When Global Hits Local: Navigating Tariffs on Canada’s Main Streets

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: I’m Mary Rowe, from the Canadian Urban Institute, and – never a dull moeh? City builders awake. We’ve got lots to pay attention to. Honestly, I’ve been talking to so many people who just can’t bare to open their phones up in the morning to find out what else has landed, but, as is often the case with topics that we tackle here at CUI and on CityTalk, so much of what we are being confronted with are underlying conditions, things that were vulnerabilities or realities for us before, as we saw during COVID, and then suddenly they get snapped into relief and everybody is talking about them and all of us are focusing in a new way. So, just to acknowledge, I’m in Toronto, I happen to be here today. The Canadian Urban Institute operates across the country with staff and colleagues and partners in communities from coast to coast to coast, and appreciating lots of people from CityTalk who are coming in, and I saw just now, someone’s coming in from South Africa. So thank you for our international listeners who come in, and as we know, we continue to collect all the important intel that participants in CityTalk offer, both on the broadcast, the panelists that you’re going to hear from, but also the people in the chat. And if you’re a lurker on CityTalk who sits at the edge of your desk and doesn’t actually read the chat or engage, here’s your moment, sign into the chat because you’ll find out lots of interesting things and lots of interesting links, and lots of people posing other questions and things that’s fascinating. So I always appreciate the vigor and the enthusiasm and the commitment of the CityTalker constituency in there. There are thousands of you and thanks so much for coming and joining us today. In Toronto, the traditional territory of First Nations, Inuit and Métis, many, many First Nations, lots of people signing in on the chat to acknowledge what the traditional ancestral lands are that they happen to have settled on. As I suggested, all these underlying conditions that are being … economic conditions that are being surfaced for us, like it or not, by the events to the south of us, similarly, we have all sorts of legacies of exclusion and the way in which colonialism has continued to disadvantage people of indigenous heritage, and how we are continuing to have that conversation. And about how we remedy that, how we design differently, how we invest differently, how we create opportunities for… Not only to go forward in a better way, but also to redress the injustices that pre-exist us. So this is not for the faint of heart, these conversations. And I’m very happy that we’re joining today to talk about when global hits local. And as I suggested, never a dull moment. So I’m going to ask our panelists to put their cameras on, and you’re going to hear from each of them. I’m just going to just show you who they all are, and then we’re going to go one by one. And we always start with asking each one, tell us where you are, what are you seeing out your front door or your back door today, and then what’s working, what’s not, and what’s next. And I would say just off the top, there are a lot of people talking about, “will tariffs happen, won’t they happen”, the arguments for them to happen or not happen, all that kind of thing. I really feel that’s a discussion that lots of folks are having. I can’t imagine Matthew Mendelsohn isn’t going to want to go in there in some way. But just to say that the constituency that CUI works with are people that are looking at on -the -ground impacts, and anticipating and planning and what are the kinds of policy, investment, and personal decisions and actions we can be taking to deal with whatever’s coming. And so, whether it’s tariffs or whether it’s climate, or whether it’s a severe weather event, or whether it’s inequity, or whether it’s some other thing, or a pandemic, that we are people coping in the real world about real effects. And not so much engaging in the rightness or wrongness of orders of government over which we don’t really have much control. I mean, I guess we ultimately do, but you know what I mean. So this is not a platform, the CityTalk platform generally is about problem -solving solutions, highlighting challenges, and looking for really  good practice. And so I’m going to ask people in the chat to share with us specific things that you’re observing, specific actions you’re taking, specific programs that you think should be introduced that haven’t been, all that kind of thing, so that we’re on that side of the equation that’s empowering people to realize that they have some agency here and how do we work collaboratively and together to build stronger local economies and what’s the role of the built environment in that? So, really pleased to have coast -to -coast today, including a mayor. And so I’m going to start with our mayor, Mayor Towndale, who is the mayor of the city of Cornwall. Bienvenue. Welcome to CityTalk. And we’re really pleased to have you, and we look forward to hearing your particular perspective. So a couple of minutes to you, and then we’ll keep going around the circle. So over to you. Welcome, and I’m going to call you Mayor Towndale once, and then I’ll revert to Justin. But welcome to CityTalk, Mayor Towndale.  

Justin Towndale: Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for having me on this. I’m currently in Cornwall, Ontario, and it is the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee peoples, more specifically, the Mohawks of Akwesasne. And, you know, being the mayor of a border community, right now for mayors across the country, every municipality is facing the same challenges for the most part. I mean, we can look at housing, and that encompasses homelessness, affordability, and a whole gamut of issues within that silo. You add to that access to primary care, which is typically more the domain of the provinces, but municipalities play a role in that, and we need to step up to find solutions. And the economy and inflation, and now on top of that and tied into that last point, we’re seeing this challenge and this issue of tariffs being proposed by President Trump. And certainly, I think, you know, every community across the country has individuals employed in the community who have a connection… 

Mary W. Rowe: Justin, I’m going to put you on pause for a sec, and I’m going to get the tech folks to talk to you to see if we can fix your feed. And I’m going to go, let’s go to the other end. He’ll probably sign off and come back on and we’ll see if we can get it better. 

Mary W. Rowe: Justin, are you still there? Let’s mute him, too. Can I get the producers to mute him? Thank you. Okay, go ahead, Rino.  

