Leading the Way: Orienting Investments Around Place

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 This is the last session. It’s kind of the chance to kind of wrap things up. I chose the four of you because I knew that you would be good distillers, so to speak, about what you’ve been hearing. And I guess, you know, you can see the way we frame the session, it’s basically can we direct investment to place and how do we do that? Can we do place-specific things? So we’ve kind of got the Western contingent over here and we’ve got Quebec and we’ve got me. And I’m going to start with the two gentlemen to my left, both of whom come from the same jurisdiction and used to be comrades in arms and are now still, I suppose, in different ways. Andre, as I said, you were on the very first session on mental health. So we’ve had a long eight hours together. How do we move this forward to get local particularity and local priorities to be the way we build, as Zita said, from the ground up? You start and then I’ll come from you.

Andre Corbould Well, I think it’s grassroots. It’s got to be built from the ground up. The idea has got to be … It’s got to be, you know, from the locals. Edmonton and Calgary are very different. Yet, you know, we’re all Albertans and I prefer Edmonton. We have a better hockey team …

Mary W. Rowe I knew there was a moment before the sparks would start.

Andre Corbould But it really is the grassroots, right, and how people are connecting on different things. What I found fascinating about today was not only the the panels themselves, but how, you know, one panel connected with another. So I very much was thinking about mental health. And I think it was two panels ago the discussion about, you know, quality of life because that contributes to mental health. The last panel – places contribute to mental health. But to your question, I think the community, every community in Canada has got a different vibe. And I think that’s one of the strengths of the communities. And so the city has to be built in the image of the culture of those people. And we saw lots of examples of that today through the different panels.

Mary W. Rowe You know, one of the things that I think about when people ask me, what do you do? And I try to describe my job and I always remember, and I said this to Sarah, I don’t know if Sarah still with us, but, you know, Canada is a vast geography with a relatively small population. And you heard repeatedly today horizontal stickiness, people talking about enabling conditions. Don, you’ve done some thinking about this, like we have … We’ve gone almost all day, I think, Alex, without mentioning the C-word. No, but you’re waiting, aren’t you? But, Don, tell me, I mean, you’ve been an elected and he was your principal employee … just for people’s benefit, Don was the mayor of Edmonton and Andre was his city manager. You’ve had to find some … you’ve had some thinking about workarounds, constitutional workarounds. How do we make it work? How do we make federalism work at the local level? How’s that for a big question?

Don Iveson I don’t think we can. I hate this narrative that the country’s broken, but it’s not working very well when it comes to building places that are sustainable, safe, inclusive, livable, prosperous and competitive. And people would put those things in different orders. But I think we all want those things. And I think none of our places are really thriving on enough of those fronts to be considered successes. And that’s why there’s this felt sense that the country is not doing well, which is not a collective abstract, you know, a sense of the country’s prospects, so we can attempt to measure that different ways. But that’s felt at the community level. It’s felt on main streets that are either physically in bad repair and or have vulnerable people residing in them now and the disorder around that. And so all of those things feel out of kilter. And I think the solutions need to necessarily come, you know, from the collective to the extent that the fiscal power and the levers to actually make change are mostly in the hands of the senior orders of government. But most of those problems manifest at the local and regional level. But I’ll make the pitch and you don’t have to change the constitution to do this, though I think we’re overdue for a constitutional crisis, personally, that makes me a minority view. But I really loved what Zita Cobb said, always fanning on Zita, she said management of place does not align with our management institutions. And where I think that’s really true is at the regional scale because we can’t have even province by province bilateral relationships with hundreds of municipalities. There are some organizing units that make sense to scale our thinking around housing issues, around infrastructure issues, around mobility issues, around climate adaptation issues around energy systems, around labor markets, around productivity. And those are the metropolitan units. And so when we think about the country and the map of the country as provinces, each one of those provinces is supposed to be a regional government. Constitutionally, that’s how it’s set up. Some of them kind of behave that way, and some of them recognize that one of their duties is to then create subregional units of administration like regional districts or metropolitan authorities, so that you’re not dealing with 13 or in Toronto’s case, 80+ municipalities. I think GTA’s got dozens and dozens, hundreds, more than 100 different local agencies. And nobody’s thinking about the traffic jam around Pearson in a strategic way. Three municipalities, the province of Ontario, Ministry of Highways or whatever, and the feds and the airport authority. And that’s where there’s no policy coherence. Right? And so I think that’s best … A bunch of those questions are best addressed at the metropolitan level. But it feels like outside of B.C. and a few other places where there are robust metropolitan institutions, there’s just crickets.

