I am a student who recently left Winnipeg for studies and job opportunities in the Nation's Capital Region. What can medium sized cities like Winnipeg do to create opportunities for young people?

Glen Murray:
Great question. Provide two things: jobs and excitement.

First, city governments have to take an intergenerational perspective. By that I mean every decision a local government makes should be focused on what impact it will on the environment, economy, health and culture of the city for the next generation.

Livability is one of the biggest factors in where people decide to live and where creative people decide to live is where investors look to put their money.

Cities have to have activist city governments that can invest in innovation, design, art, sports, entertainment and support local culture.

Let’s take Winnipeg where you and I lived. The redevelopment of the exchange district and Corydon in Winnipeg are examples. They are places with a vibe or buzz. Rezoning the district to a mixed use lie-work precinct, introducing tax credits equivalent to the difference between the market rents generated by a heritage building and the cost of restoration and maintenance triggered the redevelopment of 36 properties.

Free transit in the district, major increases in arts and cultural funding, theatre and festival programs and a strong commitment to public safety with defensible space design initiatives and 21 new dedicated police offices in the downtown all helped begin to restore the historic heart of the city.

The relocation of Red River College's creative and design programs to the Exchange and the support given to the local special effects and multimedia cluster and nascent film industry all contributed to the formation of a creative media cluster in the Exchange and the return of construction cranes and shops to the streets.

Public works as public art are also important to place-making and projects like the inhabited pedestrian bridge or new downtown library are examples of this concept.
Collaborative governance was also critical and the success of Centre Venture, a development agency that facilitated private and public sector collaboration, was an essential ingredient. Unfortunately, the city government disengaged from this approach four years ago.

City leaders need to facilitate research and development by supporting a strong university and business network to accelerate the movement of ideas to market. This is important to a city’s capacity to generate innovative and interesting employment.

Economic development initiatives in biomaterials and aerospace were example of this approach in the Peg. The success of RIM (BlackBerrys) in Waterloo is an excellent example of the dynamic of innovation at work in a mid-sized city.

Activist government partnerships to mobilize capital from the private sector and co-ordinate government investment are also essential. In Winnipeg, the Hydro building, MTS Centre, library, baseball park, Thunderbird House, the residential district on Waterfront Drive, the Forks and the Human Rights Museum are examples of how quickly these things can happen with a partnership approach.

In Ottawa, I am going to take a guess that the Byward market, Rideau Canal and Gatineau Hills are destinations you frequent. These are the authentic and essential cultural, natural and commercial assets that express the authenticity and livability of a city.

They attract creative people. With 80 per cent of new urban jobs being generated by the creative science, arts, and engineering, culture and design sectors of the economy, which wholly depend on retaining a creative workforce, this is critical. I am a little homesick lol! Good luck to you in your new city.

How do you convince politicians to spend money on cities when it will cost them votes in rural Canada? Is the system skewed so that rural voters are over-represented?

Glen Murray:
Every community has jobs that it does to support a civil and prosperous society. Cities, as my friend Jane Jacobs would say, have the important job of generating wealth and they do that for the entire country.

I am always disappointed when I hear politicians play the divisive rural-urban card. Just as we need food from farms, we need cities to generate capital and strong labour markets.

There is nothing stopping a smart politician from drawing a direct line from the capital and labour markets of cities and the food and resource markets of rural towns by identifying the common policies needed to see both thrive.
The reality is that rural or smalltown Canada and urban Canada face very similar challenges.

These problems include an aging population, aging buildings, brown energy sources, decline in cultural resources, limited tax base, loss of public services, declining infrastructure, loss of traditional businesses, poverty and few resources to fix their problems.

The so-called urbanization of Canada has actually been the massive suburbanization of Canada over the last 50 years. While many urban experts talk about a country that is now 80 per cent urban, they actually are talking about a country that is at least 50 per cent suburban.

So a smart politician would talk about the need to revitalize urban and rural Canada and identify both the common challenges and a shift in federal fiscal policy and taxation to stop the subsidization of sprawl and restore the values, policies and prices (taxes) that would support
reinvestment in existing built environments over greenfield development.

This would be essential to the renewal of both the rural and urban economy. Finally, a national strategy to shift suburban Canada to a low-energy, low-emissions environment and a specific plan to mix employment lands with residential developments so people can walk to work would be a foundation of more affordable, livable and walkable suburbs. Wouldn’t it be great to live a neighborhood where you don’t need use a litre of gas to get a litre of milk?

