From Policy to Prosperity: Local Economic Development That Works

Full Panel
Transcript

Note to readers: This video session was transcribed using auto-transcribing software.  Questions or concerns with the transcription can be directed to citytalk@canurb.org with “transcription” in the subject line.

Mary W. Rowe: Hi, everybody. It’s Mary Rowe from the Canadian Urban Institute. Delighted to have everybody on screen and online today. Not your typical week, I would say we’ve had, or two weeks even that we’ve had. And so what a fabulously important topic for us to be gathering the different kinds of perspectives that we’re having this morning or this afternoon, depending on what part of the country you’re tuning in from. If you’re new to CityTalk, you know that we have a very active chat. And so I’m hoping that if you have been a lurker on CityTalks, of which we’ve had several hundred now. We encourage you to declare yourself, come on to the chat and use it as an opportunity to raise questions, pose or offer comments, provide links to work that you think is valuable and relevant to the conversation. We always encourage people to be respectful on the chat, obviously. It’s not a place to rant or to be disrespectful. It’s because we’re Canadians, let’s just say. Although we have lots of non-Canadians coming on. And can I just say, I’ve just come back myself from a couple of days in Washington DC., and just to be reminded that we’re all fundamentally human beings. And as tense and rancorous as some of the larger discourse has been over the last several weeks, just to remind ourselves that. And I was very much reminded of it when I set foot in Washington, D.C. and was greeted by all the folks there, that live there and work there and make their livelihoods in that city. And I was speaking at a large event that had people coming from across the United States. And as I say, just heartened by the engagement that so many people in wherever they live are engaged and paying attention to the particular circumstances and challenges of the place where they live and work and how to make it better for everyone. So end of this Pollyanna moment, but just to say that we are all human beings and I always say that city life, urban life, congregate life is fundamentally about empathy and how we experience each other. So in the spirit of that, a reminder that I happen to be in Toronto today (I came back from DC yesterday), which is the head office headquarters for CUI, but we have people working across the country. We have many people tuning in from different parts of Canada and the United States today. And traditional territory to many, many different Indigenous, Inuit, and Metis peoples. And the extent to which we continue, and I know that all the folks that are on the panel today are all engaged in what reconciliation has to look like?. How do we actually make visible our commitment to inclusion and our commitment to dealing with the ways in which colonial and historic arrangements have excluded Indigenous populations and continue to exclude people who are coming from other places, newcomers and people who are not part of the sort of colonial history of Canada. So that is to say that here, particularly Treaty 13, is where and the Williams Treaty is what binds the GTA and home to many, many First Nations and Inuit and Metis, as I suggested.

So our topic today is not simple. But in some ways, maybe it is simple. And so that’s part of why we ask these folks to come on. So I’m going to ask them to open their cameras and for you to see who’s here and for us to have this kind of lively exchange about what’s working, what’s not and what’s next around economic development. And I’m going to ask each of them to give us a few minutes on their particular perspective and where they sit, basically. We all sit in different places And what their focus is around the future of their economies and particularly their local economies. And I want each of them to start by answering this question and then just talk about whatever the heck you want – What’s Working, What’s Not, What’s Next is what we always ask people. But I do want you in your first reply to tell me – Who do you think is the boss of the economy? How’s that for a little opener?

Gordon, why don’t you go first? You’re outnumbered here. So why don’t you go first? Let’s go east and start with “who do you think the boss of the economy is?” And then talk to me specifically about the things that you have been engaged with and how HRM and the pull, however broad a picture you want to paint is from Atlantic Canada about economic development and what you’re focusing on, what works. So over to you, Gordon. Welcome. Glad to have you on CityTalk.

Gordon Stevens: Thanks, Mary. You know, I think fundamentally the consumer is the boss. And, you know, I think we’re seeing that nationally this last week for sure. That, you know, when bad things happen and when people get their backs up, they start to talk and act with their pocketbooks. And I think we can’t lose sight of that and whether… whether this lasts for a short time or a long time. I think the more people are conscious and conscientious consumers, the stronger our communities will be and I’m sure Amy’s going to talk a lot about that from her perspective. But, you know, locally here in Halifax and, generally speaking, in the world of economic development, a lot has changed. It’s no longer, you know, one thing that’s going to make, you know … to convince a company to come here it’s no longer, you know, cheap labor. It’s no longer a low cost of living or low cost of doing business And as each of those things got picked off over time, we’ve started to see more concern, more focus on actual happiness and what makes people want to live in the city, what makes people … and if the people live here, then the companies will come because they need them to do the work. But we’re seeing much more integration between place, between what used to be disparate organizations, whether it was tourism development or economic development or, you know, the city itself. It’s no longer those silos got broken down and a lot of it got broken down during COVID because everything got thrown into disarray. And what’s nice is that a lot of that collaboration that happened because of COVID has lived on. And I think what we’re seeing is that everyone is stronger for it.

Now, on the flip side of it, we also didn’t think we would get another thing like COVID. And then we’ve, you know, here regionally, we’ve had wildfires and floods and hurricanes. And just when we thought it was safe to come out … A trade war. So it you know, from our organization’s perspective, dealing with these one-off things to, instead, sort of having a game plan that can be enacted on 24 hours notice for the next thing. And that’s a totally different place than where we would have been, you know, even five years ago.

Mary W. Rowe: I mean, I hear you … that, you know – what I was talking about when I was traveling this week was community resilience, that notion of resilience and how you prepare to absorb different kinds of shocks and, as you suggested, who could have quite predicted this. We’re hearing lots of sage types saying if someone asked them a question 30 years ago, did they think this would be where we’d be? Nobody thought so. But as you say, we also developed some collaborative muscle during COVID. So question is, can we dust off that? Can we reflex that? I guess that’s the interesting question. And I want to come back and talk to you about collaboration, but I’m now just going to open up some other voices to see what they say. So I’m going to go to you, Councillor Troster. Let’s go to you in the nation’s capital and specifically, who is the, I mean, you’re in Ottawa … maybe you’re going to say you’re the boss of the economy, but who’s the boss of the local economy? And then tell us about what it is that you’re seeing and the kinds of things that you’re observing as Gordon just did, and then I’ll keep going across the country. Go for it.