Mary W. Rowe But you wrote a big piece with Gabe, I don’t think Gabe … Gabe couldn’t be with us, but sort of establishing the metropolitan mindset.

Don Iveson And that’s an ode to the places where this is working. Some examples from around the world, you can find it at Metromindset.ca … But we looked at what they did in Denver around integrated land use and transportation. And the other question is sort of lurking, what you were saying is … is the solution going to come from local government institutions? It can with the right leadership, but it has to be in partnership with a variety of of different civil society actors, including business. And Denver is a great example where the political cover to raise the sales tax to build their light rail line came from the business community in partnership with the mayors of the Denver metro region. It helped the John Hickenlooper was sort of a great uniter in that case. But it was many hands making that intergenerational fiscal and policy coherence decision across dozens of different municipalities that delivered it. So we looked at case studies like that. So we started to talk about metropolitan planning organizations, well, what does it take to actually make one of those thing? You have to dig into something like Denver and see that even with limited enabling authority, you can exceed the constitutional constraints or the statutory constraints if you have enough multistakeholder buy in. And I think that’s the kind of thing that we need to be building right now, inner city regions, in order to rise to the challenges that we’re facing and take back some leadership and authority over this narrative that everything’s broken and nobody in this room really knows, you know, what would be needed to fix it? Because we do, we know what the solutions are, we have to militate a bunch of money, hundreds of billions of dollars to actually fix this stuff.

Mary W. Rowe And have it somehow driven, have it driven locally. I mean, Monique, I don’t know if Monique is still with us, but she was describing the history that Cameron, our board chair, was involved with around the Quartier des Spectacle … So it can be around almost any issue that you create these kinds of collaborations, which is what you were calling for, for the mental health session. It doesn’t have to be just about public space or it doesn’t have to be about governance. Alex, you might want to comment on this, I’ll come to you and then Fanny, this kind of collaborative architecture that isn’t attached to a regional government. Possible?

Don Iveson Well, there’s a difference between regional governments, which is a set of institutions and regional governance, which is how a variety of actors in a shared place, shared space, agree to work together. And a lot of that can be voluntary. It’s going to go a lot further if a province creates … Sets the table, puts resources there, creates enabling authorities, changes the incentive structure from the zero sum scarcity mindset that most metropolitan regions are stuck with right now where it’s competition … It’s hungry, hungry hippos.

Mary W. Rowe Do you think that the intensity of the problem I mean, I am conscious when I look at the room and I saw the registration list and it’s something that I am concerned about. Hands up if you work for a provincial government.

Andre Corbould They know they’re not welcome here.

Mary W. Rowe C’est un probleme. Oui? And I think that that’s partly, I think we need to think about strategically because you’re talking about reallocating power and resources. And we’ve been able to forge a very interesting conversation between the Government of Canada, local governments, local communities. But the big bad province … So I’m going to go to you, Fanny, and then to Alex.

Fanny Tremblay-Racicot I think talking about like regional governance and investments in metropolitan areas for transit, I think it’s… We’re facing a war right now, especially in Montreal, the outer fourth ring, third ring suburbs in the city of Montreal. I want out of metropolitan institutions from IRTM, which is the transit authority in Montreal, as well as the CMM, which is the Land Use Planning Authority. They’re not satisfied with the way the investment works and it doesn’t work for them.

Mary W. Rowe Who wants out?

Fanny Tremblay-Racicot Suburban mayors.

Mary W. Rowe Suburban mayors.

Fanny Tremblay-Racicot Like third, fourth ring suburbs if they want to play their regional game they have to know what’s in it for them, you know, so they think it’s not working. So they want out. So there’s no also … there’s no like transit infrastructure, planning culture in Quebec. So that’s the reason why it’s very politically driven. So I think it’s one reason, like you can explain the fact that the suburbs are out of the game, you know, but if you see like in here, in the GTA region, you have Metrolinx, you don’t have like a metropolitan infrastructure to fund transit. But the provincial government has decided to fund its own because they want to keep control over the investments. And I think you need to build capacity for transit infrastructure planning. You have problems with the Eglington in the region and Toronto. In Quebec, we have problems with Le Rim … It’s complicated. The LRT in Quebec City, it’s complicated. Now we’re trying to move to collaborative modes of transport infrastructure planning and construction is different from public private partnerships. When you do collaborative – the risks are shared between the contractor and the public authority. It’s the same things that’s going to be done with the high speed rail transit, and they’re supposed to be announcing the consortium anytime soon. You need to think, well, okay, what’s the best way to plan with and what’s the right price for the government, when you negotiate those agreements? So you need like good lawyers and good studies so that the price is right. And then how do you build that with communities? Because usually it’s the government, the firm and then the people. You’re supposed to build infrastructure for the people, for the people who’s going to ride it and it’s going to be … it’s going to have a large impact on real estate development as well. So if you don’t open up the conversation around like equitable transit oriented development, and if you don’t keep an eye on it, it’s going to built market rate and people are going to be excluded from those … the access to this infrastructure.