Rino Bortolin: So as most people know, I mean, Windsor sits on one of the biggest trade corridors in the country. We have a new Gordie Howe Bridge coming, showcasing the amount of trade. You may have heard things like, auto parts cross seven to eleven times over the border before they end up in the vehicle. We have an interconnectedness with the U.S. that is probably one of the most unique in the country, because it’s not just the economic, it’s also the social. You know, I use my story, my mom immigrated to Detroit, my dad to Windsor. They met on the streets of Detroit. Those are the types of things where, the integration here is very difficult. There’s a lot of unease. People are getting detained at the border. People are getting held up at the border. You’re starting to see a nationalism and a pride that is good because we start talking about Canadian pride. But at the same time, you know, when we talk about things like buying local, supporting local, local for me is supporting Detroit. Local for me is supporting my friends in Detroit, and it’s been very hard to reconcile that. And there’s a lot of unease, and especially because, you know, Detroit was one of those locations that didn’t support Donald Trump, and so they feel the same way. And so, there’s a lot of difficulty in sort of wanting to support the things that are going on nationally. But at the same time, trying to keep that social fabric that, you know, the prime minister, when he addressed the nation, he called it one of the most successful economic-military-security partnerships the world’s ever seen. And so, to so quickly move away from that, I think, has been hard for people to reconcile and to do so easily. But, there is an incredible amount of unease in this community because we know what it means when things happen at the border. We know what happened… What it means when the border shuts down, when the trade relationship gets hurt. This is part of the boom and bust of the auto sector as well, so we’ve felt it all before. So we know, and unfortunately, you know, we were on what we would consider to be a good run here with the Gordie Howe Bridge, with the LG Stalantis battery plant. We were excited economically for things to come. And this just put a hammer to it all, really bringing a lot of unease to the community here.  

Mary W. Rowe: You know, every meeting I do now, I recall I have, regardless of the topic, whatever you’re slated to, there’s always seems to be a bit of time where we have to talk about, how are you doing? A little bit like Covid, do you remember? We had to remind ourselves to be human beings and say, how are you making out? I remember in New Orleans after Katrina, that’s how every conversation began, was “How did you make out?”, Like it’s,  you had  this reminder that we are human beings experiencing something in a visceral way to check in to see how that’s going over, and I find the same with this. I don’t know whether our American colleagues, and we have many of them on the line here listening. They’re going through their own version of this. I’m off to the U .S. on Sunday, so I’ll hear about it again, and I was in Washington, as many of you know, last week, and I heard it there. They’re  dealing with their own, as you say, Rino. And it’s actually, I think, nonpartisan. I think there are lots of folks that are in states of adjustment about what’s going on and what the shock of it all feels like. But I think that to just remind us that that we’re people in places experiencing a certain kind of thing, and I want to come back to the points that you just made around how integrated the economy is. I was having a conversation yesterday with somebody in Governor Snyder’s office, and it was an interesting moment to hear from him, and we sort of compared notes and agreed that the economies in many ways are ahead of the politics. You know, we have regional economies that straddle that border, and that the politics hasn’t sort of caught up, you know, and that’s sort of the moment we’re in, as you say. And I know you have many, many, many, thousands of Windsorites who go across the border to work in Detroit and similarly thousands that live in Detroit come across every day. So this is a kind of… And then people have relatives and family and, you know, all that stuff. So anyway, it’s complicated, but we’ll come back to a lot of what you just suggested and also for us to continue to think practically about what are the things that we could be doing. Mayor, you’re back with us. Let’s give it another try. Fingers crossed that your connection works. And if not, the tech guys have a brilliant solution. OK, back to you. You were sort of mid-sentence.  

Justin Towndale: OK, I’m not sure where it cut off, but certainly I was talking about some of the challenges that municipalities across Canada face. And I touched on housing and homelessness. I touched on access to primary care and doctors. And I was touching on the economy and inflation, and tying into that was this tariffs discussion. And certainly, you know, being in a border town, I was saying how every community in Canada likely has something impacted by trade with the United States. I think for us in border towns, because we have that crossing to northern New York, it provides a bit of a regional experience. And, you know, it’s not quite like Windsor and Detroit, it’s much larger in scale. It’s much more intertwined, but all the same. You know, I was just hearing what Rino was saying about the cross border traffic and the benefits there in the economy. And it’s the same for us. You know, Cornwall is kind of the regional hub when it comes to the economy in our area. That’s for the United Counties of SD &G. That’s for the First Nation of Akwesasne. And that’s also for Northern New York. And it’s hard to separate that and create this invisible line, which, you know, granted does exist, but to put a line in the sand and to try to say prices are going to be higher because goods are coming from this side of the line. And certainly, you know, within our community, we have numerous employers that manufacture goods that are exported to the United States, in some cases almost exclusively. So that just further adds to how intertwined our economies really are, and especially our regional areas that are on the border. And, you know, it’s no exaggeration when I say, in the house I grew up in, I’d wake up every morning, look outside my window, and I would see New York State. It was less than two kilometers from my front yard. And that’s the proximity we have, but we don’t really think of it as foreign country. It’s just part of our region.  

Mary W. Rowe: Yeah, no, I know. I mean, I was teasing you that you had your Sarah Palin moment, you know, that you can look out your back door and you can see Canada, or whatever it was that she said, but I, that’s exactly the… This is sort of laying the context of what we’re talking about. And I know all of our listeners appreciate this, that we operate, we often say at CUI that municipal boundaries are fairly arbitrary, too, because economies cross over a highway or cross, you know, they are regional, smaller regional entities. And I’m going to go to Doug next, because Edmonton absolutely embodies this kind of regional reality. And I realize I misspoke, it’s not Governor Snyder, it’s Governor Whitmer. But I I think the point that I was making in my anecdote, to the person I was speaking to, is that Michigan and Ontario have, over decades, developed this kind of interdependent, interrelated kind of style, a way of operating economically. And I think we have to think hard about whether that’s a bad thing or a good thing. And what are the benefits for local economies if we’re that integrated, and what are the liabilities and the negatives? And so Tori, I’m sure, will speak to us about that. But in the meantime, I’m going to go next to you if I can, Doug, just give us a picture from, I’m sure, chilly Edmonton.  