Ariel Troster: Sure. I mean, you know, in an ideal world, the consumer would be the boss of the economy and the workers who are doing the work would have more autonomy over that work.

Here in Ottawa, we’re disproportionately affected by the impact of the federal government. I mean, in some ways we’re a company town … Aka the federal government. And the way that the downtown was planned in the 1970s, there was this thing called the Gréber report that put in place a really old school vision of the city, which is … you shoot people out from nine to five to work and then they drive to their suburbs. And certain parts of downtown Ottawa were really designed for people to shoot in and out and work. There was an entire local economy of businesses that would just be open from 10 a.m. To 2 p.m, largely, which closed during COVID.

So we’re really impacted by the change in work patterns. I represent Somerset Ward, which is one of the two downtown wards and probably the one that has been hit the worst by the shift in working patterns. Since the pandemic we’re missing between 80 and 100,000 people that typically would have come in and out of the downtown core on a daily basis. And Bank Street is struggling. There are 30 empty storefronts on that street right now. And plus we have the impact of the homelessness and addiction crises, which is making a rebound really difficult. I believe that workers should have autonomy over their work and I completely understand the federal unions wanting more remote work. I get it. But I will say that when the federal government did implement a mandatory return to work of two or three days, local businesses were happy for that. They’re largely immigrant or family owned businesses that are really trying to survive so we know, and the Canadian Urban Institute collaborated with the city on an action plan for downtown Ottawa, we know in the medium and longer term we need more housing, more people living downtown, more things to attract people. And I’ll talk a little bit more about what we’re working on. But I’m not going to lie. I’m going to do a lot of listening during this conversation because Bank Street is sort of the epicenter of tough stuff going on right now in my city. And a lot of this has to do with the fact that we were designed as a town to cater to the whims of the federal government. The federal workforce is changing. We have a lot of empty buildings. Certain parts of the core have become derelict. So it is an opportunity for reinvention, but it’s not instant. And that’s very frustrating for people.

Mary W. Rowe: Yep. Well, that’s what we need to be about on these CityTalks is, and I appreciate your candor, Councillor, because let’s hope that that’s exactly the spirit that we always try to surface here on CityTalk is let’s talk frankly about what’s working and what’s not. There are lots and lots of smart people from across the country who are observing you on this chat and can start volleying in all sorts of ideas. And I’d encourage our producers to put into the chat the Ottawa Downtown Action Report. And actually, Halifax has one too. So we’ll put some resources … and so does Toronto, actually the Councillor will probably speak to it in a minute. But I think that this is all an opportunity to have this kind of Pan-Canada conversation. We’re all in varying degrees of these kinds of challenges. The mental health one you just signaled, the idea that we had, I like your phrase, I mean, it’s not an endearing phrase, but “tough stuff”. As I said, urban life is about empathy. It’s about tough stuff. And the mental health piece is manifesting … I think we’ve obviously got lots of issues around what the economics are of running a small business are. And if you had to exist on a 10 to 2, five day a week business cycle … Now you’re dealing with 10 to 2 on a three day business, like maybe, you know what I mean? So all of these things, we’re in this massive transition. And there’s obviously … nobody has the perfect solution. So thank you for being so frank about that. We’ll come back to you.

Next to you, Councillor Carroll, big smoke, “Torana”, you’ve just come out with a big economic development strategy. You are the budget chief and the economic development person on council. Speak to us. First of all, tell me who’s the boss of the economy and then talk to us about what your particular focus is on Toronto Council.

Shelley Carroll: Sure. Well, I just want to say before I forget, you know, I do have to count my blessings … Ariel, I was in Ottawa this summer for the first time since COVID and that was a shock to me. I was a frequent visitor throughout my childhood because in that company town, my grandfather was a member of that company, the federal government. And we forget in Toronto, because we do have a very diversified economy, it’s got a lot of different sectors that are multiple foci. And so to come to a company town and realize what work from home can do to a city was kind of a jarring thing for me. But I’ll tell you, Mary, you know, if you asked me pre-COVID, I would use my big conspiracy theory hat and say, it isn’t even a government – the boss of the economy or billionaire Logan Roy type interests and they like to make us think we’re the bosses and manipulate us. Well, “here’s a benefit, go spend some money”. Then pull it back and sort of manipulate the economy and governments really in that way. But more and more, and I think it’s on the downside and through their pain, the consumer really has become the boss of the economy now. We have to base the fact that if they don’t have an adequate way to earn a living and we’re not looking after them, they will vote with their feet. They won’t get on that transit system you’re trying to fund and suddenly you have no fare box. And now your main streets are suffering. And we recently saw a government try last ditch effort third quarter, let’s give them a tax break and see if they’ll spend. And the numbers are in now for Moneris and taking away the HST at both levels of government, the whole HST was removed in Ontario.

And it didn’t have any impact on spending. So consumers, in their pain are the boss right now in a lot of places we still shrunk. We were well down this past Christmas from Christmas 2023.

That data just hit, I think it just hit the airwaves yesterday. And so the consumer really is the boss right now. And they are saying if something doesn’t change, if there isn’t a big reset,

I can’t keep the local economy afloat as a consumer. And I think we have to wake up to that today.