Mary W. Rowe I mean, the difficulty is that we’re perpetuating when we try to do large things, it’s become a kind of joke how difficult it is to build these projects, you know, and I worry about that. Are we just increasing people’s cynicism, Alex? Are people cynical in B.C.?

Alexandra Flynn There’s some … I mean … first of all, I just want to say, I’m so shocked that you mentioned the C word. Last year, Mary, as we were like going onto the stage, Mary whispered, “we’re not talking about the Constitution”. It was like the one verboten thing to raise. You know, I agree with Don about many things, but also about this, that we can address a lot of the challenges that we have without amending the Constitution or reinventing what governments are doing. But what the constitutional talks, I think are a proxy for are a question about how are we going to do this. You know, it’s almost like the Spider-Man meme where we have all three governments that are pointing fingers to each other [Mary – it’s totally that]. And they do that for a good reason, right? We have the federal government that has all the money, the provincial governments that have the power and the cities that have all the problems. And we haven’t figured out the infrastructure, how that’s going to work, other than a few discrete examples. I will say, though, you know, this is an amazing group of people. You know, this whole day I’ve had such wonderful conversations. You are all doing such interesting work. You’re trying to tackle this problem. You’re here to do it. You know, I think we also should be focused on the positive and things that are going well and asking ourselves how we can replicate those examples across the country as well. So in B.C. it is a bit of the promised land at the moment in terms of a government who’s saying, “okay, we’re going to tackle housing” and maybe, I’m sure there’s lots of people who don’t agree with every aspect of it, and none of us will agree on every aspect of it. But that kind of accountability, a word we haven’t heard enough of today, accountability, where is the problem landing? The Constitution gives us that accountability in that antiquated text …

Mary W. Rowe But, but … I mean, harkening to the Constitution hasn’t helped us build housing. Most of us would say … we’re kind of screwed.

Alexandra Flynn Well, housing isn’t in the Constitution?

Mary W. Rowe Well, well, so therefore, why should I pay any attention to the Constitution?

Alexandra Flynn Because if it was in the Constitution, maybe we’d be talking differently.

Mary W. Rowe But if Janice Stein were sitting here, she’d say, “Get real, Alex. It’s not going to happen”, wouldn’t she? Wouldn’t she say that? I’m trying to channel her. She’d say, “Get real”. And she would say, “Don’t waste your time”. Like, I think that’s the dilemma we’re in. We heard urgency on almost every session. There is urgency here. So, you want to advocate for a perfect solution and get some kind of constitutional process that’s going to you know, it’s going to outlive me. Or can we actually get down to actually solving? I mean, I think a lot of regular folk, there’s not a single regular folk in here, but all our friends are saying get on with it. They do not care who’s responsible. They just want it fixed.

Alexandra Flynn I agree. I mean, I don’t think we should be amending the Constitution, but I do think we need some accountability.

Mary W. Rowe And how do we get that? How can we get accountability? We still have a housing crisis, we’ve been talking about it for at least – I’ve been in this job for five years, since I arrived, and prior to that we’ve had a mental health challenge and I had Nenshi when he was mayor, Don during your time, he was saying we had a mental health challenge. What is preventing us from actually moving forward and solving some of this?

Andre Corbould Well, I would start by focus, I think.

Mary W. Rowe Yes. And we heard that this week. Today. Priorities.

Andre Corbould Too many things. Yeah. Too many people, Too many organizations. Too many teams trying to rise to the top of the list. And we heard that, you know, a couple of times today. What’s in the top of the list? We can’t be having things on the top of the list. We need to integrate them all and then we need to do 5 or 10 things. If everybody agrees that they should be in that category and then get on with it. [Mary: You really want to do 10?] But when you’re asked to do 680 things and they’re all different all the time, that becomes …

Mary W. Rowe I mean, you and I talked about this through the pandemic, that there was a level of expectation that was in place … sorry that we have our backs to you guys. Sorry about that … that there was a level of expectation placed on municipal councils during the pandemic that was unbelievable. Just more expectation, more stuff. And I wonder how … It’s not just us disciplining ourselves. Can we challenge and discipline the public will to focus? Is that possible?

