Roger Martin and Richard Florida of the University of Toronto business school published a report last year on the future of the Ontario economy that had city boosters celebrating.
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They argued that the future belongs to jurisdictions that build a creative economy based on ideas and education and nurtured in large cities.
The implication was that dependence on the traditional resource economy and the manufacturing economy that followed it is not a strategy for the future.
Urban columnists saw it as a prophecy of decline for all those spaces outside urban centres.
There are three different Ontarios, wrote Toronto’s John Barber: creative city economies; failing industrial cities and towns that will have to be reinvented; and “a rural hinterland doomed to decline, its only hope being to forge new connections to larger, denser regions where people and ideas are fast-moving.”
That kind of argument drives Darrin Qualman to distraction, a symptom of an urban and intellectual disrespect for rural Canada.
“I think that rural people feel a profound sense of being under-appreciated,” said the research director for the National Farmers Union.
“A million people in Calgary produce nothing of fundamental wealth and a million people in Saskatchewan are probably the highest per capita producers of wealth in the world, but the million people in Calgary are vastly wealthier.”
The Martin-Florida report extolled urban creativity, but it did not write off the rural economy. Instead, it said the two should be linked.
“We must build province-wide geographic advantage,” they wrote.
“We have a strong economic core, but we need to improve the connection of the cities, towns and regions across the province – linking our older industrial communities and disconnected rural areas to the mega-region.”
The report ranks farmers high on the skills needed to achieve workplace accomplishments – just below biomedical engineers and surgeons on analytical skills, mid-level in social intelligence and at the top of the heap in physical skills.
Toronto mayor David Miller said the important part of the report’s recommendations is the call for linkages.
“I do think Mr. Florida is right about the very significant importance economically of what he calls the creative economy,” he said.
“But I also believe there is a synergy between the city and the country. I think both rural and urban have to understand that the industries of the future will have to be green.”
Miller said city people should help farm communities by stressing more local food in their diets.
They should also not object to tax dollars being spent on farm programs.
“If public tax dollars go to help farmers in the areas surrounding Toronto, it is good for Toronto.”
In the same way, rural residents should not resent the attention and investment that mega-cities such as Toronto receive.
“It is my view that the future of the economy flows through the major cities and the challenge is to make sure that that benefits the rural areas as well,” he said.
“There is an incredible synergy between research that is done in Toronto labs and what happens on the ground in northern Saskatchewan and northern Alberta. I think that is a link that is often overlooked.”