Doug Griffiths: Yes, I’m in Edmonton, and it’s not that bad. It was a lot colder earlier. So it’s warming up. The economy isn’t, though. There’s a bit of a chill in it. And that’s one of the challenges. We haven’t really pushed out as the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce shop local campaign. I think that actually is a bit numb to people now, and what does that mean? So we created stickers, a brilliant team, and they created stickers and they say, you know, made in Edmonton. And the idea is, you know, we’re still shopping local, but it’s more about manufacturing and producing goods instead of just buying the products in the local economy and not buying them online. And that’s a shift that this has created. We’re also working with the the Canadian Chamber of Commerce and the largest chambers of commerce across Canada from each of the big cities to really push the reduction in inter-provincial trade barriers, which, we’re talking about two hundred billion dollars that could be added to the economy, a four percent GDP increase if we just eliminated our own provincial trade barriers and can move goods across the country. But the biggest concern we have right now, actually, and I, this is my perspective. I think the chill that we’re feeling in Edmonton, it’s not just the weather, but to the economy, is something we’re going to have to deal with with the next four years. The president of the United States, I think more so than tariffs has the desire to create chaos and a sense of chaos. And that’s going to pose a constant chill on investment coming into this country, even local businesses, local manufacturers, local production. A lot of people are going to be afraid of investing until this gets resolved. And the president’s goal is to not have this resolved, but to have that anxiety over the business community for a long time. And so, I think we really need to focus internally on supporting our entrepreneurs and encouraging our manufacturers to make that investment, and showing them that we’re actually going to reduce inter -provincial trade barriers and talk about investing properly in infrastructure so that we can reach tidewater, so that every single jurisdiction in Canada can reach tidewater, so we can reach international markets. And, you know, I think my biggest fear of this is that we don’t take advantage of this crisis to change Canada and make it more competitive. And that, you know, I’ve said to many people, and I mean this honestly, not just fearfully, that if we don’t do something drastic to improve the productivity and get rid of inter -provincial trade barriers, reach new markets and invest in infrastructure, and deal with our tax regime so that we become more competitive internationally, then we are going to be the architects of our own demise when the next round of crisis comes along and our dependence on the U .S. still remains.  

Mary W. Rowe: Yeah. Many of you know that at CityTalk we also produce a podcast. So we’ve got CityTalk Live, this is this, and then we have CityTalk the pod. And I have Doug on the CityTalk pod this week, so he goes into a little more detail about some of these concerns he’s got about never wasting a crisis. Doug, I want to come back though to this piece about productivity and also investment, and whether or not we’ve got a moment to kind of reshift what we invest in. Because I’m always looking at, what are the things that we have some levers that we can pull, or that the municipal government can pull, or that the province or the feds can pull. As you say, if we’ve got years of uncertainty like this, then what do we do to kind of bolster ourselves and continue to invest, invest, invest? So I’m going to come back to you on that. Tori, let’s go to you in Squamish, far west. What is the weather in Squamish today?  

Tori Williamson: Hi Mary, great to be here. It’s actually pretty nice. We’re lucky on the west coast it’s not too cold, although I would love a little bit of the snow so folks can send that over so I can go skiing I’d really appreciate that. I’m with Buy Social Canada. So we’re a social enterprise with the mission to advance and grow social procurement across the country. And it’s interesting, you know, these times of, you know, tension and crisis similar to the pandemic is when supply chains get to have a little bit of a moment. Normally when I say the words procurement, people’s eyes start to glaze over. But we really are advocating and providing the tools and support so that procurement can move from being an operational function to a strategic function. And we’re seeing that now across the country, people are thinking about how do we support Canadian? How do we buy local? How do we be strategic with the money that we’re already spending so that we can have the impact with that that we want to have? So this is kind of an opening for organizations to really look at their supply chains and their policies, and we heard about the inter -provincial regulations. Every organization, especially in the public sector, is going to have regulation that governs how they do their purchasing, and so I encourage folks to take a look at that. We’ve done great work with cities across the country. Edmonton has a sustainable procurement program. Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Winnipeg. You know, this is a brand new thing. Organizations are thinking about, how do we put this into practice? And I really encourage folks to to focus on measurement too. You know, where is that spend going? How can we get the data to learn and iterate over time? And then, definitely prioritize local, you know, scale that from individual purchasing to institutions, governments, corporations. And then think about going a little bit further and thinking about what the social impacts can be too. You know, we talked about the systemic challenges that we’re facing, that we’re seeing in communities around homelessness, affordability, reconciliation. So think about, OK, you’re buying from a Canadian business. What about an Indigenous Canadian business? What about a social enterprise that employs people with barriers? So there’s so many opportunities and Buy Social Canada has so many supports available. This is all I do every day, social procurement. So, you know, it’s a challenging time. This threat, this direct threat and attack from somebody who we thought was our neighbor and our close, dear partner. And now we have to think about, OK, how do we position ourselves strongly and respond in a way that’s going to protect and support our communities?  

