Anne Golden.
In a six-week series of interviews, Canadians with a variety of experiences discuss the major challenges our country is facing and how best to address them. This instalment deals with building healthy communities.
Anne Golden, former chief executive officer of the Conference Board of Canada, was interviewed Sept. 12 by Adam Kahane, chairman, North America, of Reos Partners.
Kahane: What is going on in Canada that you think needs attention?
Golden: Two forces are transforming the world: globalization and urbanization. Both focus on cities. By globalization, I mean all of the changes that have been facilitated by the technology revolution, including the restructuring of the economy, the intensification of competition and the growing speed at which all of these things are happening. The IT revolution is reshaping everything – every industry and job, education, health care, democracy, even how people think and communicate. The second major force, urbanization, is a demographic revolution. A few years ago, we passed the point where more than half the world now lives in cities. In Canada, 80 per cent of us live in towns of 10,000 or more inhabitants. Combined with the aging of the population and the dependence of our economy on immigration, our cities face huge challenges. And that's where people are going, where innovation is occurring, where the wealth of the country is generated, where our major educational and health care institutions are concentrated. Cities punch above their weight when it comes to creating the country's GDP. The future success of our cities is pivotal to Canada's ability to compete in the global economy.
Kahane: If things turn out badly over the next 20 years, what would have happened?
Golden: We will fail if we don't invest in the changes that are needed. For example, in Toronto, we've barely invested at all in infrastructure; since 2000, we've made some improvements but not enough to deal with our backlog. We need to invest in new construction and waste management and energy systems. We need to improve how we develop and grow, by linking our transit decisions to our development decisions. And we will fail if we don't address growing income inequality through a combination of tax changes and program innovations.
The cause of these failures would be poor leadership, it would be politics, and it would be the public's unwillingness to pay more taxes. Right now, a lot of people are working very hard on some of these issues, but we're stalled because we've had poor leadership. As a result, people tend to distrust politicians to make wise decisions. The zeitgeist today is that nobody wants to pay more taxes, even to do good things like addressing poverty and homelessness. You'd have to shift the climate of opinion to move people from the "stop the train" side of the equation to the investment side of the equation.
Kahane: If you could ask a clairvoyant anything about the future, what would you want to know?
Golden: Will we address the congestion and connection issues that are so fundamental to the prosperity of our cities? If we don't entice people out of their cars and if we don't connect all parts of the region, we will pay a steep price in terms of productivity losses and lessened quality of life. With the arrival of new groups, will we be able to continue to achieve the openness and tolerance that has been key to our success, or will it result in tensions as it has elsewhere in the world? Finally, will we be able to address the growing income divide and so blunt the harsh edges of capitalism? We had hoped that participation in a globalized knowledge economy would increase living standards everywhere, that all boats would rise, but we're finding that the yachts are rising faster than the rowboats. In Toronto, you can see the stagnation of the middle class and very little improvement in the poorer classes.
Possible Canadas is a project created by Reos Partners, the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation and a diverse coalition of philanthropic and community organizations. For longer versions of these interviews, or to join the conversation, visit possiblecanadas.ca