Talking Points<\/p>\n
Rogers won\u2019t say how it\u2019s measuring up against its own promise to hire 500 early-career technical experts for a Calgary \u201ccentre of excellence\u201d once it bought Shaw
\nA stacked advisory council announced in 2022 has mostly fallen away<\/p>\n
The centre would \u201csupport the needs of the new combined company, creating hundreds of new high-skilled jobs and opportunities to work with Canadian developers to create new consumer and business applications and services,\u201d Rogers said then.<\/p>\n
The promise got more specific<\/a> just over a year later, with an announcement by Rogers\u2019 then-chief technology officer Jorge Fernandes. The Shaw deal wasn\u2019t consummated yet, but the centre got a name, an advisory council made up of business and academic leaders from Alberta and B.C. (part of the point was to train and employ new graduates, the announcement said) and a headcount.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n \t \t Five hundred people would be hired for \u201cskilled technology roles,\u201d doing cutting-edge work in areas like cloud computing, AI and cybersecurity.<\/p>\n Rogers repeated its promise to launch ThinkLab when it closed<\/a> the Shaw acquisition in April 2023, though it never set a deadline for the launch or the hiring.<\/p>\n \u201cThinkLab has continued to evolve alongside our technology priorities with a focus today on applied research, experimentation and collaboration that supports practical outcomes with external partners,\u201d Rogers spokesperson Leann Yutuc said in an email exchange this month. She did not answer The Logic\u2019s repeated direct questions about how many people worked there.<\/p>\n Since the exchange, Rogers has offered<\/a> buyouts to about 10,000 staff across the country.<\/p>\n As for what ThinkLab does, Yutuc said, \u201cit remains a dynamic model.\u201d It focuses on practical and applied research, she said, and currently those are \u201can initiative in the remote health space and early stages to support the safety of personnel within wildfire management agencies.\u201d<\/p>\n Searching LinkedIn turns up hardly anybody who lists ThinkLab as part of their work history. Its self-described head left<\/a> last September for Calgary\u2019s economic development agency.<\/p>\n Yutuc said the \u201ccore ThinkLab team\u201d works at Rogers\u2019 western headquarters in Calgary and now answers to its current chief technology officer Mark Kennedy.<\/p>\n In an August 2024 interview<\/a> with the Calgary Herald, Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri answered vaguely when he was asked about ThinkLab. \u201cIt\u2019s early days on that,\u201d he said, a phrase he repeated when asked how many people worked at it then.<\/p>\n Rogers was still trying to decide what ThinkLab was going to be for, Staffieri said: \u201cThat\u2019s been part of, if I\u2019m frank with you, a bit of the\u2014not slowdown\u2014but we wanted it not to be R&D coming up with ideas that are looking for a problem.\u201d<\/p>\n When Rogers appointed the ThinkLab advisory council in 2022, it noted the move in its quarterly earnings report\u2014the only time ThinkLab has had a mention. The advisory council was a powerhouse, though if it\u2019s done much, its members aren\u2019t saying.<\/p>\n Deborah Yedlin, CEO of Calgary\u2019s chamber of commerce, through a spokesperson, refused to answer specific questions about ThinkLab, including when the advisory council last met.<\/p>\n \u201cFrom my perspective, what matters most is Rogers\u2019 sustained commitment to Calgary as an innovation hub\u2014through jobs, skills, collaboration and long\u2011term economic impact,\u201d she said in a written statement. \u201cOn that front, Rogers has played\u2014and continues to play\u2014an active role in the Calgary business community across all sectors and sizes.\u201d<\/p>\n In a similar vein, Yutuc pointed to broader self-reporting on the effects of its Shaw acquisition; in early April, Rogers said<\/a> that it had created 2,599 of the 3,000 jobs in Western Canada that it said it would if the deal went through. The ThinkLab promise didn\u2019t appear in that progress report or either of the previous<\/a> two<\/a>. Although Rogers did make that pledge publicly, it wasn\u2019t among the formal commitments<\/a> it gave the federal government.<\/p>\n Another advisory council member was Kory Wilson, the executive director of Indigenous initiatives and partnerships at the B.C. Institute of Technology. She said in an email that she hadn\u2019t been involved with ThinkLab for a year and a half and didn\u2019t respond to a follow-up query about what had happened.<\/p>\n Bill Rosehart, who was named to the advisory council when he was the dean of the University of Calgary\u2019s engineering school (he is now the incoming president of the University of Waterloo), said he missed a first meeting of the council after the Rogers-Shaw deal was completed. He left the body when he moved from Calgary to the University of Guelph, in Ontario, because of ThinkLab\u2019s western focus.<\/p>\n \u201cI would have been eager to stay on it, just because it was looking very interesting,\u201d he said in an interview. But if ThinkLab ever got onto a trajectory, Rosehart said, he didn\u2019t get to see it.<\/p>\n Laura Jo Gunter, CEO of the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology in Edmonton, said via a spokesperson that she went to one meeting and then passed her advisory duties off to another NAIT staffer \u201cwho had more of a technical [and] operational lens.\u201d She referred further questions to Rogers.<\/p>\n Bala Kathiresan, former head of BCNET, a not-for-profit IT service for British Columbia\u2019s higher-education sector, said he couldn\u2019t say anything about ThinkLab because he\u2019d left his former job. Two other members named to the council didn\u2019t acknowledge The Logic\u2019s questions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Four years after Rogers promised to hire 500 people for a \u201cnational centre of technology and engineering excellence\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26062,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[51,12629,235,7627,2134,2184,12630],"class_list":{"0":"post-26061","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-calgary","8":"tag-calgary","9":"tag-competition","10":"tag-economy","11":"tag-rogers","12":"tag-tech","13":"tag-telecom","14":"tag-thinklab"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26061"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26061\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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