Mary W. Rowe: Boy, that’s sobering. I mean, here we are … I mean, you know, on the one hand I think consumers, of which we all are, can be encouraged by that, that we actually have some agency, which is part of what we’ve been saying at CUI through My Main Street and the various initiatives that we are involved with coordinating that you can make choices. And I’m sure people on the chat are going … actually our next panelist is going to speak to that. You can make choices about how you act as a consumer and how you spend and whether it helps local or not. But exactly what you just said, that also means you can decide whether you’re going to go on transit or not, and whether or not you’re going to actually be engaged in the public amenities that are around you. So these are really interesting questions about how do we mobilize ourselves. And it has been a moment – for our Americans who are on here listening, thanks gang for coming on, you can appreciate in Canada that there has been a heightened level of discussion about this because of the particular statements and actions of the Trump administration. So we’re in the throes of this. It kind of brings it into relief. But as I’ve been saying, and I’m sure my panelists will agree, and actually you just mentioned it, Gordon, a lot of these things pre-existed before we had any kind of tariff threat. So lots and lots of issues in how we operate and how our local economies … what their constraints are and what their opportunities are. Long before there was any mention of the “T” word, just saying. So Amy, I know you’ve been dedicating your life to this kind of conversation. And thank you for joining us from the West, where I’m sure it’s beautiful and temperate and it’s probably not sunny, but I’m sure it’s warmer than it is for everybody else. I’m looking on the chat. We’ve got people coming in for, oh, we got somebody coming in from Cartagena, Colombia. Thanks, Rick. But we’ve got most people coming in from minus 20, minus 25. What is the weather like today?

Amy Robinson: We have had our own version of deep freeze here where it snows and they don’t really plow. They just wait for Mother Nature to clean it up a few weeks later. So yeah, most people are sort of hunkered down and working from home if they can.

Mary W. Rowe: Because it’s cold. [Yeah, cold for us.] Okay, well, we feel for you. Just saying. All righty. So Amy, talk.

Amy Robinson: It’s almost a full-time job trying to keep my hummingbird feeders from freezing.

Mary W. Rowe: Okay, we got the picture. Okay, hummingbirds unite. All right. Give us your perspective, as I suggested, you’ve been an activist and you’ve been organizing platforms around, I think, consumer behavior and influencing consumers. So talk to us about your work and talk to us about what you’re observing in terms of how do you actually spur local economic development?

Amy Robinson: Yes. I mean, I think that that’s where some of where we started. We started looking at, you know, very much as a business to business network, trying to get, you know, businesses to partner and become aware of each other and use each other in their supply chains. And then about 13 years ago, we launched a consumer campaign where we partner with business groups and cities and others across the province, businesses across the province. And that started out as a consumer campaign and has been very successful at raising consumer awareness and making businesses aware of their own need to buy local, have local suppliers. And it’s made government officials quite sympathetic to their cause. And so that’s been successful. We’ve expanded into business to business campaign, where we’re trying to encourage businesses to do more buying from local suppliers as well, localize their supply chains. I think that I… I agree and I disagree about the consumer being in charge. I think that we, you know, Canadian households spend about $70,000 a year on goods and services. And then they invest. So those are some of the levers they have. And I guess more and more as we’ve been doing this work over the years, we’ve realized you can have buy local campaigns and try to give them, you know, all the reasons to buy local. And I mean, it’s about affordability is one thing that impacts their ability to make that choice. And the second is whether or not we actually cite independent businesses in their communities. So we’ve been looking at the land use issues around this. And then I do think if you, you know, the first thing that came to my mind when you ask who’s the boss, I think globalization has become the boss to some degree.

And large corporations and a lack of competition, that economic driver that it’s like cheaper, sooner, faster. And that government policy can’t really keep up with that. It really … we didn’t, you know, there was a lot of spending that started happening online before we even charged tax on, you know, that … basically that cross-border online shopping. And then I think about things like the gig economy, like, you know, we just, we can’t, we’re not keeping up to, you know, ensure fairness for employees and to, you know, to tax those purchases online. All that money is flowing right out of our economy. And, you know, only now are we like with digital services taxes and things like that, are we trying to figure out how to tax all that economic activity. So those are just some of my initial thoughts. The other thing I think is that I agree that we, you know, we did see more cooperation happening during COVID. I would say, like, we always collaborate. We’re sort of small and scrappy. And so I was happy to see that. I think that we backed off a little bit on that. I mean, we have amazing partners that we continue to work with. But I would say that all of us that support local businesses, Canadian owned businesses are sorely underfunded. So that makes it a lot harder to do the work.

Mary W. Rowe: Give you an example of who’s underfunded.

Amy Robinson: All the business improvement areas are … you know, small not-for-profit organizations, all the chambers, I mean, they were all suffering during COVID because they are funded by their memberships, funded by events and things like that that they could no longer coordinate. So I would say … and then, of course, you know, organizations that … I think it’s hard to get like – for an organization like us, nobody wants to fund research.

Mary W. Rowe: Yeah, yeah, I get that.

Mary Robinson: When you’re … nobody sees you as like a charitable cause when you’re trying to promote private business. There’s some kind of feeling that it’s like, well … and there’s a lot of need out there to compete with homelessness and mental health and all these kinds of things that. It’s like, well, should we be funding private business? Like, shouldn’t they just be able to survive on their own?

Mary W. Rowe: Yeah, you sound like my dinner table. Just saying, Amy, you know, I run the Urban Institute. Can I have everybody put their cameras on? We’ll have a group chat now. And I appreciate all the people coming in on the chat. Open your mics so we don’t have to go mute/ unmute. Just open your mics, if the dog comes in, that’s fine. Put the dog on. So a couple of things …. I’m interested in the unit, the unit of analysis. And at CUI, we’ve been trying to push back on the macro talk about productivity. And we’ve been trying to push the micro talk, which is that 75 or 80 percent of the Canadian population is employed in an SME (small, medium enterprise) and about the same percentage, 75 to 80% of those businesses are within a kilometer of a main street within … they’re a kilometer from Gottingen (I’m going to see how well I can do here). They’re a kilometer from West Hastings. They’re a kilometer from Queen Street, and they’re a kilometer from Bank Street. And they’re … how about that? And, you know, I think for us, part of it is just … how do you help us … it can feel kind of helpless. I hear lots of people in the chat saying globalization, globalization, globalization. But Amy, you just spoke to this. There are actual ways that … we can lament globalization however we want to, but at the same time do something. We can actually engage. So I’m wondering if somebody wants to start off by talking about that.About how can we encourage people to actually engage. Shelley, do you want to start?