Mary W. Rowe: Yeah, you know, it’s interesting that this, you know, maybe we need to be having some… Listen, usually the CityTalk chat is fabulous at coming up with memes. So I don’t know whether it’s buy baby buy, like, you know, as opposed to build baby build, or drill baby drill, whatever it is. But you’re saying it’s not just your individual purchasing, it’s actually your wholesale purchasing, your neighborhood purchasing, all that kind of stuff. I’ll be interested, I’m going to come back and ask you in a minute once I get into Matthew here, whether we’ve got data, Tori, to tell us, you know that notion of a leaky bucket? Google it. Anybody in the chat, Google leaky bucket and you’ll see it, how much money slips out of a local economy’s hands. Do we actually have a number of what the quantification, I heard Doug talk about the quantification of interprovincial trade barriers, but do we have a number of what the billion dollar number would be if we altered X percent of our procurement? I’m sure that one of you has that number, so I’ll come back to you. Think about it, if you got a number. Matthew, welcome to CityTalk. I can’t believe we haven’t had you on before, but apparently we haven’t.  

Matthew Mendelsohn: I guess you don’t like me.  

Mary W. Rowe: That’s what it is. It’s been deliberate all that time. But you’ve got the biggest picture here. I know that you have been thinking thoughtfully and your partner, your colleagues at SEP are thinking all the time about alternate ownership, different kinds of mechanisms to kind of hold money in local economies, et cetera. What is your particular perspective about the impact locally, and what agency do city builders of all types have? What are you thinking?  

Matthew Mendelsohn: So I appreciate the invitation. You know, Doug’s comments, Tori’s comments, others. We’re quite privileged that we’re not at the pointy end of this. Here is the pointy end of this, dealing with this like day to day. So hopefully we have some perspective and can take a step back. You know, we’ve been saying that we think that how this is being framed, as a trade war or a tariff war, is unfortunately not the right way to think about this. And it’s difficult to engage with and it’s difficult to change our mental maps. But at least for the time being, the president of the United States is waging an economic war on Canada and Canadians. And they may get out of that. We may get out of that. But there’s no sign that that is happening. And it’s not just about trade or tariffs or the boarder, it’s much larger than that. As the U.S. rethinks its position in the world. And so, when you say buy, baby, buy, you know, we are also saying invest, baby, invest. Because there are scales and levels to this, right. So individuals make individual purchasing decisions. Institutions make larger purchasing decisions. But all of our holders of capital, whether that’s foundations and endowments and pension funds, have to think about how we invest to build Canada. Our focus has been around economic sovereignty and ownership. So Doug’s points are really well taken about export diversification, selling to internal markets. But we also recognize that we are economically vulnerable because we don’t own enough of our economy. We’ve sold off our resource companies. Our main streets are dominated by multinational corporations. Our media are owned, not locally, I mean, you can go down the list. We’ve lost ownership of our economy. That was kind of a strategic decision that we made in the 80s and 90s. And we can debate whether it’s worked well or not well, but our partner who we engaged with has decided to change those terms, kind of illegally. They’ve broken the treaty and they’ve broken the contract. And so, I do not underestimate the challenge that we face or the difficulties that individuals are facing in communities in Windsor, and Cornwall, and Edmonton. My friends and family, we’re all up and down, right? You know, one day we’re feeling proud and excited and nationalistic, and I’m buying this. And then the next day, you know, we’re feeling, or the next moment, feeling, you know, vulnerable and afraid. For us, for our kids, like all of that is real. But from my perspective, what we’re trying to focus on is how, as a society, like with the chambers of commerce, with the community foundations, the city governments, there are so many city builders on this call. How are we, as communities, organizing, convening, not just to talk about it, but how do we shift our investment practices? How do we shift our procurement practices? How do we support one another? Your leaky bucket point, Mary, is really important. How, as institutions that hold capital, and power, and influence, do we think across all of our systems, municipal, federal, provincial, corporate, philanthropic? Is this money helping my local community? And that local community may be all of Canada, but it might also just be the city or the community. And that requires a big shift in mindset about how each of these decisions that we are making as people of power and influence, are strengthening our capacity to be economically sovereign. And, can I make one final little comment? Because Doug’s point was so important about export diversification. But it’s really important to remember that so many of our businesses, and Mary and others on this panel know this, so many of our local businesses are not export exposed. So while manufacturers are threatened, like in Windsor and Cornwall, 100 %, and merchants, there are lots of businesses in lots of communities, whether those are arts, or culture, or service, or restaurant, or hospitality, that are not usually export exposed. Yeah, we may attract some more tourists to come to a concert, but many of our businesses are not export exposed and those local community economies, not the ones that are directly impacted by tariffs and the economic war. How do we support those as well, and all of us, and those of us who are pensioned and have salaries? How do we make sure we are supporting the whole ecosystem of our local communities?  

