A recent study that ranks Toronto as Canada's high-tech capital has the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation up in arms and questioning the validity of the results.

Montreal-based research firm E&B Data released this week the preliminary results from a comparison of Toronto's high tech sector with other North American cities.

The study is meant to serve as a marketing tool for Hogtown, commissioned by the City of Toronto and the Greater Toronto Marketing Alliance with the support of both the Ontario and federal governments.

The final results will be released by the end of the month.

The preliminary report ranks Toronto as Canada's top tech centre by a wide margin and third in North America behind San Francisco and New York.

Ottawa is ranked 14th on the list of fifteen, behind Montreal, which ranks ninth.

The Toronto study included companies with more than 100 employees working in the hardware and software industries, or that provide services for the computer and communications industry.

The report claims Toronto has "over 100,000 skilled information and communication technology workers, twice the number of any other city in Canada."

The E&B study is based on a simple headcount of how many tech workers are employed in each city. OCRI argues that is an inaccurate measure.

Meghan Pettipas, OCRI's manager of marketing and communications, criticized E&B's "loosey goosey" methodology and said the true measure of a city's tech sector must be based on a per capita count.

According to OCRI's figures, Ottawa's high-tech sector employs 63,700 people. That represents six per cent of the Ottawa-Gatineau metropolitan population. Toronto has far more tech workers, at 148,000, but that represents only four per cent of its population, OCRI says.

According its data, the only North America city with a higher proportion of tech workers is California's Silicon Valley, at seven per cent. Seattle ties for second place with Ottawa at six per cent. Third place is a tie between Washington and Boston at five per cent each.

OCRI president Jeffrey Dale acknowledged that Toronto eclipses Ottawa in terms of technology manufacturing and head offices, but Ottawa is the greater of the two in terms of new product development.

The Ottawa data from the E&B Data study was apparently leaked to Toronto media. The research firm is not yet ready to go into the numbers in detail before the final report at the end of the month.

However, company president Jean Matuszewski did say the study found Ottawa to have about 900 technology companies in total, compared with 3,000 in Toronto and 2,000 in Montreal.

The E&B report also raises again the fact that such statistical analysis is all a matter of perspective.

OCRI compiles its data on the local tech sector by contacting local firms one by one.

At Statistics Canada, the measure of the local tech sector is somewhat different, with the data based on monthly household surveys for the Labour Force Survey. Statscan also has a narrower definition of what qualifies as a tech company and excludes many of the professional and services oriented firms that OCRI includes in its definition.

According to Statscan, high-tech employment in Ottawa-Gatineau totalled 42,200 in April, up slightly from March and far short of the peak of 69,000 reached in the spring of 2001.