Shelley Carroll: Well, sure, because we had this conversation when we were developing the plan that you mentioned. I think you linked to it, Sidewalks to Skylines. And what was interesting was they did come down from their globalization pedestal and said, “we can’t do anything”. The larger the table … we can’t do anything until you get the basics right, that you have to address those quality of life issues because they hurt us all, whether we’re an SME, or a giant corporate sector, we really can’t do anything. The first thing we got to do is get people to feel like they can come out and they can engage in their community and that they’ll be able to move around when they do that. And so that was sort of a social responsibility – I’d never heard from the likes of the president of the Canadian Council businesses or a CEO from a gigantic corp. But we did. We heard it right off the bat. So, you know, the focus sort of shifted from “What do you do for the smalls” and “what do you do for the larges” to … “We all need you to do that quality of life and social piece, or we can’t even market your town”. So do that. And if you’re not experiencing a quality of life, you’re not going to start that small business or storefront business. You need a certain quality of life to even be able to channel your entrepreneurial inner spirit to say, I want to be my own boss. And so they want all of those things happening. They wanted us to, you know, part of getting people to come back to my office, which I need if I’m Deloitte Touche in the downtown of Toronto is those small businesses … help them, help them because I want my folks back. So they were starting to realize the interconnectedness between them, between the SMEs and the storefront. And what we’re trying to do in the giant financial service sector. And so I think that means we’re at a tipping point. If they really see that connective tissue that they need between them, that is how you build a well-rounded economy. Whether on a Toronto scale or a city of only 100,000, that’s how you do it – Who are our main employers and how are they interwoven into the people who made this town to begin with, the small businesses.

Mary W. Rowe: … Made this town. You know, when you think about it as an ecosystem, right, that it’s a whole interrelated things. And as you suggest, Ariel, you described this in Ottawa, you had businesses where you were a one horse town, one company town, we get that. But you had businesses that would benefit from that. And then you create this kind of synergistic relationship. Toronto, in fact, is many, many, many, many, many ecosystems like this across … and it’s not just the City of Toronto, it’s all across the region, all this kind of interplay, right? Councillor Shelley, that’s part of what you’re trying to stitch together, I think.

Shelley Carroll: Yeah, yeah. And the plan was written so that if it works, it should actually be good for the whole GTHA. And so I think so I think that needs to be replicated in other places and then localized in those tailored ways. But I think it signals an end to the trap that municipalities used to always be in, which was – We have to make the peace between those two things. “Oh, how much money did I spend on my BIAs? And is there enough left for me to have a competitive tax rate to get foreign direct investment from giant companies?”

That dynamic tension – it’s a different thing now. And if you’re live to it and you can make that shift, which is what we hope to do over the decade of this plan, I think we end up with a much healthier sort of local economy because they are willing to interact with each other now because they suddenly woke up to the fact that they need each other.

Mary W. Rowe: It does require different forms of, I love this word that everybody mishears, governance. It requires these kinds of informal arrangements. Ariel, you probably have the toughest version of this.

Ariel Troster: I do. It’s…

Mary W. Rowe: Because your regional economy straddles another province.

Ariel Troster: It does. And also we have, you know, we have jurisdictional issues over land. Like I’m trying to fix an intersection right in front of city hall and like two inches of it technically belongs to the to the feds because it’s close to, you know …

Mary W. Rowe: Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Yeah, yeah. You’re like your you’re like your own border city.

Ariel Troster: It’s very tricky. But I mean, I think what I’ll say is, you know, we have some of those big employers, but we have people who work at the Amazon warehouse living in shelters and getting up every morning and going to their Amazon job. And we have a situation where housing has become so expensive that how can you have the services you want if those service workers can’t afford to live in the neighborhood?

Mary W. Rowe: So let me just stop you because I can tell you’re going to put in a whole bunch of things. Let’s talk about the quality of life piece because you’re speaking to that. And quality of life … I think quality of life used to be, “oh yeah, that’s nice to have”. But you know, we used to be able to say, and I’m wondering if the chat is blowing up … It always happens … Somebody says something and then all hell breaks loose in the chat, which is great. We used to say that we had the most livable cities in the world. And it used to be a big part of our sales pitch, right? “Come and settle in a Canadian city because you’ll have a higher standard of living, a higher quality of life. You’ll have good schools, you’ll have good health care and everything works”.

And I’m interested whether this shock that we are experiencing right now with a different kind of relationship with the US – Can it push us into reinvesting and improving those things. Gordon, are you seeing that in the HRM? And the other thing we’ve got is politics. Two of you are engaged in politics, two of you formally, and two of you aren’t. And we’re living in a complicated set of jurisdictional relationships where premiers and the federal government and municipal governments aren’t always on the same page. Gordon, talk to us from HRM’s perspective. You operate in a region, but it’s also municipally organized as a region. Does that make it easier or does that make it harder?

Gordon Stevens: Um. I don’t know. I mean, I think, you know, to your earlier point that, you know, even in a city the size of Toronto, it is this collection of smaller communities. And so there’s a bit of a, you know, when it comes to municipal spending there is that tug and push and pull between rural and urban and suburban that is a fairly significant challenge. But I think, you know, from where we sit in economic development, we kind of have to stay above that fray and really… think about what types of businesses can we attract into the region? But more importantly, how can we continue to make that quality of life promise true. Because so much of it has been eaten away at um you know as …

Mary W. Rowe: And we see it in the newcomer population, right? So we’ve been dependent on an immigrant workforce for years, and then they come in and then they experience a lot of expectations that aren’t met. And so back to you on that, Gordon. Any particular thoughts? Do you think we’ve got the attention of governments to be able to say, “well, we better start aligning here”. Otherwise, we’re eroding what our competitive advantage used to be.