Mary W. Rowe: I appreciate your flagging of the ecosystem. I’m going to ask everybody to open their mics and the producers will put us all into the Hollywood Square’s look. And we can now have a sort of a collective conversation about this. This idea of export exposed, I hear you on that. You know, yours and my colleague Matthew, talks of Zeta Cobb, who runs a social enterprise in Fogo Island, says that the Fogo Island Inn is an export, you just have to come and pick it up. So tourism can have that kind of benefit. And with the Canadian dollar slipping, does it mean that we will have more tourists, more Americans potentially coming here? And it’s a non-tariffable economic development strategy, if you follow me. So that’s one piece of it. But I just want to highlight, here are the things that you all touched on. The notion of purchasing, like I’m talking about individual purchasing. Procurement, more systemic. Infrastructure, what are we investing. Productivity, and then investment. What is the Canadian investment landscape looking like? And as is always the case with any topic we put into CityTalk, there’s never just one answer or one solution. We’ve got to be multi-solving. We’ve got to do a whole bunch of stuff all at the same time. So I’m wondering, but looking back to you, Mayor Towndale, if you look at, and I’m interested just for Rino and Justin to have a moment here, because you are both in municipal environments where manufacturing historically played quite an important role to your local economy. Is that viable to continue? Or should we be thinking, really strategically, about stepping away from that kind of relationship? It’s a big topic, I realize. But I am interested for your workforce. And it’s certainly true for you, Rino. You have thousands of people who worked in automotive manufacturing all along Southern Ontario. And, what are you hearing from those people? So first to you, Justin, and then to Rino. And we’ll keep our fingers crossed that we can hear you, Justin.  

Justin Towndale: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, Cornwall’s history is, you know, heavily based in manufacturing. I say to people that, at one time, you name it, it was made in Cornwall. That’s not exactly an exaggeration. You know, these days we’ve changed. We have a lot of distribution in our area, and the manufacturing has shifted. So we have electronic manufacturing, we have food production. And I think when you think about that, food production in particular, that’s more stable in general. But the caveat is, those producers in my community are exporting to the United States. So there is a demand for the products there. When it comes to automotive, you know, we’re not Windsor by any means, but we do have a few companies that do produce finishes for the automotive sector. So that still impacts us to some extent. I don’t think manufacturing is returning the way it used to be. I’ve said this before, you know, I think it was said very well. Manufacturing, the way it’s been moved offshore and kind of giving up that part of our…  

Mary W. Rowe: I think that our American friends are scrambling. Go back, we almost got you, Justin.  

Justin Towndale: Yeah, I see my connection is still kind of suffering.  

Mary W. Rowe: That’s okay, Justin, I’m going to suggest you phone in. Let’s see if we… The producers will get you a phone and we’ll take your picture off. And then I bet the phone line will be more reliable. Can I now just go back to you then, Rino? In terms of… You’ve got that workforce. You’ve transitioned, it’s not Windsor’s first rodeo, let’s just say. So is there a way to invest… Back to Matthew’s question. Is there a way to be investing in skills retraining more quickly? And Doug, I would have thought that would be happening in Edmonton as well, because the oil industry has gone through so many transitions. So is that a priority we should be making? Investing in re -skilling. Rino, then Doug.  

Rino Bortolin: Well, diversification has been something we’ve been talking about for years. Unfortunately, and again, we had this problem when the EV battery plant opportunity came up, some people saw it as diversification because it was EV and not traditional combustion engine.  

Mary W. Rowe: Right.  

Rino Bortolin: That’s laughable, of course, because it is the auto sector. I mean, it’s as simple as that. And it’s auto manufacturing. We did at one point 30 years ago go into the casino business. It was successful in the sense of pulling a lot of tourists, a lot of American tourists. Until now there’s a casino every few hundred kilometers across all of Northwest United States. So that casino has now sort of tempered itself, and only has so many. I think manufacturing will always be a core aspect to what we do. I think our other manufacturers have gone in different directions and don’t rely on the auto industry as much, but there still is, you know, for every auto job, there’s something like seven or eight spin-off jobs. And not to mention that those spin-off jobs and those auto jobs then have a direct impact on things like hospitality. The first thing that gets cut in your spending is those extras going out to dinner and going out to the symphony, movies, and things like that. So it definitely has that effect. I think the challenge is the diversification after it’s been so entrenched, and so entrenched for what we’ve seen as such a strategic location for hundreds of years in fact. So that’s the difficult part for us here with our specific strategic location. Now we have been trying to push, we, meaning some of the city builders, to connect more with Detroit as a city, as an entity, and to sort of start working more towards sharing the stories and the entities that Detroit has figured out a way to invest and diversify in non -automotive jobs and seeing a big resurgence. And a lot of the city builders here have talked about connecting with that more, but that still needs a porous border, that still needs an open border, that still needs a connectivity that is not happening in times like these.  

Mary W. Rowe: You know, as city builders, we’re believers in proximity. You know, that we’re … a lot of what we believe or why urban settlements happen is because of the benefit of adjacency. So this kind of an arbitrary border and then the politics gets involved and before you know it, you’re disrupted from what actually is quite an organic thing. And so I saw … coming in and saying, remember, you know, we have other trading arrangements and it’s not always to the US and let’s not think that we can do everything locally. We’re too small an economy. He doesn’t say this, but we’re too small an economy with too small a market. So we’re going to have to try to find the right equilibrium, I guess. Doug, Edmonton’s gone through this on many occasions, many, many … recalibrate, recalibrate, recalibrate. What lessons have you got for us? 

Doug Griffiths: Well, specifically when it comes to oil and gas, and we’ve seen a downturn and we’ve seen a shrinkage of the industry, when it comes back, those people don’t come back to those jobs. They actually… just keep the workforce the same size, but the oil industry sort of bounces back. And I think the challenge we have, and it’s not just Edmonton, I think it’s across Canada challenge is that we’ve got two generations of complacency. It’s been so easy for us to follow the same pattern and the same pathway, and we don’t wind up having the same, we don’t have the level of innovation and ingenuity. So people don’t want to go get retrained for a new job. And we as a country don’t talk about how we need to be more aggressive in our and re-engineering our tax structure that we need to make financing more available to entrepreneurs, that we need a culture of entrepreneurship and business friendliness in this country that we need investments in infrastructure. This is a nation building moment. 

