16 per cent of all Quebec expenses for companies developing animation or special effects for video content, in addition to other film and TV tax breaks—but staff have to be working in Quebec for employers to take advantage. Just having a Quebec address doesn’t cut it.

“It’s more difficult for them to have a small presence in Montreal and then have people work from Seattle or Toronto or anywhere outside Quebec,” said Alexandre Lagarde, the vice-president in charge of foreign direct investment at Montreal International, the regional economic-promotion agency.

(As the name implies, it’s all about attracting foreign money, workers and organizations, and LaMantia said it sets the standard for that work in Canada.)

Montreal also appeals to European companies looking for a pied-à-terre inside the North American free-trade zone. But Lagarde said the pandemic has meant a shift in employers’ priorities.

“​​It’s to take more seriously working from home as a way to increase productivity,” he said. “You know, before, working was spending maybe an hour in traffic, and then you come in the office, you have your meetings, you have lunch, and then you leave, and then again you’re in traffic for another hour or so. And then you come back home and you’re taking emails.”

Employers still want offices where workers gather and their “corporate identity” is formed, but they’re putting more value on having them in places where employees will be happy to live.

Lagarde said in one current instance, Montreal International is competing for the favour of a San Francisco company looking to set up shop in Canada—not against Toronto or even Calgary, but Banff.

Still, on the whole, that’s ground Montreal is happy to fight on, he said.

“Essentially, you know, we’re a cool place to live in.”