Southern Ontario is a driving force in the Canadian economy and our Government is committed to helping regional businesses thrive. Through the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario, or FedDev Ontario as we’re more commonly known, we continue to support economic development and job creation in communities across southern Ontario.

I am proud of the difference we are making across the region, and across sectors; including supporting R&D and commercialization, bring together academia and industry and supporting ideas and innovation.

In the medical sector specifically, we are investing in the right innovative technologies that are improving and saving lives, while also creating skilled jobs.

Current initiatives

Ottawa-based eSight, for example, has been gaining tremendous recognition for helping a legally blind mother to see her newborn baby for the first time. Our Government, through FedDev Ontario provided a $950,000 dollar repayable contribution for the development of eSight’s wearable, electronic assistive technology, designed to help people with low vision to see. The investment helped to leverage an additional $3.4 million dollars of private sector investment and to create 13 new jobs.

“In the medical sector specifically, we are investing in the right innovative technologies that are improving and saving lives, while also creating skilled jobs.”


We helped B’nai Brith create the Alzheimer’s Centre of Excellence with a $5 million dollar investment. Managed in partnership with the International Centre for Health Innovation of the Richard Ivey School of Business at Western University, the Centre provides high-quality care for patients, while pursuing the latest innovations in Alzheimer’s treatments, products and services.

Another investment of $10 million dollars helped SickKids develop KidsArm, the first image-guided surgical robot designed specifically for the most precious and vulnerable patients in our health care system, our children. The project will not only enable surgeons to safely and rapidly perform minimally invasive surgical procedures on children, but it has also created 34 design, engineering and manufacturing jobs, and trained 57 undergraduate, graduate and medical students and residents.

We have helped to foster innovation in the region’s medical sector through an almost $7 million dollar investment in the Sunnybrook Research Institute. In collaboration with Western University and 18 industry partners, this project accelerated the commercialization of 23 image-guided technologies. Some of these are now being sold internationally.

Staying committed

Overall, in our first five years, FedDev Ontario supported 63 projects with investments of $86 million to health-related organizations, post-secondary institutions, and small- and medium-sized enterprises, both directly and through partner organizations.

We remain committed to ensuring that FedDev Ontario’s activities encourage partners to work together in the rapidly evolving medical field to bring ideas out of a lab and into the hands of health-care professionals.