If we look at the different OCE funding programs and the headquarters of the companies on the OCE website. We see that Toronto-based companies get a really big chunk of the OCE money. But maybe it’s due to the population of the region.
| City or Region | Count |
| Toronto | 222 |
| Peel | 12 |
| York | 12 |
| Ottawa | 28 |
| Durham | 7 |
| Halton | 4 |
| Hamilton | 18 |
| KW | 33 |
| Niagara | 4 |
| London | 12 |
| Vaughan | 3 |
| Windsor | 1 |
| Wellington | 3 |
| Sudbury | 4 |
| Barrie | 3 |
| Kingston | 9 |
| Bruce | 1 |
So if we look at the number of startup grants per 1 million population you see that Toronto still leads.
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Funding per Million population
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A graph shows this disparity well.
So the graph says that somehow people in Toronto produce more startups than do people in the suburbs of Toronto. It also says that Ottawa, Hamilton, Kitchen-Waterloo, London, Guelph, Sudbury, and Kingston are really good at punching above their weight class.
Why is that?
Well, my suggestion is that the centres I just mentioned are centres with very large post-secondary institutions. Let’s plot out the OCE grants to the number of University Students.
So this kind of confusing graph shows that if we include all the grants received mapped to the population of post-secondary institutions you get this correlation of 93%. Which is pretty darn good. Why would this be causally correlated? Our guess is that since companies are mostly started by young people, and since young people mostly show up at Universities and Colleges this is a decent marker for where companies will start.
So if we wanted to answer why Mississauga has so few startups that get OCE money, we could say because Sheridan and UTM have so few students. If we want to get more business plans and good ideas coming out of Mississauga, we need to approach young people willing to risk creating these startups.