Mary W. Rowe: Yeah, yeah, I hear you. Like, it’s interesting. Somebody in the chat is saying, “Don’t forget about universities. Don’t forget about applied research”. I think this, you know, the temptation is to get caught up in the drama. And everybody wants to just yammer on about the drama as opposed to what you’re getting at, Doug. How do we actually say, let’s be serious here. We need to invest differently. We need to train differently. We need to look at import replacement. There’s a whole bunch of things – like Tori – how big is the bisocial 

Canada membership. You existed long before this. Do you see this as a boost to get more people to just think thoughtfully? 

Tori Williamson: It’s not big enough. That’s for sure. 

Mary W. Rowe: It’s not big enough … 

Tori Williamson: We could definitely use more folks who are on board with social procurement. It is an emerging field and I think it is a massive opportunity because you’re not starting from scratch. If your city, your university, any organization isn’t already doing this, there’s so many resources out there for you to start to put this into practice. And I think, you know, on your question around like the leakage. Unfortunately, I don’t have that number, but the one that really resonates is Local BC’s research on the impact … economic recirculation through the economic multiplier of buying from a local independent business. So you spend $100 with a local independent business, you get $63 stays and recirculates as re-spent in the local economy, whereas buying from a multinational corporation only $14 stays in that local economy. So that’s a huge difference in what can stay and then recirculate.  

Mary W. Rowe: I hope we can get that. Somebody can put into the chat the source for that stat so people can see it. So that affects people individually. But, you know, we’re only 40 million people. We’re a small economy and we would never be able to sustain ourselves by just selling to ourselves. This is why it has to be a series of different kinds of steps. I was interested to see, and Matthew, this is leading to you because you’ve been doing so much work on ownership … Tim Hortons, the iconic, associated with Canada Company, is not actually owned by Canadians. But I did see yesterday that the CEO is saying they’re looking at their supply chain and looking at every American product they can replace with a Canadian product. So there are ways for this to happen, to evolve in a way, as Doug suggested, we don’t waste the crisis. Matthew, are you seeing any other kinds of signs like that? Of shifting? 

Matthew Mendelsohn: I’m going to talk about that. I want to say one thing, Mary, that I must, and I don’t like to correct you. 

Mary W. Rowe: Oh, correct me, please … 

Matthew Mendelsohn: But I want to say we are not a small economy. We are the ninth largest economy in the world with 42 million people. And you look around the world, there are lots of countries that would envy our position. [Mary: Point taken!] I mean, you know, for people who are on the pointy end of this, for my friends and neighbors who work in manufacturing and export to the US, I mean, this is terrifying. I am not underestimating that in any way. And everyone has their own situation. But just about everyone in the world would like to be living here in Canada and have the issues we have, which are the largest pension funds in the world with unbelievable pools of capital that can be deployed. Like we’ve talked about leaky buckets if we shift half a percent of our pension investments to impact You know, like community local impact investing in affordable housing in communities or investing in local infrastructure. Or half a percentage point of those investments to Canadian companies, even if there’s a bit more risk there than investing in Tesla. I don’t want to invest. I don’t want CPPIB to be investing in Meta. Right now, and arming the people who are waging war on us … 

Mary W. Rowe: What would be the investment? Do you have it quantified? What if you moved half a percent of Canadian pension investment. Do you have any idea what that impact would be? Enough that you think half a percent would make a difference? 

Matthew Mendelsohn: I don’t have that in front of me. But I think… I think these are the conversations we have to be having locally, provincially, nationally, across sectors, 

top universities … Universities have huge endowments. What do they do with … How do they choose to invest? I think your point, Mary, though the question was about like Tim Hortons and buying and investing in Canadians. I know there’s a movement … I was at the prime minister’s summit last week with, it was called Business Leaders, but it was civil society and not-for-profit And I know it kind of looked like a photo op. These things always look like a photo op, but on the ground you had serious business leaders, serious labor leaders. Talking about how they could do import replacement. So I know there’s a working group of senior business leaders who control … who employ hundreds, tens of thousands of people who are looking at making lists. These are products we import from the US. How do we replace those with Canadian? So this isn’t social procurement, but this is thinking strategically about who we’re buying, who we’re investing in, who we’re giving our capital to. And so the Tim Hortons example is a good example. What I would, and this is for people who do investment attraction into communities. I have a colleague who runs one of the investment, like investment attraction agencies for a city – They just have metrics, right? How much money do we bring in? But some of that foreign direct investment is not helpful. If it’s acquisition activity where we’re bringing in US private equity funds, buying out our local main streets and consolidating them and putting head office jobs and capital into New York pockets, that FDI is not good for our communities. And so I think we have to be thinking about how when we are attracting investments, how are these investments supporting the long-term resilience of our local economies and our businesses and our workers so that we’re not vulnerable, so that we’re not in a place five years from now where someone says, you know what? You either have to do XYZ or, you know, “fuck you”. And I’m … sorry, you’ve never heard that word. Sorry. (laughter) 

Mary W. Rowe: First time the F word’s ever been uttered on CityTalk before. Just saying.  

Matthew Mendelsohn: So I just think all of our systems at municipal governments, like the the ecosystem and connective tissue between the chambers and the community foundations and the local governments and the investment attraction folks. How are we building our economy for growth, productivity and you know medium term resilience. 