Gordon Stevens: I’m not sure. I don’t know that we have the attention that’s needed yet because W=we’re in this situation now where this pendulum of immigration is just swinging wildly … um it you know it wasn’t sustainable at the high end and it’s not sustainable at the low end. But we tend to … our policy moves tend to be quite wide sweeping and immediate. You know, so in health, we’re really a university town So the cuts to international students is going to hit particularly hard here in a city where the abuses of that system weren’t actually as prevalent. And regardless of what… what the government tries to do, the way that they go about doing it can sometimes have unintended consequences of overshooting even beyond what they wanted to because word gets out.

Mary W. Rowe: Tons, tons. Yeah, yeah. Well, exactly. And then all of a sudden, yeah. So Gordon, the partnership, the Halifax partnership is a really interesting model of cross-sectoral engagement. Give us a hint about what you think has been working well from that point of view.

Gordon Stevens: I think our ability to bring businesses together with universities, with primarily the municipal government because we are much more tied to the municipal government than the other two levels of government. But to be able to convene those conversations in a timely way. And, you know, so two weeks ago, we had one with the university presidents and a number of CEOs – and just to unpack some of the “what’s going to happen three or four years from now from the impact of having fewer students”. It means that there will be fewer grads in IT to work at the new operation that just opened up two years ago. And … because otherwise, you know, it was like, oh, okay, you know, business leaders are, you know, they’re hearing the thing about students not really thinking that it’s going to impact them. Or, uh, you know, it’s that interconnectedness that’s the pipeline from … the pipeline, you know, grade school to university to the workforce. We used to … people used to be born here, they’d leave, they’d make a living, and then they’d come back and retire here. So we had a demographic issue we’ve solved, at least temporarily, it seems we’ve solved some of that demographic issue. But the economy piece needs to catch up.

Mary W. Rowe: It’s interesting, isn’t it, that the economy would catch up with the demographics. That’s an interesting point. And also, though, this idea, you’re in essence a unicity for the province in many ways. HRM is such a dominant player, I can come back to Shelley in a second because Toronto has some of that, although not to the same extent that you do in Nova Scotia. Amy, in terms of this … you just were suggesting, look, all these intermediary organizations that support small business are not funded adequately. What would you do if you had a magic wand? How would you strengthen the supports that are available to the independent business sector, the local economy sector. Magic wand.

Amy Robinson: That’s a good question. I mean, I guess that’s what I was referring to where we had like a little bit more collaboration and support during COVID.

Mary W. Rowe: Yes, we saw it. Necessity.

Amy Robinson: I was asked that question a few times during COVID. And so it was like for the first time, you know, a local credit union funded a project that we worked on on carbon and economic impact of buying local to encourage people who are sitting on savings, those who had savings and weren’t traveling and stuff and during COVID to you know buy local. They funded a digital support pilot that we had. There was tons of digital support programs going on. I know you have Digital Main Street in Ontario. We don’t have that here anymore. I don’t know how you would fund it, but I definitely … like all of us are out, you know, we’re trying to collaborate as much as possible. You know, I don’t know if everybody knows how BIA is funded, but it’s, you know, they put it together and it comes off the tax roll. So some of them with the worst … those tough issues that you mentioned in Ottawa, we have, you know, Gastown, Chinatown, Hastings Crossing. Bias are all sort of in the center of the downtown east side and, you know, it just sort of depends on the value of your buildings, how much money you get to help those businesses who are dealing with those frontline issues. And so I don’t know how we could better resource them. I’m not sure. I’m not sure how, but I do know that, you know, increased collaboration really helps us. I was at a BIA partnership meeting here in Vancouver yesterday. They are amazing partners to us. We work together. Often they come to us to do the research to put the statistics forward to paint the right picture of the problem that they’re seeing. So 2020, we did some work on permitting and licensing delays and how much that’s costing the local economy.

Last year, we looked at the cost of doing business in Vancouver, both municipal and provincial regulation, various things are, you know, including inflation and other things, are just … the cost of doing business has just gone through the roof. Like, you know, people are not going to survive and they haven’t even recovered from COVID. And now we’re collaborating on the supporting commercial affordability and independent business because we really are looking at that siting piece as we, you know, everybody’s talking about affordable housing. We need that housing. Much of it is being sited along our commercial corridors. Where we’re going to push out all the independent businesses. And then the last affordable spaces that they have … and what gets put in those spaces is a little bit up to the developer and the city.

Mary W. Rowe: Yeah, yeah. And it often pencils out to be a big chain or something. So we are, CUI is doing work on this around how do you actually revitalize the main street without displacing the affordable housing that those … you know you lived above the store and what possibilities are there to encourage more housing along Main Street, as you suggest, without displacing the housing, but also without displacing the independent retail? Shelley, are you looking at all about … are there other – I mean, this is a bit out of the box now you know you’re a councillor. You’re not going to be able to speak, you know, completely outlandishly about this but could we imagine a different kind of approach to property tax when it comes to independently owned local businesses.

Shelley Carroll: That’s just what I was going to rant about. We have to be very careful in this regard. Do we need to help them with resiliency? Yes. But we had already addressed our tax structure for the last several years. We had a very uncompetitive and difficult tax structure, whether you were a small business or large. It was sort of how we got through amalgamation in the City of Toronto but … so we’ve addressed that and that’s a long painstaking shift to pull some burden off business and onto residential. You’ve got to be careful how you do it. And we now have, we have … now there’s an approach to how we do the increases, but there’s also a 15% discount for that main street business. But the minute we had this tariff war hit the horizon, right away, and Mary, you could predict who they would be. There were people saying, well, “you just have to get rid of taxes”. Just no taxes for businesses. That’s the solution to everything. We cannot do that right now. Amy just listed all the things that we must continue to do that are all part of the resiliency of those businesses, making sure that their customers and their employees have places to live, that there is still a social safety net. That we’re continuing to send people out to address the fentanyl crisis and so on and so forth. We do have to continue to do those things. So across Ontario anyway, seeing very high property tax increases.