Andre Corbould Yes.

Andre Corbould Yeah, I believe it is. .

Mary W. Rowe I mean, they seem to be all focused on housing.

Andre Corbould And I think a lot of the public, they want to see more of that instead of …

Mary W. Rowe More focus.

Andre Corbould Doing all the other things.

Alexandra Flynn We know that housing is the priority. It’s at the top of the list in every election … and governments know it’s at the top of the list. It comes up in for every government, at least if you look at the news, every government is talking about it every day. So we’ve made our list. And I agree, the job now is to execute it. So how do we do it? I think regional approaches are one method. We’ve used them in transit, as was mentioned, to a large extent but what’s you know, what’s the alternative? What’s the alternative? What’s the promise there? We have the federal government who’s investing in housing. There are ways to tie obligations through the agreements that are set – stronger obligations than exist now. And a metropolitan region is one interesting vehicle to do that.

Mary W. Rowe Well, and just to say that during Deputy Gillis’s tenure, they initiated an integrated regional planning ambition of which housing and transit have become the first pillars. But could we … It won’t work? It’s never going to work?

Fanny Tremblay-Racicot No, no, no, no. I was at the conference in Paris last summer, at ESOP is the school of planners. And there was Patrick Le Galès … I don’t know if you know of him. He’s a prominent author in Europe around policy instruments. And he was saying like, stop planning and start implementing. I’ve seen such great plans, like the greatest regional integrated transportation. You know, you were talking earlier about the best like plan for investing in culture, but then stop planning, just start implementing. We have great plans, but nothing is… It’s not being done. It’s just the conformity requirement. And then yeah, and too, I think municipalities need to share expertise on implementation. We have new regulations, new options in Quebec. We have a lot of leverage around property tax. We have a general taxation regulatory charge powers. Some municipalities are trying to implement new regulation, new bylaws, and there’s a lot of experimentation, but we need to share the expertise. And I think that’s where the focus should be on on sharing innovation and expertise.

Mary W. Rowe Do you know this expression better to ask for forgiveness than permission? Right. I was raised with that. You can see why. You know, is that … do we … Because people have been talking all day about risk. How do we de-risk? And I feel like we have, as somebody on one of the previous sessions said, “look, there’s all sorts of good things happening”. And we know that on mental health, for instance, Andre, we’ve got communities, many of you are in them where people are doing something. They found a workaround. They’re starting to work across sectors. They’re sick and tired of waiting. They’ve gone ahead. Can we get to that place where we’re more permissive, where we take more risks, where we try some things … you had said last night we should go back to community councils, right? You can start at a lower, smaller scale.

Fanny Tremblay-Racicot Yeah. Local neighborhood councils that are elected every every four years. And then they have an autonomous budget of $100,000. And it’s not very much. It’s not very much. But they have to adopt a local neighborhood plan and identify projects within their neighborhood, and they can use that money to invest in like the Central Cities project. So direct investments, I think it would be a good way also to bring the citizens back to like build the civic culture because I think with the pandemic we’ve lost it in some parts. So that would be one way. But there’s other there are other ways certainly. And I think with a circular economy as well, like people are looking into energy loops and circular economy.

Mary W. Rowe Local district, district energy, all that.

Fanny Tremblay-Racicot Exactly. And we have like roadmaps at the municipality and regional levels, but there’s no implementation. And I think we need to share the tools how to implement those plans done.

