Brighter Lights, Bigger Cities

Harper’s problem is that the growth of Canada’s largest cities has been achieved, in good part, at the expense of the next tier of cities. In 2001, Winnipeg’s then-mayor, Glen Murray, pointed out that he, like many of his fellow mayors, was watching the steady erosion of tier-two cities like Winnipeg as successful businesses, media, and government people moved to one of the larger cities for greater opportunities. Murray looked at the space between Toronto and Calgary—with Winnipeg, Regina, and Saskatoon shrinking—and called it a great national concern, something that demanded federal government attention. The great observer of cities, writer Jane Jacobs, noted the same trend and warned that the hollowing out of parts of the country would be problematic for national prosperity and unity. Indeed, given current migration patterns and immigrant settlement trends, one can forecast a population picture of Canada in the very near future where the overwhelming majority of Canadians will live in one of three major urban centres, all separated by vast and relatively unpopulated regions.

This concern led to a number of initiatives, including the meetings of the C5 Mayors (from Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto, and Montreal) beginning in Winnipeg in May of 2001. These meetings were aimed at highlighting the ways in which the world and Canada had changed. The astute Don Stevenson, a former Ontario senior public servant, called for fresh attention to urban matters in Canada. He also alerted us to the fact that although the majority of Western society lived in cities for most of the twentieth century, the twenty-first century would be the first “urban century,” when a majority of the world’s population will live in cities.

Along with the powerful trend toward urbanization, immigration has added great potency to large cities. Canada, of course, has always been a country of immigrants. Our first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, was from Scotland. But during the last quarter of the twentieth century, two big changes occurred. First, immigrants came from many different regions of the world other than Europe. They came from South America, Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Arab world, and most of them were people of colour. Second, they moved from cities to cities. Unlike many previous waves of immigrants, they did not have the skills, experience, or interests that would make them successful in rural Canada. Nor did rural Canada have the concentrations of people like them to make life welcoming and familiar, the economic opportunities, or the programs and support networks to expedite successful settlement. While perhaps not sufficient, to a far greater degree such programs and supports are already features of big cities.

To put this in perspective, since 1991 over 3.2 million immigrants have arrived in Canada, the vast majority of whom have come from urbanized areas in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. The Greater Toronto Area alone absorbs nearly half of Canada’s immigrants, and the percentage of foreign-born Canadians in the country’s three largest cities is growing at a much faster rate than Canada as a whole is growing. By the time Canada celebrates its sesquicentennial in 2017, up to 23 percent of Canadians will be visible minorities, with 75 percent of those living in one of Canada’s three largest cities. And by this same year, Canada will have, for the first time in its history, more citizens over the age of sixty-five than under fifteen years old. In short, our rapidly ageing population will be concentrated around the health-care and other services that cities provide, placing even heavier governance burdens on Canada’s largest metropolises.

Past governments were not oblivious to these trends, nor to the imbalancing effect that increased urbanization through immigration was having on the rest of the country, but they were puzzled about how to respond. To fill population holes, a succession of federal immigration ministers contemplated policies that would require newcomers to settle outside of the large urban regions for a period of three to five years, after which they could move. Such notions met protests from immigration advocates who said that even if such policies survived inevitable Charter challenges, social engineering of this kind wouldn’t work. The settlement trends are driven by positive attraction—i.e., people move to cities because that is where they find opportunity, wealth, education, friends, and even love. And the trends are further driven by readily available health care and publicly funded schooling. Forcing new arrivals to live away from where they were inclined to live would delay successful settlement and, in any event, it would be hugely expensive to create settlement programs on smaller scales across the country. Urban advocates simply asked, what is so wrong with large and larger cities

If Harper is of the view that the health of our cities is critical to the health of the nation, he will want to know how to best support them. While not a businessman by training, he is no doubt aware of the basic precept that investing in strength is the best strategy, and most economists would advise him that investing in city regions would produce the greatest returns. Returns, by the way, that can be invested in the many other objectives of government, including, if he chooses to continue the “Canadian way,” sending money to the non-urban parts of the country.

This brings Harper face to face with the so-called New Deal for Cities. There is a lot of confusion about what the New Deal actually is, and on particularly confusing days it seems to be not much other than more federal or provincial handouts for cities. It might be helpful, therefore, to parse this out a bit. If there is a New Deal, there must have been an Old Deal. The Old Deal was firmly in the grip of the constitution. Cities were the creatures of the provinces and they depended on provincial or, occasionally, federal money for big-ticket items, like transportation infrastructure. Under the Old Deal, there were good days and bad days. On the good days, the money arrived. When Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau created a ministry of municipal affairs, there was attention and money. Under the Davis government in Ontario, cities in the province generally had a friend at Queen’s Park (as they do today in Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty). On the bad days, the money didn’t come, or came in small amounts with hard conditions. The prevailing moods of hostility (the Harris government in Ontario) or indifference (the Chrétien government in Ottawa) made for bad days during the Old Deal.

What good and bad days shared under the Old Deal is that the decisions weren’t made in the cities. It was what the other levels of government wanted that counted. The city in question lacked the decision-making power and the financial resources to do what it wanted (and its structure of governance often exacerbated the problems). For example, Toronto has known for some time that it wants to improve its waterfront, an area in rather ugly transition between its industrial past and a more appealing future. But it has neither the resources nor the powers to change it without the approval and participation of the federal and provincial governments. It has been unable to do what Vancouver has done so wonderfully to its False Creek and Coal Harbour areas and Montreal to its historic buildings.

This led urban advocates to insist that waiting for handouts, constantly being the supplicant, is no way to build great cities. What that takes is more money, more power, and governance systems that lead to effectiveness and accountability. Money, power, and governance. Most people agree that these are the component pieces of the New Deal, but there is a lot of debate on what should constitute each. A simple concept can help to clarify: control of destiny. What, within each of these categories, would contribute to greater control of destiny for our large urban regions At the end of the day, if reforms are just about being better supplicants, what Jane Jacobs has called “opportunistic beggary,” then we probably only need more charming mayors.

The powers that would yield greater control of destiny would be akin to the powers of a province. Some would include power over both the education and health-care systems. In Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, for example, the large immigrant populations put unique demands on the school system because of language and cultural issues that are fundamentally different than in the rest of Canada. Local control would provide more appropriate curricula. Similarly, these populations have different health-care requirements.