TORONTO — Kitchener Mayor Berry Vrbanovic and Toronto Mayor John Tory announced a joint effort Thursday to market Waterloo Region and Canada's largest city as a world-leading tech corridor.

Tory made the announcement at the Toronto offices of Shopify, where he was launching a new website to promote the city's technology potential.

Joining forces with Toronto will have obvious benefits in marketing the region as a prime place for innovators and the venture capitalists who fund them, and in competing with other global tech centres, Vrbanovic said.

"We can't underestimate the fact that having a partner which is Canada's largest city will certainly help with advocacy," Vrbanovic said. "It's really looking at how do we capitalize on the talent, on the skill sets, that are moving between our two cities."

Tory agreed, noting that a number of companies have offices in both regions. They include Shopify, Google and Open Text.

"A rising tide lifts all boats," Tory said. "If we're doing well in Waterloo Region, and attracting people to come from elsewhere … that's going to benefit Toronto. … I think together we can take on the real competition, which is Silicon Valley, which is Boston for life sciences, which is New York, which is Chicago, which are centres elsewhere on the globe beyond North America. We will be stronger together, and Toronto stands to benefit immensely from that."

Waterloo Region has plenty to offer, Tory said. "If you look at Waterloo Region there is, in that one place, hundreds, thousands of startup businesses and a rich concentration of educational talent and other resources available to us that is unparalleled," Tory said.

The collaboration will include lobbying together for all-day, two-way GO train service between Waterloo Region and Toronto, as well as other, shorter-term transportation solutions. The need for improved transit links was a key focus of Vrbanovic's remarks at the Toronto event.

"Currently, our greatest barrier to unlocking this opportunity is the lack of efficient, effective transit between our two regions," Vrbanovic said. The distance between Toronto and Waterloo Region is roughly the same as between San Francisco and San Jose in Silicon Valley, he said. "What they have that we do not is more efficient and effective transit."

About 10,000 "knowledge workers" in the tech and financial sectors already commute into Waterloo Region from Toronto, Vrbanovic noted. They "spend hours a day, stuck on the 401, wasted time, inefficient time, or they're constrained by poor schedules and GO train service between our two regions," he said.

"An investment in two-way all-day GO or high-speed rail service between our two regions is the single most impactful way to advance the Toronto-Waterloo Region corridor as the global leader in innovation, create jobs and grow our regional economy," Vrbanovic said.

All-day, two-way train service is years away, Vrbanovic conceded. "The reality is we're one of the only jurisdictions in the Western world that don't see that already in existence," he said. "There seems to be real commitment from the province toward it, but obviously there's a lot of work that needs to be done."

Tory will be coming to the region in March to tour tech companies and incubators, and the two mayors will travel together to Silicon Valley in April, to encourage venture capitalists to invest in new Canadian businessesS and try and lure Canadian expatriates working in California's tech sector to come home.