Mary W. Rowe: So let’s just say that you’ve put a whole bunch of things on the table there and lots of people are responding in the chat. And I totally appreciate your correction that we are the ninth largest economy in the world. 

Doug Griffiths: Could I add, Mary, that economists have shown that when we hit 60 million people, we will be the third largest economy in the world. There is that much potential, but we need population. 

Mary W. Rowe: So get having some babies and let’s get immigration going. Yeah, okay. I’m just saying …  Can I go to my favorite topic, which is productivity? Because it’s bandied around so abundantly and it’s used constantly as a critique and as a measure of criticizing the Canadian economy. And then right behind the criticism is “Oh, and 80% of our workforce works in the SME sector”, as if that’s a bad thing too. Can I just get a sense from you collectively, in terms of this, is there another way to talk about what we’re … what is the productivity anxiety code for? What are we saying when we say “Canada”? Because, you know, it’s a bit like GDP. I’m not sure these are great measures. So I’m just curious … 

Doug, you’re in the industrial heartland there in Alberta. What is it when you say we have a productivity problem? What are you saying, really? 

Doug Griffiths: Well, when I say that, I’m saying that we don’t have enough technological and innovation in our production methods. And that’s what’s limiting our productivity. I think … 

Mary W. Rowe: Okay. So we’re not getting enough [Doug: Innovation and technology] … we’re not producing the value equal to whatever the input we’re making. Is that right? 

Doug Griffiths: Well, that’s what its core is. But I think the factor is what’s driving increased productivity and our economy is not set up with a tech strategy that incorporates innovation and technology to help improve our productivity. 

Mary W. Rowe: Okay. Rino and Matthew, anything to add in on that? Because I want us to stop using these short forms. I feel like this is just something people just throw out … you know, we’re horrible. Our productivity is terrible. And I feel a lot of us say, well, then what? What do we do? Rino. 

Rino Bortolin: I wanted to come in and I may sound unpatriotic here, but I think I wanted to warn against this Canada first mentality. And I think there’s a slippery slope to what got us in this mess in the first place. And then from going from patriotic to jingoistic and then to problematic and pointing fingers at other people … We then start turning to pointing fingers to immigration as a problem. I just … I’m careful to hear that we do want to support local. I’m a restaurant owner. I had a restaurant that based everything on 30 kilometers. I love the idea of it. I think we also have to remember, and I keep going back to this, we had one of the strongest relationships in the history of the world. We still do. And it’s not a bad thing. And as much as we need to protect ourselves from instances like this, I want to caution that the slippery slope does not go too far down this Canada first rhetoric. And we’re already seeing it politically. And it’s mimicking exactly what’s happening on the other side of the border that got us here in the first place. And it’s not just across the border, you’re seeing it across Europe, you’re seeing it in different… countries and right-wing responses to some of the pressures and the cost of living. And when you start to do that, you start to point fingers and put fault with other people. So I just want to add that one bit of caution that as much as we want to support Canadian companies, investments in Canadian everything, across the board, we also need to start to not forget that global markets and trading on global markets has produced a lot of why we are one of the best economic countries in the world. We are ninth in the world for a reason, built on the relationships that we’ve had and not by just keeping everything internal and looking internal. So we have to remember that and make sure that whatever we’re doing to support and whatever we’re doing to support this patriotism does not lead down a slippery slope of jingoistic rhetoric that leads to what’s happening across the border. 

Mary W. Rowe: Very good point, Rino … It is hard, isn’t it, when they get poked in the eye, it’s hard to not poke back. But I know exactly what you’re speaking about. As I said, I was in the US last week and I’ll be there on Sunday. Americans are, you know, generally fabulous people, unbelievably hospitable, very creative, very warm, all that stuff. And we forget about that. We just can’t … The rhetoric at the other is the noise. So anybody else want to weigh in on this productivity piece? Matthew, is it on your radar? 

Matthew Mendelsohn: Well, yeah, yeah. I’d say two things. And the first is part of the reason we don’t have high productivity returns to the point I made earlier about ownership. Many of our biggest employers our subsidiaries of American multinationals. And so the research and the IP return to the United States. So we need to build big Canadian companies here. 

Mary W. Rowe: So let me ask you that. Is there a moment to repatriate any of that? Like, is there a way, it’s a cautionary tale. A lot of the productivity number, Doug, I think with all due respect is skewed because of oil and gas and the fact that it’s a raw material that’s sent down too. But what would you do, Matthew would you, would you just create some other kind … I mean, you’re from the policy world. Are there ways to create some policy incentives to create more of those where we would hold the IP, where we would … How do we do it? If we knew…  

Matthew Mendelsohn: I mean, this has been a conversation for 30 years. I’m not going to try and do a 30 second answer on how we build unicorn companies or have an IP strategy like these have been discussed for 30 years, but I think it’s a good question and now might be a time where we take some more risk and be a bit more ambitious. My own view is doing nothing or doing things slowly at the moment is a much bigger risk. Like I take Rino’s point, you know, 100%. And your point about, you know, my friends and relatives in the United States that were texting back and forth all the time about what’s going on. But at the same time, we have the most powerful person in the world, in the president of the United States and the most powerful Tech companies in the world kind of with us in their crosshairs. So, you know, we have to be responding to that, not in a poke them in the eye kind of way, but thinking strategically about our own future. And the productivity point that I did want to make, and this might be the tiniest you know, place where Doug and I might not align perfectly. Because I think the biggest needs we have on productivity, what would really help is investments in housing and investments in infrastructure. People spend too much of their money in Canada on housing. And so people invest too much in housing. They don’t invest in other things. They don’t have disposable income because they are stretched and our productivity really suffers because we can’t get working people to live in cities because it’s too expensive where jobs are and they are traveling an hour or an hour and a half to get to their job. So to me, it’s infrastructure, transit and housing. In addition to the stuff Doug was talking about on productivity. But I think we forget the real things and we make it abstract. 