Don Iveson So I think, senior orders of government can do things that either enable local jurisdictions or regions to take risk or make it harder for them to take risk. And I think to to this federal government’s credit, they have tried to do a lot of things, whether it’s through the infrastructure bank or different grant programs to try to nudge, but also give cover to municipalities to try different things around everything from district energy to fleet electrification in transit. And so that makes it easier to reach a little bit further, Right? And when the public transit infrastructure fund says, hey, we want to see now as an informed investor, as the federal government, that billions of dollars worth of transit infrastructure we’re going to put in your region that the BRT goes to the LRT goes to the subway rather than these things never line up, which is traditionally how it was done. I mean I think that’s a reasonable question to ask. And when you fund the studies and make it easy to sort of have it all add up, then you’re going to get that coherence between land use and infrastructure expenditure. And then you can start to ask questions about like, okay, what, what are you doing for land use as they are through the Housing Accelerator Fund. So some people will see that as an affront or an intrusion into jurisdiction or meddling and it gets labeled lots of things, but at least you have interested investment trying to manage those risks on behalf of the local government. But when the project goes badly, you still wear it as the mayor. If the transit lines late or the electric busses don’t work out, then you wear that. But at least you got a senior order of government trying to share some risk with you and trying to make something different and better happen. Is there a province in this country that is doing that for its municipalities right now? Consistently, coherently, constructively? I mean, I think that’s the problem. And on the flip side, if we had … and this is the advantage of federalism, at least in the American construct, is policy competition, you know, between the laboratories of innovation in the 50 different states … well we only have 13 of them.

Mary W. Rowe Yeah, it’s smaller.

Don Iveson but I think the … I think Mr. Ebee (correct spelling?) gets this on a on a good day. So I’ll give him credit for that. I will reserve comment about the government of Alberta, but you can infer from my tone of voice what I think of their approach to working with municipalities and creating an incentive framework for them to take leadership and take risk and take ownership and show bold initiative. But I don’t think so … Let me just say this, that the provinces who create that non-zero-sum, a permissive enabling de-risking environment for their cities and their regions and their counties and rural areas and indigenous partners are going to outperform the ones that don’t. That’s the race I would like to see. I don’t think there’s a Canadian … there’s a Canadian answer to some of this, but there’s a Quebec answer is going to be very different than a B.C. answer, very different than a Nova Scotia answer. We need to figure out how to unleash that as friendly competition and learn from each other, because right now I don’t see a lot of that support, that air cover coming in from premiers to their mayors and councilors and, you know, chambers of commerce and development communities. I mean, it’s just picking on … It’s blame-based politics right now until we get past that, I don’t see a permission environment for mayors to take the kind of leadership that was even available to us, you know, 5 or 10 years ago.

Mary W. Rowe Yeah, it just seems to be part of our DNA at the moment to blame. You were in a provincial government Andre, you served as a provincial bureaucrat. What path do you see?

Andre Corbould Well, I have a slightly different view than Don does, I think and, you know, I don’t think it’s as broken as that. And I do think the province on the right thing is pitching in. They pitched in on, you know, quite a few things I would say in my experience, both when I was at the province and when I was at the city. Not perfect for sure. And I would absolutely agree with Don about ….

Don Iveson It was an abusive relationship Andre, in my experience anyway.

Andre Corbould Yeah, I have a different perspective, but for sure I understand that, but …

Mary W. Rowe Here’s the interesting question for me, I guess – I was sitting in this the chair that I occupied. Running a national charity with a bunch of colleagues in civil society. Part of us just wants to de-partizanship community and city building. We’re kind of tired of politicians booting this priority and making housing the latest thing or making transit the latest thing. We’re all a bit tired of this. We have to be serving people and places and stop allowing this to be politicized. So can we not, as a bunch of, I mean, there might be a few electeds in the room. Sorry if you’re feeling really lonely. We’ll buy you a drink. But, you know, it’s got to be people like us who are in the chairs for a long time. The deputy is leaving public service, having been there for what, how long? 30 years. I think. Like, that’s what we are the ones that actually should be leading forward and helping our political masters do the right thing. Eileen de Villa said this morning, she said, I don’t know if she’s still here, she said that she’s been in medical practice and she said, “When you’re a doctor, you have to remind yourself that you’re in the business of treating the patient where they are”. And she said, “So what we need to remind ourselves is that maybe the patient is the policymaker”. So what do we need to do, Andre, to be able to advance this and survive the political machinations? You were in the public service for years.

Andre Corbould Well, what do we … I mean, first of all, I think we do need to start just getting on with getting things done and not do so much planning that you’re just planning …

Mary W. Rowe Back to what Fanny was saying …

Andre Corbould Get shit done

Mary W. Rowe Get shit done

Andre Corbould Heard it from you last year.

