“How Toronto Lost Its Groove”In the wake of Pierre Trudeau’s landslide 1969 majority, several ambitious, activist policymakers began thinking about the relationship between Canada’s cities and the federal government. At the time, recounts Daniel Coates, then an advisor to Trudeau cabinet minister Robert Andras, a handful of influential federal bureaucrats had become increasingly preoccupied by urban growth, traffic, and housing. As they delved into the policy issues, they began to see that federal policy had a huge but largely uncoordinated impact on Canadian cities. “Nobody was thinking about it or talking about it,” Coates says. “But the dollar figures were stupendous. That was the compelling reason for [establishing] the Minister of State for Urban Affairs.”
With American cities facing dramatic upheavals, Coates recalls that his team began researching deeply, consulting prominent thinkers like Jay Forrester, a professor of computer engineering at MIT’s Sloan School of Management who had applied his work on dynamic systems to urban development. Inspired, Coates says his group started investigating the economic linkages between Canadian cities.
The bureaucrats pulled together an analysis and presented it to Trudeau’s cabinet. Their prediction: that Canada’s largest cities, especially Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, would soak up population growth, eventually becoming too large and too congested. Coates recalls showing the cabinet a map of Canada circa 2000, with “big red balls” indicating the population concentration in the large urban centres. The country, they predicted, would change dramatically. Time has proven them to be correct.
Out of that analysis came a bold idea, says Coates: linking Quebec City to Windsor with a high-speed rail line. It wasn’t just about improving rail passenger service, he adds. The real goal was to use an ambitious transportation infrastructure project to direct some population growth away from Toronto and Montreal. Indeed, the strategy would see Kingston become a major growth centre, equipped with an international airport, as a means of taking some of the pressure off Toronto and Montreal. “It was the most imaginative urban policy you could imagine,” he says.
For a short period, Trudeau convinced Quebec premier Robert Bourassa that Ottawa could pursue a federal urban affairs strategy (through MSUA) without trampling the provinces’ constitutional right to oversee municipal government. That short-lived experiment spawned a surge of federally backed affordable housing complexes, as well as a handful of trophy projects for big cities, including Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre, built in 1972.
As for that high-speed train, that idea, of course, never left the station.
The Walrus HOOPP Pension Debate
Be It Resolved That Canadians Are Incapable
of Saving for Their Retirement Needs Alone
12 pm, Wednesday, May 30 at
Hart House Debate Room, Toronto
The Walrus Glenbow Debate
Calgary’s Cowboy Culture:
Living Legacy or Just History?
6:30 pm, Thursday, June 7 at
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