Canadian founders and researchers and engineers build remarkable things every week. The smartest people in the country push the boundaries in AI, clean energy, quantum computing and biotech. The startups these men and women are founding attract talent from around the world, and yet almost nobody outside of their immediate tech ecosystem hears about it.
When Canadians, including those making policy at the top, don’t see their own innovators reflected in the stories they read, they start to believe innovation happens elsewhere. They look to Silicon Valley and Shenzen and Seoul. Capital follows and flows to where the stories are, and talent follows the capital. Right now it seems Canada’s innovation story is not being properly written.
The gap we need to fill
Canada’s mainstream technology coverage falls into two buckets.
The first is mostly corporate PR and business. Outstanding publications like The Logic and BetaKit do amazing deep dives into the business and movers and shakers behind Canada’s tech scene, which is great, but it’s not exciting. It doesn’t explore what the tech is the way it deserves. It doesn’t push the story of Canada’s innovation to the forefront.
The second bucket is American tech coverage with the odd Canadian footnote. The big story is always Silicon Valley. Sometimes Toronto will get mentioned. Rarely.
This framing trains readers to see Canada as a minor league in the world of innovation, and not the fourth largest tech hub in the world. It trains future founders and engineers to believe they have to leave the country to innovate.
Independent journalism is the answer
The age of AI-generated content is making the problem worse, and newsrooms need to compete with a deluge of AI-generate slop on social media. Readers can feel the difference. The machine-created content is bland and voiceless, and dangerously innacurate. The newsrooms operating on tight budgets can’t afford dedicated investigative journalists to tackle the domestic tech industry.
Independent journalism is the answer. It offers a real person instead of an AI chatbot spewing out generic content. This is a person who picks up the phone, interviews sources, researches the issues, fact checks the claims and writes the story in a way you, the reader, can connect with. This is what I do.
My name is Nathan Drescher and I’m an award-winning professional journalist. I am regularly published in respected media like the Ottawa Business Journal, The Logic, Digital Trends, Mobile Syrup, Marketingedge Magazine, and others. I studied journalism in college, am accredited and spent many years covering stories from the war in Ukraine to groundbreaking ceremonies in Ottawa. I started The Drescher Drop because I believe Canada deserves a dedicated source of technology journalism that takes our innovation sector seriously.
Here’s what you will find here
The Drescher Drop publishes twice a week.
You will receive a deep dive investigative feature every Tuesday. This is original journalism based on research and interviews and my on-the-ground observations. I explore the companies, the people and, above all, the technology shaping Canada. I examine what technology coming out of places like China and Europe are doing differently and what we here in Canada can learn from them. Some weeks that means profiling a founder and others it means walking the floor of a production plant.
Every Friday you will receive a tech brief that rounds up the most important innovation stories in Canada for the week. This is your cheat sheet. You can scan headlines and digest the quick description and then go about your day.
Who The Drescher Drop is for
This is for founders, innovators and leaders in Canada’s tech ecosystem. It’s also for every Canadian interested in how technology impacts our lives and our nation. This is for anyone who cares about where Canada is heading. I strongly believe Canada can and should become a leading tech power, and I believe in doing my small part to help us get there.
That last point matters to me personally. We have the talent and the institutions and the clean power and the potential to become real leaders in technology, and to drastically improve our own lives here at home. What we lack is the storytelling to make that visible, to hold leaders accountable and inspire the next generation of innovators.
Canada’s tech story is not being told properly, at least, not in its full form. Welcome to The Drescher Drop. I am glad you are here as we begin telling the real story. We have a lot of ground to cover.
If you know someone who should be reading this, send them the link. The more people who engage with independent Canadian tech journalism, the stronger our coverage becomes and the louder Canada’s innovation story gets.
Nathan Drescher