We’ve done seven and nine and a half to, this year it’s 6.9 we did the arc.  And we’re seeing 8 in GTA municipalities. Because we have to address those things. So outside of that tax structure, what can we do with our reserves? What sort of a granting model or resiliency fund model can we have for them to access? That’s the kind of thing we’re working on now. We can look at the tax structure, but we can’t do something tomorrow. Because what we’re in now is not going to end in the short term. We’re looking at how long is this Version-2 guy going to do damage?

So we really need that structure to be there and to look at resilience as accompanying it in some other form of strategy. Because if you eradicate or take away all those things, strip them away, you can do a really quick benefit, but then have 30 years of damage. And we can’t withstand that right now because we’ve just come through years of damage. I’m pushing back on that to both my colleagues , the businesses I work with …

Mary W. Rowe: There’s only so much tax, right? And there’s also, and remember, is it Oliver Wendell Holmes what would be a CityTalk if I didn’t get a chance to quote Oliver Wendell Holmes … “I’m glad to pay my taxes. It buys me civilization”. So if we start to do tax relief, we have to find a way to fill those holes. Ariel, were you going to chime in on that?

Ariel Troster: Yeah, I mean, The Municipal Act prevents us from directly subsidizing businesses, that’s considered bonusing. You know, I brought together, you know, we have 30 empty storefronts on Bank Street and I was like … and we have a whole collection of private landlords and some of them would rather sit on the property and use it to finance their other properties than fill them with incubator businesses. We have an amazing organization called Immigrant Entrepreneur Canada that was doing these pop-ups in a shipping container in the Byward market and each of these incubator businesses were getting a week to market their product. And then a lot of them have gone on to do really cool stuff. So there’s lots of cool opportunities. And so knowing that I can’t find a way to incentivize landlords, and a lot of them are bad landlords too, right? Like, do we want to be giving them tax money?

Mary W. Rowe: Yea, and I know, we saw this during COVID, that the breaks went to the wrong folks often. I get that.

Ariel Troster: Right, right. Well, I was very lucky. We’re working with the Bloomberg Foundation, Jeanette Sadiq Khan, who of course wrote Street Fight, was responsible for pedestrianizing Times Square. She and her team came into town last week. And we’re really looking at .. What are the other things we can do to make it a better environment to do business? So the social services need to be paired with the public realm improvements.

So we’re looking at … and we were able to we were able to access from the province and also from the feds, you know, significant money for outreach programs. So how can we pair those outreach workers to be caretakers of the public realm? So when we put in a new public bathroom facility, can we create an employability program for formerly incarcerated or street involved folks and they can help be caretakers of this facility to make sure it doesn’t get trashed. How can we have visible helpers on the street? Because, you know, I have business owners saying like at open time and close time, there’s someone like asleep in my … you know or using drugs right in front of my business or they come in and they’re having a mental health crisis. We’ve also implemented, similar to Toronto, we’re doing our own pilot on non-police crisis intervention. It’s a program called “Anchor”. The first location, it started in Centertown you can call 211, 24 hours a day, And we’re getting great results out of that. So, you know, I’m really thinking about how can we make the public realm beautiful? How can we clean up the garbage and have it be less dirty? And how can we have You know, evidence-informed peer sensitive outreach workers working with folks, because public drug use has never been this bad.

The drugs that are more and more poisonous, which is leading to incredibly erratic behavior from folks with addictions. We need to deal with that because the number one thing people are saying is I don’t feel safe coming downtown but …

Mary W. Rowe: So I want to riff on that, the visibility thing and other … long longtime fans of CityTalk will know I’m a big fan of what I used to call “pinnies” … Gordon, do you know what a Pinnie is? See, a pinnie was a little thing you dropped over your shirt when you were in a high school or elementary school. You were this team when you dropped that penny on, remember?

And we had through COVID, varying periods of time, and here in Toronto, you see it when there’s some kind of construction disruption or the transit’s getting rerouted. And there’s  somebody with a pinnie on and you go over and you say, “I’m supposed to take this streetcar. What do I do?” I can’t get over how different you feel when you have someone you can go to.

Ariel Troster: Yeah. So this is what we’re working on. Can we make these folks visible?

Mary W. Rowe: Pinnies, the pinnie strategy.

Ariel Troster: Exactly. Pinnie or a vest or a button Can we make all of these outreach workers really visible so when you’re standing there, you could be like, oh, “the red t-shirt person will help me.” Can we do that and can that be a service to businesses and to the public? Can they be caretakers of the public realm? Can they help prevent some of the deterioration? Yeah, I love that. Give them really cool hats. Nothing militarized or police oriented. Just like ,these are neighborhood ambassadors and so what I’ve been working on and what we’re going to work on, with the Bloomberg Foundation, is a really strategic tactical public realm uplift strategy for Bank Street. But paired with those visible helpers, because people need to feel safe. They need to know who to talk to, who to go to. And I really think that combination is important because you can’t have economic development when social needs are uncared for. Like it’s just never going to work.

Mary W. Rowe: Right. So I want to go, we’re going to run out of time, you know, that always happens because I always say CityTalk isn’t the end of a conversation, it is the beginning. But I am interested in a thorny topic just while we’re, you know, got a little time. Making stuff. How do we get in, how do we, I want to, let’s talk about it in a normal way. How do we create opportunities to bring back some manufacturing? We have big, serious manufacturing around automotive and we have serious manufacturing associated with oil and gas and we have serious manufacturing around raw materials in the West. What do you think? Can we find a way to get ourselves back into making things? We will buy less from somewhere else and we will source here and buy here. Gordon, is there any hope for this? Can we make it in Canada?

