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Finance Minister Bill Morneau never said it, but many of his budget’s recent measures in favour of high-tech should not have been necessary.

He and his fellow Liberals are planning to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to support clusters of innovation – communities of high-tech firms capable of spinning off one success story after another.

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The formula for successful tech hubs is pretty basic. This is what you need:

a large anchor tenant with sales and employees across the globe;

hundreds of entrepreneurial firms with smart plans and outsize ambition;

access to investment money;

top-notch local universities and

plenty of tech wizards who have done it before and can serve as role models.

Canada’s tech communities have all these ingredients but the first. The country lost its national champions when Nortel Networks slipped into bankruptcy in 2009 and BlackBerry’s hegemony over the smartphone market vanished in 2011.