Big Ideas: Get municipalities in GTA to work together

If Toronto, Mississauga and others could stop competing and join forces, the GTA could win on a North American scale, says Carol Wilding

Toronto Star
March 24, 2014
By Marco Chown Oved

What if Toronto didn’t compete with Markham, Mississauga or Richmond Hill for jobs and instead joined forces with them to challenge other metropolitan regions across North America?

To stop thinking of Toronto as isolated from its neighbours and start working in concert is a natural idea, a mental amalgamation enacted repeatedly over the city’s history as it co-ordinated its economy and development on an ever-bigger scale.

While regional integration has been the focus of many reports and speeches, the GTA remains stuck between the rock of municipal government and the hard place of the province.

But with the possibility of new mayors in places such as Toronto and Brampton, a once-in-a-generation renewal of leadership in Mississauga, and a possible provincial election, 2014 could provide the perfect conditions to dust off those reports and put them on the top of the priority pile.

“This is the time,” said Carol Wilding, president of the Toronto Region Board of Trade, which tucked “region” into its name only last year. “It’s a unique opportunity.”

Wilding concedes that the Greater Toronto Marketing Alliance and Invest Toronto already work to attract business to the GTA and promote the region as an economic hub, but she doesn’t think they go far enough.

“There needs to be a big, bold move there to get rid of all these disparate agencies and disparate organizations ... and once and for all take the jump and say we want one regional agency,” she said. “(So) we have one voice that we go out with and we have one doorbell when investment comes here. That would be a huge step forward for politicians - whether at a (provincial) level or a municipal level - to come together and do that.”

The Board of Trade put out an economic vision and strategy report Monday that notes Toronto is by far more important to Canada’s economy than New York, the San Francisco Bay Area or Greater Boston are to the U.S. economy.

But lack of innovation has seen the GTA’s productivity drop - the only metropolitan region where that’s occurred since 2000, the report says.

Investment in regional planning - starting with transportation - is key to exploiting Toronto’s potential and playing in the big leagues with U.S. metropolitan regions such as Los Angeles or Atlanta, Wilding said.

“If you look at the data we’ve put out ... I don’t know what more people need in front of them to say things are trending in the wrong direction. Yet we have a tremendous asset base here regionally that is enviable of many other U.S. large competitors - the Seattles, the Bostons - so it’s just a golden opportunity staring us in the face,” Wilding said.

“Why aren’t we doing this, when it seems so logical?”

It’s been eight years since Metrolinx, the GTA’s best-known regional body, was created to streamline and co-ordinate transit. While tunnels are being dug along Eglinton Ave, and new bus rapid transit is operating in York Region, overall the agency has failed to impress, said Roger Martin, head of the Martin Prosperity Institute at U of T’s Rotman School of Management.

“It’s in the teething phase. We’re trying something new,” said Martin, who is also the Premier’s Chair in Productivity and Competitiveness. “My hope is that we’ll keep going at it and we won’t eviscerate Metrolinx and say ‘that didn’t work.’ ... This is all part of a learning process of how to operate as a coherent and hopefully powerful region.”

For Wilding, transit is both a litmus test and a prerequisite for true integration on the Greater Toronto level. To succeed, we need to do better than we did when debating between an LRT and a subway for Scarborough.

“We are trying to be very big and very bold,” she said. “Because if you can’t get that one right, then how do we expect to get anything else right? That’s a big test for us, and right now, I don’t think we’re at a passing grade.”

Councillor Michael Thompson, chair of the city’s economic development and culture committee, says Toronto has many products and services to offer the world, but a collective approach at the regional level is needed to coordinate efforts and develop jobs.

“Transit is necessary to attract investment and expand opportunity,” he said. “But prior to that we need political alignment.

“The challenge we have is to get all the regional municipalities together to figure out what is the vehicle that will get us to the next level.”