I haven’t seen a serious discussion about this yet. I also think the biggest challenge is that cities and rural regions need greater autonomy and abilities to solve their own challenges.

We don’t have a national manufacturing economy in the sense that most of us understood as we grew up. In the 1950s and '60s, two-thirds of Canadians worked in production and manufacturing.

Now, in a place like the GTA, about 80 per cent of the new jobs are generated in fields where people create, research, experiment, design, think, perform and imagine for a living. I still think politicians are building policies around quaint notions of an economy that no longer exists.

Capital, people and ideas are highly mobile and the places that they settle and are attracted to are the places that tend to be the most prosperous.

The conditions and factors that drive prosperity are generally local and global and national institutions play a secondary role in most of the major factors that determine a city's ability to generate wealth.

Canada’s economy is very much a series of regional economies with different resource and employment bases that trade and interact with other regional economies around the world. Toronto and Calgary have very different needs and policy responses. While the GTA struggles, some resource-based regions like Sudbury are prospering.

Can you please come back and be Mayor again?

Seriously. Please?

Glen Murray:
Thanks.

I would have to get a job back home in Winnipeg first and that is hard with the current political climate there. My family drew a line in the sand when I turned down many job offers out of town hoping to find something in the Peg. After a long time and few prospects, I promised them the next job offer that was reasonable I would take wherever it was. So here I am in Toronto.

I miss the city and the people who are the friendliest folks in the country. Thanks for your kind and generous invitation.

Grab a Nip on the “Dink” bridge for me lol!

How do we as Canadians affect smarter growth in our municipalities, especially in mid-western Canada where we have an abundance of land to annex (usually top farming soil too...) and expand and sprawl into?

Thank you.

Glen Murray:
There are many ways to do this. One of the most direct is end all public subsidy of green field development.

Federal infrastructure programs have been particularly bad contributors in giving communities that don’t have significant infrastructure repair and renewal needs the same amount of money those older urban and rural communities with serious repair bills are allotted.

That has meant that newer communities often spend those federal and provincial subsidies on new roads, water and sewer treatment facilities that mature municipalities have paid for and continue to pay for with locally generated property tax and utility revenues that drive their costs and taxes up disproportionately to the peripheral new developments.

So the first step would be to end these “perverse” subsidies of virgin land and allow the economies associated with already-serviced land to be realized. The more compact development and the closer it is to existing municipal services should make it smarter and less expensive to build.

Toronto has just announced a tax increase. Is this the only option for municipalities to raise revenue?

What is the balance right now for a major city? ie. how much does, say, Calgary pay in tax to the feds vs. how much it gets back?

Glen Murray:
You have really been paying attention!

Cities collect between six and 13 per cent of all taxes that their citizens and businesses pay. Municipalities in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Atlantic Canada are at or close to six per cent and cities in Alberta and B.C. collect 11 to 13 per cent of total tax revenues. Usually the federal government taxes most heavily at 50 to 60 per cent of tax revenues and the provinces get 40 to 50 per cent of the taxes you pay each year. Again, this varies between regions.

Unlike the United States where most cities can raise sales and other taxes, almost all Canadian cities are limited to property taxes, land development charges, utility charges, program fees and transit fares.

The Conservative government, while it blew away a $12-billion annual surplus, also managed to increase annual federal government revenues by over $39 billion in less than three years. This increase is greater than the annual revenues of all municipal governments in Canada put together.

They did this while "cutting" taxes. Federal revenues escalate rapidly because income taxes, sales taxes and most federal revenue sources are tied to economic activity and income that often grows a rate that outpaces inflation.
Property taxes rarely grow at a rate that even approaches inflation and new tax revenue from new residential development is often consumed by the costs of servicing those new neighbourhoods which outstrips the associated growth in the tax base.

The challenge for cities is to build their tax base, not their tax burden. If you have a look the first answer, the one in response to Kirby, you will see a summary of what I was involved with when I was a city councillor and mayor in Winnipeg. These measures drove investment and built a tax base. Through partnerships with business, labour and the non-profit sector in everything from technology, commercialization of research, downtown renewal and neighbourhood housing partnerships we managed to mobilize capital and people to solve problems and start to rebuild the city and its tax base.

These activities provoked a great deal of development in already serviced areas of Winnipeg and saw the tax base in the affected districts grow by as much as 40 per cent in just a few years.

When I was mayor, we froze or cut taxes every year, cut the cumulative debt of the city in half and through attrition and information technology innovation streamlined the workforce and cost of government. The city’s credit was upgraded four times over this period. This was an investment and value-based approach, not a cost-cutting or tax-raising strategy.