Mary W. Rowe So, yes, I’m afraid so …

Andre Corbould I think you’re right. We have to de … maybe not depoliticized, but depolarize – And one of the things that was a little successful and that recently is our language. So both at the province and the city level, we started sort of really highly – what is the polarizing language that gets people incensed and, you know, starts off these abusive relationships and it really can be language. So I think we need to think about our language, how we speak, how we relate to different orders of government. And as a public servant, as a sort of a DMCEO, I would say my experiences with all the governments I work for is that I think some politicians are getting a little too far into the weeds on things that have traditionally been, you know, you know, let administration get on with it. And so I found that different orders of government sort of turning around in circles because of the different direction and sometimes micromanagement, I was getting. And that makes it hard for the employees to get on with things, especially if the priorities are changing. So … But it gets back to the focus concept. It gets back to let’s start building and get things done and not sort of renegotiate everything.

Mary W. Rowe My colleague to the left is tapping her mic, which makes me think you want to say something? I just need to tell the tech guys that, you know, I’m reading Slido, I cannot believe you’re not asking a single question. There’s 400 of you. Who’s turned it off?

Mary W. Rowe Yes. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do to change that, if I’ve broken the system, then whoopie for me. If some technical wiz can come in to open the system, Jeremy, it’s your turn to solve this. Because … oh, it’s open now. Somebody did something. Okay, pour your questions in and we’ve got ten minutes. We’ll put them to you. Fanny, have a go. I’m going to have Fanny first and then Don.

Fanny Tremblay-Racicot Sure, yeah, quickly. Where I’ve seen that is in Chicago when the they did a merger of the MPO and the planning organization, the Land Use Planning organization, it was a civic organization comprised of business individuals who said it’s the interest of both the left wing and the right wing to have a tool to integrate land use and transportation. The provincial officials need to understand that the interest of the region is the interest of the province, if the cities are doing well, the province is doing well, and it’s the same for the suburbs. So I think it’s a trans-partisan issue.

Don Iveson Two things real quick. I realize I contributed to polarization there, but I hope you you’ll take it with a trauma informed grain of salt. It was really bad during the during the pandemic. I have the receipts. But the other thing I will say is that … And I totally get this bias to urgency on “we just have to get building. We just have to get building”. But I want to preview a really good paper that’s going to come from the Canadian Climate Institute in the new year on land use and climate resilience. And if we just build, build, build because we need to do the urgent thing and we put those houses where they’re currently planned, based on planning that we’ve done, rightly or wrongly, over many times over the last 50 years, the amount of them we’re going to put in floodplains that are already floodplains that we don’t talk about, much less things that will become floodplains due to changing weather and the amount that we’re going to put in the wildland urban interface or in proximity to fire risk or heat risk. If we don’t start thinking about those things that are changing about us, we’re going to make our cities even more maladaptive. So notwithstanding that, you know, if there was a theme today that we do need to all feel urgency, it’s around housing. The instinct to just get ‘er done …

Mary W. Rowe Yeah, I hear you …

Don Iveson Is going to make several problems worse. If we don’t also deal with income inequality, we can build all the houses that we want. People won’t be able to afford them who need them the most. And if we don’t make them climate adapted, we’re going to be losing those houses to the natural disasters that we can reasonably foresee in the modeling. So we do have to make not to a navel gazing degree, but we do have to make some smart decisions about where we go next with this most precious commodity of shelter for people and the habitat and the places that we build, because we could make some really shortsighted and maladaptive decisions in the reflex.

Mary W. Rowe Well, and we heard it here. We heard it … You heard it here. People concerned about complete communities, other parts of infrastructure. So it’s got to be all of it. The dilemma is we make it so complicated, we kind of get helpless. We get immobilized. Okay, Alex …

Alexandra Flynn That’s exactly what I was going to raise. So we’re sharing a brain. It’s amazing. Yeah. I mean, it’s such a monumental issue. Depending on the source that you’re reading, we need 3.5 million homes or maybe 10 million homes. We have you know, we have a massive crisis in terms of how many people are housed. But we also have many local communities that are changing and introducing new models like community land trusts. We have investment in co-ops. We have tenancy changes that are taking place. A lot of these ideas are coming from the grassroots and then getting realized by governments who are endorsing them into law. And so I think the more that we can come together and advance these local ideas and not simmer in agony and inaction, we will be better off. I think there does need to be a change in the way we’re asking the questions of how we’re going to tackle this from, you know, we have to tackle it to ask how are we tackling it and how is that working? And let’s make sure that there’s just this fine line between acknowledging urgency and then moving into a narrative of complaint and distemper where you just complain about everything. Did I say get it done? So I was going to say, this year I’ll say that we just bitch about everything. We’ve just got to move to a more empowered place as lots of people take action. There’s a lot of action taking place. I mean, you know, we have a way to measure housing precarity. We have lots of ways to measure housing precarity. The housing assessment resource tools that was created at UBC, which I’m part of, we know across every municipality what housing need is, based on five different quintiles of income. We have housing start data. We have, you know, information by community on what’s taking place. We don’t have enough data. I agree with the panel that spoke earlier that we should have better data available, but we have a lot of information. What we’re less focused on, I think, is where is it happening, how is it happening? How is Burnaby doing this? Why is Burnaby doing this?