Gordon Stevens: I sure hope there is, you know, and this goes well beyond my professional life. This has been a …

Mary W. Rowe: That’s fine, you’re a regular person. Apparently you spend $70,000 a year, according to Amy. You’re spending some dough.

Gordon Stevens: there’s 41 million of us. You know, I think I think we need to. The notion of offshoring – It was just feeding a consumer driven cheaper, faster… I was going to say better, but it’s not better …  And… you know, somehow we need to embrace it and

Mary W. Rowe: Well, let’s think about how. Let’s think about how. So go ahead, Shelley and then Amy. Let’s think about how.

Shelley Carroll: Well, you know what, Mary, we better see this shift. Certainly, we’ve watched you know community colleges and universities shift … the science of incubation all to tech. It all went in the direction of tech. That’s where all the education money was going. And in cities, the economic development strategy is like every major city in Canada says, “we’re the tech hub”. But now we’re in this weird space in a trade war where I think we need to turn back to – Ariel just mentioned it. How do we make a landlord give us this strip? You can’t fill it. We want to do some pop-ups. How do we get our economic development departments to say, “okay, is there a city building where we could set up an incubator? Is it food manufacturer? Does somebody make particularly delicious chocolate? Where we’re going to enable and facilitate that. We used to be very good at it because it was a great way to funnel newcomers into entrepreneurialism. And they’re now some of the best businesses in town. But we shifted away from it because it was all things … tech startup, tech startup. And I think we’re going to find that sort of strange territory for a while and quite frankly, the universities, we got that now. Go talk to DMZ or Vector Institute in Toronto if that’s what you want to do. But I think we got to get back to the thing that cities used to do very well, which is that incubate some of those interesting small things that become both storefronts and medium-sized businesses.

Mary W. Rowe: Cities do this around the world very well. So it’s not rocket science or maybe it is rocket science. But Amy, when you’re looking at these kinds of intermediary relationships that Shelley’s just describing, and I saw Ariel nodding her head there, you know, can we stitch a straight line from a main street storefront, what we used to call a garage … Anybody remember? You had a garage, you know stuff was happening in the garage and then somehow it goes from that small business to then to the next stage. And maybe, as Gordon, you suggested, maybe it’s through a partnership with the university or maybe … what are the other options? How do we strengthen the links

Shelley Carroll: This is not far off how Canada Goose started. In the corner of another fabric plant, this little thing started. What if we made coats over here? Because I found a source for down. Let’s help do that. And here we are.

Mary W. Rowe:

Yep. Yep. Amy and then Ariel.

Amy Robinson: I think that one of the things that … I mean, I think all this talk about Canadian product, Canadian product is great, but I think our manufacturing is not in a great state. And a lot of people are like, what’s the Canadian product that’s the substitute for this big brand that I buy? And we just don’t have that many of those things. So what I’ve been … my messaging has been like your production is local. So, you know, find in your region, try to find the local made laundry soap or whatever you’re looking for. So for some consumers, that’s just not as easy because they shop at maybe big national chains and things like that. And I do think there’s two things. I think that, yeah, we don’t have that support for businesses as they grow. So, you know, we have a lot of startups …

Mary W. Rowe: So what do we need, Amy? When you say we don’t have money, when you say support? When you say support, what do we need?

Amy Robinson: We need support for that mid, you know, the bigger … small to midsize businesses … Well, I think access to capital is one thing that businesses always complain about. I think inventory type businesses are very difficult to finance. I think that a lot of the local banks are, you know, just don’t want to do that. They just want to do bread and butter kind of like real estate transactions. So I think access to finance is one of them. I think red tape reduction. I mean, I wasn’t suggesting we eliminate taxes on businesses, but I do think we need to look at the tax structure and kind of using them as a cash cow, you know, particularly property taxes when they’re in that highest and best use is really killing existing businesses in urban areas where we are going to redevelop. And I think that they deal with a lot of red tape and somebody mentioned in the chat about Canadian productivity. If we could increase the productivity of our existing businesses, we’d be 30% stronger overnight. So I think that …

Mary W. Rowe: Obviously, I mean, obviously these are big topics we’re going to have to, this isn’t the last, this isn’t our last rodeo on this topic, just saying. In fact we’re going to do one next week specifically on how can we … what kinds of instrumentation do we need to invest in the economy to become as diverse and as resilient as I think you’re all kind of getting at. Do you want to finish?

Amy Robinson: Can I just make one more point about, just because it’s the local government audience that  …I think we have a lot of empty storefronts and that zoning is very restrictive. And so, you know, I just finished a project with Hastings Crossing BIA on how can we fill these empty storefronts? What do we need to do pop-ups. I think that, you know, why can’t, if it’s a restaurant space kit it out with all the things to eliminate smells and things like that, why couldn’t someone do small manufacturing and retail within that space. And so I think that, you know, looking at, you know, maybe it’s in a certain area of town, if you have trouble doing that across your city, but just to pilot some of these things, because I think our, you know, the zoning and licensing is really outdated. And if we can get some of those small manufacturers into those … because it’s affordable spaces, incubating them, they need affordable spaces.

And we have empty spaces.

Mary W. Rowe: Yeah, go ahead, Ariel. You were waiting to get in. Go for it.

Ariel Troster: Well, I mean, I just, there has been some conversation about, you know, we have a vacant unit tax for residential units that has been successful in funneling, you know, first of all, getting those units filled and putting millions of dollars into affordable housing.