Mary W. Rowe: We’ve only got five minutes left and there are five of you. Justin is still there, but he’s only on audio. So what I’m going to ask is in terms of what you just mentioned, Matthew, you know. When we respond to our colleagues who are focused on making Canada matter more, our response always is-  one of the ways you make Canada matter more is you continue to invest in places. You get places where people can live, places where people can have a really high quality of life. And have economic and social and cultural opportunity. Justin, are you there? We each have a minute, basically, to give your sort of two cents about what you think the priority should be. Let me just see if Justin is there. Are you there, Justin? 

Justin Towndale: I am here. 

Mary W. Rowe: Great. What would you do? One thing. Or maybe you’ve got four, but what is the municipality of Cornwall going to focus on? 

Justin Towndale: It’s a difficult… Well, in terms of this tariff topic, and I’ll focus on that because my time is so short. But certainly we reached across the board and met with our peers because for us at our level, we don’t have the authority to impose tariffs or ban US liquor from shelves. But what we’re doing is we’re meeting with our peers in New York. I’ve met with two mayors already and we’re trying to lobby that way across the border reach across, work together. We’ve always had these great relationships and partnerships and try to provide the hard facts as to why tariffs won’t work, why it’s a bad idea, how it’ll affect both economies as opposed to just one. And I know that’s a very quick answer here, but I realize we’re short on time. 

Mary W. Rowe: Mm-hmm. No, but it’s a very constructive one, Justin. And tariffs or no tariffs. That’s a good thing to be doing. To have those kinds of relationships. Tori, what’s one thing that you think people should be focused on? 

Tori Williamson: I think every organization needs to look at their procurement supply chain and then look at what your local capacity is and put those things into alignment. There’s trade agreements that we still need to abide by, but there are lots of things that organizations can do. Look at – what is the capacity in your area and how do we make sure that we’re going to be buying those things and then measure that and like tell that story so that it can build awareness and momentum. 

Mary W. Rowe: Maybe it’s like a checkup, eh? Annually you look and say, where are we spending our money? And what could we be doing differently to replace it? This is a kind of …  

Tori Williamson: We’re doing really interesting market capacity projects right now where we’re looking at infrastructure investments in the construction sector and saying, what do we have for workforce development? What do we have for local suppliers? And how can we be strategic about this project so that we’re building those connections and we’re maximizing the opportunities? 

Mary W. Rowe: Wonderful. Doug, one thing. 

Doug Griffiths: First, I want to say, Matthew, I don’t disagree. I’m really glad you added that. I agree. And Rino, I really agree with you too. I don’t think… I don’t think it’s putting it’s not putting Canada first. It’s making Canada better that we need to focus on.  

Mary W. Rowe: It’s a shame you guys don’t get along, really. 

Doug Griffiths: So if I added one thing, it is that everything we need to survive this issue with the terror potential, the taxes, the financing, the entrepreneurship, the infrastructure, the building communities, all the labor issues, all of that stuff together. What is going to help us through this tariff crisis now is exactly what we need to do even if the tariff crisis goes away to make Canada stronger. We cannot lose that sense of urgency. 

Mary W. Rowe: Yep. Yeah, and we’ve just got to have a thick skin while we do this. Rino, one thing, what would you do? 

Rino Bortolin: I’m going to reiterate what Matthew said. If we invest in transit infrastructure and housing and create some of the best cities in the world and best places in the world, 

investment will flow. People will come. We already have the natural resources and a beautiful country physically. If we build the best cities in the world, a lot of those things will flow from there. 

Mary W. Rowe: Matthew, last word to you. One thing, what would you do? 

Matthew Mendelsohn: I’m just repeating myself, but I would really… I would really look at our investment dollars. The spending is important. And to me, it’s not a checkup once a year. It’s like a changed mindset. And it’s a change about risk. Like we all hope the United States changes. We all hope that Trump whatever. But we have to manage for risk, which is that this might be a semi-permanent shift in the United States about who their allies are and America First. And so if that’s the reality, we have to manage that risk and think every day about how we’re investing in Canada, for that world. 

Mary W. Rowe: Where’s our money going? Let’s leave on that thoughtful note, everybody here can think about that. They can think about it at every scale, whether it’s our individual money, our shared money, our collective money, where’s our money going and try to 

insulate ourselves from all the noise and double down on all these things that we’ve just talked about that are things that have been challenging and liabilities long before the current political landscape arrived. So thank you everybody for joining us. We’re not losing … people are saying, “oh, I wish I had more than an hour”. Did you hear that, guys? They wanted more than an hour with you. We always say at CityTalk, “it’s not the end of the conversation. It’s the beginning”. And we are doing another one on the 27th. We’re going to keep at it every couple of weeks. And next time we’re going to talk about exactly what Justin and Rino and Matthew and Doug … all of you actually and Tori, have been advocating for, which is “How do we form these kinds of regional relationships, whether there’s a border there or not, to kind of make the point that we are interdependent and how does that work for everybody”? Justin, thank you for tuning in. Even though your video didn’t work as well, we saw you briefly and we heard you. Rino, Doug, Matthew, Tori, great to have you on CityTalk. Thanks, everybody. Happy Valentine’s Day.