Toronto and many Canadian cities are focused on cost-side solutions to meeting urban challenges which drive up taxes. The right wing of many cities is afraid of engaging and working with labour and often sees government as a glorified utility created to fix pipes and pavement and hire police officers.

I would call this utilitarian approach “3P” government. The old left in city politics associates an almost moral value to public expenditure that follows a credo that only tax revenues can be used to develop city infrastructure and provide services. There is a phobia about private investment, an attitude that profit is a bad word and collaboration with the other city builders outside of government is only to provide advice. This is also pretty utilitarian.

Cities are mostly built by citizens' hard work and entrepreneurial risk embracing capital.
Local governments that can embrace risk, mobilize capital and work from the investment side of the balance sheet by identifying and capturing the return on investment from public infrastructure and initiatives tend to mobilize the creativity needed for to build great cities. This is critical because 80 per cent of the urban environment is not constructed by local governments.

The traditions of right-wing politicians leaving city building to "market" forces and left-wing politicians leaving solutions to more public spending render the local government incapable of engaging private and non-profit sector leaders and the bulk of economic and cultural activity that drives city building.

In my view, the cities that live lightly on the land, are highly activist and play the role of community-engaged funders and facilitators of city building rather than provider of all services or a handmaiden to market activity are the most successful.

Cities that raise taxes beyond rates of growth in the local economy slowly decline. Provinces and the federal government need not give cities more money but rather better, greener and more citizen- and business-friendly tax choices that allow cities to retain a sufficient amount of the tax revenues they generate to maintain the public realm and reinvest in the things that sustain an excellent quality of life.

The Liberal government of Ontario has done more than just about any other province in trying to address urban issues in the last few years. The provincial Conservatives in Alberta transferred gas tax revenues to large cities and past provincial governments in B.C. turned 11.5 cents a litre of gas tax over to Translink, the greater Vancouver transit system. Both these initiatives were breakthroughs in provincial contributions to building the capacity and competitiveness of urban regions.

Can you come back and be mayor again???

Glen Murray:
Would you head up my campaign?

Sometimes cities find that they have to bid for sporting events in order to leverage public funds from provinces and Ottawa. You were mayor during the 1999 Pan-Am games. Was it worth it? Whould other cities do the same thing? (Toronto is going for the Pan-Ams right now)

Glen Murray:
The Pan Am Games were held in Winnipeg twice, in 1967 and again in 1999. The second Games cost about $200 million and the net cost to the city was less than $15 million. I believe the other governments ended up in black on the project given the economic stimulus and net new tax revenues.

Yes, I absolutely support these events. Pan Am was a great cultural event as well as a sporting event. I wish the City of Toronto much success in their bid and I would gladly help. One of the challenges is Toronto doesn’t often look to other Canadian cities for help and in the competition for international events they could learn a lot from Winnipeg, Montreal, Calgary and particularly Vancouver.

Premier McGuinty is on the right track here.

Hi Glen,
With gas prices skyrocketing, why are federal politicians not getting behind rail and bus transit?

Glen Murray:
Because most federal cabinet ministers enjoy free door-to-door limousine service? Lol!

I think that the federal government has failed to see any real value in investing in transit when most provinces and urban-suburban municipal governments were only approving automobile-dependent, low-density development.

The urban cores of cities where transit is needed are not swing battleground ridings and the rural areas are also mostly uncompetitive with one party dominating. The real competition for seats is the massive belt of suburban communities that surround most urban centres. Transit is not only difficult to make work in this low density environment; it doesn’t get any votes, while publicly subsidized toll-free expressways do get lots of votes.

Transit technology with a few exceptions is rather unimaginative and public transit in most communities is bus-based. In the middle class value system of many regions of Canada, success and independence are associated with owning a car and transit ridership is considered a transportation option of last resort.

Finally, governments tax the heck out of people who build transit-friendly development or choose to live in compact developments contrary to their own official land use and transportation plans. My company, located a few blocks from a subway in central Toronto, pays three times the property taxes of a similar-sized business in an auto-dependent commercial park in the 905 suburban belt. I live in a transit-serviced high-rise and I have the privilege of paying property taxes at 150 per cent of the rate per square foot of someone whose home is a house on a large lot on a cul de sac.

The irony is that transit not only has environmental benefits; the density and mixed use compact development that it supports tend to generate greater property value, better pedestrian flow at street level to support local businesses and residents and much lower energy use. In other words, it builds the tax base, not the tax burden.