Mary W. Rowe How do we highlight the things that are working?

Alexandra Flynn You know, how is it that we have rent banks that are being created or how is it that evictions, modifications are being made? Let’s look at how that’s being done. And as Fanny said, turn to action to realize it more broadly.

Mary W. Rowe You know, there were a whole series of things that were raised. I’m just going to list them off and I’m going to make you sit here while I do a quick summary, which is to … here are the things that I gleaned from the last eight hours. You know, we’ve got to say yes quicker. We’ve got to recognize that investment in infrastructure is not inflationary. There were so many good soundbites. Just so you know, we post all these sessions. I don’t know how long it’ll take us, but they’ll all get posted. And there have been people patiently watching online for hours in the comfort of their own home or their office. Thank you. Thank you, Canada, for joining us here in Ottawa. And as I said, we’ll post some highlights. Lots of you’ve been, I know, taking notes and we always appreciate what people say about that. There was a comment early, early on, I think it was in Andrea’s panel. If don’t have hope build a plan, you’re saying, enough planning let’s get some action. Right? And a whole, I think a consensus we now have about small g – governance. It’s hard that consonant we’re going to work collaboratively in a sort of ad hoc way. Am I right? It’s got to be more than that.

Don Iveson It needs some structure like.

Mary W. Rowe Can’t just be over the back fence.

Don Iveson Well, I think there’s some neat examples out there. I was just in Victoria the other day with Gabe from the School of Cities at the South Island Prosperity Partnership, which is First Nations, business, universities, NGOs and municipalities.

Mary W. Rowe It’s a great model.

Don Iveson And they’re all trying to figure out what is going to support economic development, how do they solve some of their infrastructure issues, how do they get essential workers in there? And it’s not stuck to a political cycle and it’s not stuck in the single frame of one kind of institution. So kind of everybody puts their stuff aside and with great reverence and respect and inclusion for traditional indigenous ways of knowing and doing on those lands. And so, I mean, there will be folks who would look at a room that large with that many tables and say, “oh my God, you’re never going to get coherence out of this”. But last year they had a session, they got to three priorities and then they went and they actioned them. But that’s participatory democracy.

Mary W. Rowe And there are other models …

Don Iveson And so it’s a great example of place based, but at the altitude of the region that shares all these same issues across 13 municipal jurisdictions, one regional district and several First Nations. And they just all got together and said, “roll up our sleeves, so what do we have to do”. And so you don’t need the province to force you to do that. Frankly, initially, it’s almost better if it rises up out of a genuine desire to put aside difference and look for something. So it can be done.

Mary W. Rowe Have we got other examples, Fanny? give us one hopeful example.

Fanny Tremblay-Racicot One hopeful example. I just was working with Mascouche … We did the strategic planning for their finances. So strategic financial planning, using all the tools that Quebec have, like we studied like 25 to 30 financial fiscal measures that the city could implement over the next five years. And we used … we analyzed them through four lens like equity, environmental efficiency, social acceptation of it and another one, efficiency. And then… So we could come up with ways that the municipalities could become resilient financially based on that process. So that’s a good example. So municipalities can use the financial tools that they already have to be become more resilient.

Mary W. Rowe Yeah. Alex?

Alexandra Flynn So I think we have a lot of different tools in the tool kit and they’re going to look differently across the, across the country and based on local communities. In the community that I come from, which is Vancouver, First Nations led development is exploding. So in the city of Vancouver’s Housing Target report, they didn’t quite meet the targets, but First Nations are building 15% of the new housing stock in this coming five years. This is reserve land. It’s off-reserve land. It’s big. It’s small. This is land that otherwise probably would not have been used for development. And so, you know, it’s a way to … it hits all sorts of different buttons, but, you know, perhaps something replicable across the country as well.

Mary W. Rowe Yeah. And there are indigenous communities and development companies, corporations across the country doing the same kind of planning and thinking. And Andre got an example of something interesting.

