The failure of Toronto’s Quayside smart city project boils down to two “original sins,” according to former Research In Motion co-CEO and Centre for Digital Rights founder Jim Balsillie: a lack of regulatory oversight and a lack of citizen input.

But that doesn’t mean Toronto can’t have a smart city — under the right conditions.

According to Balsillie and York University assistant professor Natasha Tusikov, those original sins point the way forward to ensuring any future smart city projects don’t infringe upon citizens’ digital and privacy rights.

The Quayside project, a proposed smart city in the underused Port Lands area of Toronto spearheaded by Google sister company Sidewalk Labs, sounded appealing at first, said Balsillie.

The project promised a high-tech neighbourhood with sensors everywhere, gathering data on weather, movement, traffic and more.

But just months after a panel was formed in April 2018 to help Waterfront Toronto tackle data privacy and safety issues, experts on the panel started resigning, citing concerns over how the data would be collected and controlled.

And in May 2020, Sidewalk Labs pulled out of the project, blaming COVID-19.

Balsillie and Tusikov both say the Quayside development was flawed from the start, in two major ways.

The first was that it was allowed to move ahead without a proper regulatory framework, instead giving the regulatory power to Google’s parent Alphabet Inc., said Balsillie.

The second was that it didn’t involve citizens right from the start, he said.

He described the project as an example of “surveillance capitalism,” which infringes upon people’s basic rights to privacy.

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