Do we have to consider something like a vacant storefront tax for those landlords that are content to just sit on their buildings. You know, to have some sort of incentive to fill them I don’t know what the tool is yet. But we need something. And I know a lot, certainly in Ontario, a lot of landlords are renting out to either legal or illegal head shops and cannabis businesses. I have an entire block that’s flipped over from coffee shops into vape shops … Sure, we need some of those things, but we don’t need them everywhere and provincial legislation means that a lot of these windows are now blacked out to the public. So the whole block goes dark so

you know, I don’t know what the policy lever is to get those building owners to fill those spaces or to, you know … But if we had something like a vacant storefront tax, could that money then be funneled back into the BIAs to provide incubator startup money? I don’t know …

Mary W. Rowe: That’s interesting.

Ariel Troster: It’s an area I’m interested in exploring and Mary, you’re the one who said to me, there’s other cities that have just … They’ve just taken over public ownership of their main streets. I don’t think there’s an appetite for that in ottawa but I wish there was because …

Mary W. Rowe: I uttered it this very morning. What is the future of ground floor retail? How are we going to sustain? Because everybody knows what we’re talking about when you have a really vibrant Main Street. And it has to do with uniqueness and it’s sort of kind of funky and it has different kinds of products and it’s often small business, small floor plates and all that. We had this, anybody who’s on the chat from New York, they’ve been through this. They know exactly a lot of the challenges that we’re talking about. American cities are struggling with as well.

Ariel Troster: I was just going to say 50% of the people in our shelter system are newcomer asylum seekers, many of whom would love to open a business. There’s got to be a way to match this up you know …

Mary W. Rowe: Yes, yes, yes. Yes, yes. There’s got to be a way to take what we’ve got, work with the assets we’ve got, including people, and find ways to make the spaces work. So in the time left that we have, and thank you everybody in the chat, so many great ideas, so many great suggestions. Make sure that when you’re posting, like Sue Utech, you just posted to hosting panelists. Redo that comment, put it to everyone, so that everybody can see it. We’ll post the chat. So many great ideas. So in the last couple of minutes that are left. Over the next six weeks, let’s assume we’ve got this six week window. What would you be doubling down on, Gordon? What do you think we should be doubling down on to stimulate local economic development? Go for it. Gordon first.

Gordon Stevens: I think we need to use the opportunity, the political opportunity to get rid of some of the barriers that we’ve struggled under for decades, whether that’s … interprovincial trade is probably the number one thing. And aside from that, though, just listening to the last 55 minutes, we talked a lot about problems and solutions. I think we need to reframe it all as what’s the opportunity in all of this? Because just the simple movement from a negative to a positive, I think will start to unearth different ideas.

Mary W. Rowe: Never waste a crisis. Amy. Next six weeks.

Amy Robinson: We’re going to continue to collaborate. We’re trying to make our Buy Local materials available to, you know, we’ve always been pretty open source about it, but we’re trying to, you know, make it a little bit more Canadianized to leverage the opportunity, working with our partners across the province. We always were going to plan on doing like a B2B focus, but … so I do think like, you know, when you support that business, you want them to have a local supply chain so that you’re having the biggest impact with your dollar. And then I think, you know, for us, it’s the opportunity to follow up on things like the results of our cost of doing business. We had some recommendations for the local and provincial governments on various things. You know, to pressure for some of those things because you know a lot of businesses are going to need … their costs were already high, they were already struggling and now having to retool or, you know, change their supply chain or, you know, it’s going to take some time. And so maybe employer health tax breaks and things like that could help from the provincial government. And then I think we’re going to try to, again, what Gordon said, leverage the opportunity. The City of Vancouver is saying they’re interested in using their own procurement to support Canadian businesses and addressing that finally. And, you know, the province and the housing opportunity, you know, I think looking at … They’ve been looking at affordable housing and really pushing for that. And so trying to get affordable commercial as part of that conversation.

Mary W. Rowe: Yeah, I mean, it’s a whole bunch of things all at once, no silver bullet. Now, this is really chancy because we’re out of time. I need brief comments from two municipal councillors. Here’s your test. Shelley first and then Ariel. Last comments about what the focus needs to be over the next six weeks, really fast.

Shelley Carroll: Well, you know, you can just look it up – Sidewalks to Skylines because one of the things in there is strong main streets. And right now for us, the buy local, not buy Canadian, buy local. We just want to get you on that avenue and we want the store to still be in business when you get there. And so the actions that we have in there that were going to be spread out over 10 years, they’re now going to happen right away. Including resiliency funds.

Mary W. Rowe: Fast, good things fast. Yeah, yeah, do things fast. Last word to you, Ariel.

Ariel Troster: While we’re in the middle of a provincial election here in Ontario, we have a federal one coming up soon. We need a better, I say my not so secret agenda is to radicalize people about municipal finance reform. We need a better funding arrangement for cities.

We need more dollars to go directly into cities. We need the federal and provincial government to pay their fair share when it comes to things like housing and homelessness so we can focus on things like economic development. So yeah, just, I encourage people to ask those questions at the doors.

Mary W. Rowe: Yeah, and let’s push for local imaginative leadership.

Shelley Carroll: Ariel, I feel like I’ve got back up in Ottawa.

Ariel Troster: Oh, yeah. Anytime. Anytime …

Mary W. Rowe: Listen, we’re all about connective tissue. So listen, alignment, consumers are the boss. You’re all consumers on this call. Collaboration, making sure we’re using space imaginatively. Are we looking at different kinds of tax tools? Maybe, who knows? The role of intermediaries of which both Amy and Gordon are central to that. The quality of life and all the different investments that Ariel just made the pitch, we need different kinds of financing arrangements to be able to afford. And finally, this notion of patience, Shelley, that you just said, we need new rules, we need new approaches, but it’s not going to happen overnight, but we’re not going to wait. So on that happy note, thank you for joining us to CityTalk. Gordon, great to have you. Nice to see you again, Amy. Both councillors, thank you for stepping away from the council Sturm and Drang and to be part of CityTalk with us. And thanks everybody on the chat. A really great audience of people on the chat. Thanks, everybody.