Andre Corbould Well, I think what I should have explained at the beginning, one of the reasons I’m on this panel is the CEO of EMRB could not come because last week there was a decision to [just spell out EMRB] … Edmonton Metro Regional Board and same in Calgary. And last week they were defunded and deregulated by the province or at least that was announced. So … but the positive news is I don’t think they’re going to fall apart. I really don’t …

Mary W. Rowe In spite of it.

Andre Corbould I think the mayors all got together and said, no, we like a lot of things that are happening. And the reason I think it was deregulated was for similar to your … what you said about some of the more rural people not wanting to be in. So it was deregulated, but I don’t even think all of them will leave. So there’s some hope. I think we should, you know, we’ll have to watch that in Alberta anyways to see if it stays together. But there’s a lot of amazing regional planning that was done that’s ready to build now. So let’s not throw it all out. We have an integrated transportation plan. Let’s start building it because that planning has been done and let’s not throw it out. So I think it’s just a place to look to because I think, you know, it was regulated, was mandated at first. That’s how it started for sure. And I think that was the right thing to do at the time. But I don’t think it’ll fall apart just because it has been deregulated now …

Mary W. Rowe It’s interesting, isn’t it? It takes a lot. Go ahead Don.

Don Iveson Be still my beating heart. The metro mindset is alive and well isn’t it?

Mary W. Rowe Nobody’s killed it yet. You know, this notion of how we prioritize people in place, in tandem, I guess that’s part of the theme. You know, what a fabulous day we’ve had. If you .. You know, we could have put … any of you could have been up here on this stage at some point. And what’s fantastic is that we’ve got several hundred people across the country who are engaged in these conversations, engaged in this real work, trying to learn faster, fail faster, fail better, whatever that adage is … many, many, many, many, many, many, many points of light … who are at work on this and how appreciative we are that we can gather like this. So would you just join me in thanking Andre and Don and Alex and Fanny for joining us in the last session? We always say at CityTalk, some of you will know CityTalk. We’ve produced them since the pandemic. We’ve done 272 of them. I can’t quite believe it. And we always say at CityTalk that when we’re at the end, it’s not the end of the conversation. It’s just the beginning. So that city building and community building is a perpetual thing and you all do it without even thinking about it. You do it all the time. And what you’re ultimately doing is this. Somebody mentioned I think, Jeb Brugmann spoke about self-organization on the panel. And that’s what I feel my world is, is enabling self-organization. That’s what we all do. Self-organization is a thing that happens in nature and it happens in humans. We want to meet our needs and have our aspirations met and cities and communities, the denser they are, the more connected they are. They can make this kind of self-organization happen. There is another slide. There’s only three patience … This summer. Wasn’t this remarkable? We had a moment where almost all of the country saw something. And I was struck by it. I watched with my FaceBook … I couldn’t, I was in Toronto, we couldn’t see anything there. So sad. But the rest of the country could and we somehow all looked up and saw this extraordinary phenomenon … That’s from all over the country, as you can see. And … for Zita Cobb, one of those is the Fogo Island Inn I think. And it just reminded me of this connectivity that we have with one another, that we need to be reminded of. And in this case, nature. Next slide … So some of you know. I have a dog. I’m a woman of a certain age. And you know, what do we talk about? Our dogs. And I have Bella. She’s the featured dog there. And she, every day, gets picked up during the week by something called the Adventure Dog Club. And the Adventure Dog Club, whose one woman, picks up 7 or 8 dogs, three times a day, and takes them down to Cherry Beach in Toronto, which is on the lake. And she has an hour of running with her pack. And I am always reminded, next slide, that we all need our own adventure club. That’s what we are. That’s who all of us is … we’re part of an adventure club about making better places for each other, for people and for place. And my mother died 25 years ago. But I found, you know how you do … I found a note in her handwriting. And I thought she invented this phrase. I put it up on my fridge. It’s been there for … she’s been dead a long time. It’s been up on my fridge for a few years. I’ve thought she invented it, but here it is. “Pessimism of the intellect …” Do you know it? Did you know my mother? “Pessimism of the intellect. Optimism of the will”. It’s a famous phrase. It turned out my mother did not coin it, but I’m adding to it. “Optimism of the collective will”. And that’s what we all are in our adventure club. So I’m going to … one last slide … This is my back lane, I live on a lane, and this is my neighbor’s fence. And some tagger put that there [writing on fence … Everything is possible]. I see it every morning when I take Bella the dog out. So thank you for being part of our adventure club. Everything is possible. We’ll see you next year. Let’s hope. Go get a drink. Thank you very much for being part of the summit.