Toronto would like to be seen as the nice person’s Silicon Valley

You can have good companies anywhere in the world. The problem is building and showing demand for whatever you’re working on - and the more forward thinking / exotic it is, the more risk-taking people you need around you to make adoption happen.

This is something that reigns in SV, and partially elsewhere in the US also, but is absolutely missing from Europe, for instance. Here in Finland people go to work to get a paycheck, not to rock the boat. Why would they take risks in adopting new tech?

Would be interesting to hear how it is in Canada.