Toronto makes its pitch for Amazon HQ2 and tech greatness

Amazon is planning on building a 5 billion dollar, 50,000 employee second headquarters called HQ2. Out of 238 bidders Amazon picked 25 final cities earlier this year. Only one of those is outside the U.S. that city is Toronto. << It'll be great to be able to sort of say well there's 50,000 more reasons to stay home now and do it here. I think will be great, not just for the 50,000 people who work for Amazon, but as an encouragement to the start ups that can join a community that exists here of people that have been very successful staying in Toronto. This is Toronto mayor John Tory. I talked to him last month about his city's bid And how we could validate Toronto as a major global tech hub. If there was a observation somebody would have made seven years ago, it would have been we were the greatest kind of farm team for Silicon Valley because we graduated all these fabulous graduates in AI and a whole series of software engineers and promptly sent them off to You know, to work in California. That has changed, because we have so many home grown success stories now. Where people have chosen to stay here, they got the financial support they needed, they certainly have the talent and they tell you that's one of the reasons they stayed. Chatting to folks on the street in Toronto, most were enthusiastic about Amazon brining HQ2 to town. They could have like jobs available for 50,000 people. That's a good thing.>>Maybe there's a little bit of a Canadian swagger we need to have as Canadians. We have this interesting moment in time right now where I think there are great things going on in our country and great things happening in Toronto. When you stack us up to some of the greatest things in North America, we should be on that But there are still plenty of concerns about HQ2. I spoke to Michael Katchen CEO of financial Tech from Wealthsimple. He said the Toronto tech is mixed about the project. Hearing Amazon we approach we approached some of the best people. Long term though he saw the development as a big help to the city. [MUSIC] There are also worries about higher rents and more traffic but Mayor Tory said his city was already prepared for some of those issues. We're investing literally $150 billion in transit and other related mobility projects in this region, right now. the great thing is hopefully it will be propelled along even further by Amazon. That there are many, many reasons for people to stay here. This is Ben Fox Rubin with CNet.