Michael Healey on his biting stage satire about the failure to build a smart city in Toronto

24:45Michael Healey: His stage satire about the failure to build a smart city in Toronto

In the fall of 2017, Waterfront Toronto partnered with Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., to build a data-driven, sustainable "smart city" in an underdeveloped 12-acre neighbourhood along Toronto's waterfront.

The vision included ideas for exciting new technologies, such as autonomous cars and intelligent sidewalks, but it never came to fruition. The fiasco is now the subject of Michael Healey's biting stage satire The Master Plan, which is currently being remounted at the Soulpepper Theatre in Toronto. The play is an adaptation of the book Sideways: The City Google Couldn't Buy by Globe and Mail reporter Josh O'Kane.

"It's fair to say that the careful bureaucrats at Waterfront Toronto [experienced] a real culture clash with the kind of 'move fast, break things' tech bro guys from Sidewalk Labs," Healey tells Q's Tom Power in an interview. "The other thing that happened was Toronto and Canada rejected this idea [of a smart city] with a kind of vehemence that I found really interesting."

The high-tech neighbourhood was proposed as a kind of test bed for new solutions relating to the climate and housing crises, but critics questioned how its data collection would impact privacy, equity and democracy.

"Toronto got so hung up on the idea that there would be centres around the neighbourhood collecting data to manage traffic and energy use, and probably dozens of different things," Healey says. "That narrative got weaponized by the people who hated the idea of the project."

While the playwright admits there's real reason to have privacy concerns when it comes to Big Tech, he thinks the government threw the baby out with the bathwater on this one.

"The question I want to ask in the show is: can Canada innovate at all? Or are we just going to hang around and wait for others to innovate, and then buy those innovations?" he says. "I don't want us to just go, 'Google bad, Canadians virtuous.' You know, I want to be able to say, 'Yeah, they had some kind of idiotic ideas and they were extremely pushy, but we really rejected this in a crazily hysterical kind of way.'"

The full interview with Michael Healey is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. He also reflects on his life in theatre, from the success of The Drawer Boy to the controversy around Proud, his satirical play about Stephen Harper. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Michael Healey produced by Ben Edwards.