Preville on Politics

Another Inconvenient Truth

Posted on November 22, 2007 by Philip Preville

Cities are the engines of the national economy. This is the assertion that girds every call for more money for municipalities: cities are the source of the country’s wealth, and they need major repairs to keep churning out prosperity. Alas for cities, this morning’s Statscan Daily argues otherwise. Real income per capita has been growing far faster in Canada than in the United States in the past seven years, not because cities are such unstoppable juggernauts of economic growth but because commodity prices—oil and minerals—have gone through the roof. It turns out that the engines of the national economy are Sudbury, Fort McMurray and Prince George, not Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Oops.

None of this changes the fact that the country’s civic infrastructure is falling apart. It just makes the case for cities harder to argue, especially with a federal government whose power base does not lie with cities, and which believes that it could throw billions into cities and come away without a single seat to show for their largesse.

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joe November 22, 2007 at 10:27 a.m.

This may come as news to you, but Sudbury, Fort McMurray and Prince George are municipalities, too. Lots of people in Canada live in cities that are not Vancouver, Montreal or Toronto.

Sudbury - 157,000 people
Fort McMurray - 64,000 people
Prince George - 71,000 people

Will November 26, 2007 at 11:37 a.m.

Joe's stats here actually support Phil's argument. So, Sudbury has two seats in Parliament, P.G. and the Fort one seat each (roughly), Toronto has many times that. We are more likely to see policies from the Federal Conservatives that sell easily to rural voters, and less so to urban ones.

Michael November 26, 2007 at 4:31 p.m.

And if we take Joe's stats and extrapolate the seat representation Toronto at about 2.3 million should have about 29 seats in the House of Commons and not the 21 (and 1 shared with Pickering) it currently has. If we use Fort McMurray as a baseline, Toronto should have 35-36 seats.
But Mr. Harper and Mr. VanLoan don't see things that way at all. More seats for BC and Alberta.


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Philip Preville

Veteran freelance writer Philip Preville lived much of his life in Montreal and Edmonton before he was lured, like so many Torontonians before him, by the promise of more work and a better living. A National Magazine Award winner and former Canadian Journalism Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Massey College, Preville writes Toronto Life’s politics column. He lives with his wife and one-year-old son in Riverdale, just close enough to the Don Valley Parkway that he can hear it when he steps outside his house—but just far enough away that it doesn’t keep him awake at night. On his office wall hangs a 1938–39 press pass belonging to his grandfather, Elias Gannon, who wrote for the Montreal Star.


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