Who is this guy anyways?

I assume anyone reading this already knows me. But in case this thing gets improbably popular, I might as well introduce myself.

I’m Steve. I’m 41 years old and I’ve been a public policy analyst in some shape or form since around 2010. I’ve published dozens of papers with various think tanks and I’ve written columns for every Canadian print media outlet, as far as I can tell.

I’m interested in cities, big and small.

My roots are in Northern Ontario, but as an army brat I moved around for most of my childhood. I continued that habit into adulthood. I’ve lived all around Ontario (Sudbury, Ottawa, Cornwall, Waterloo, Toronto) and Western Canada (Edmonton, Regina, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Calgary).

I also travel a lot - both for work and pleasure, which are often one and the same. By mid-July I’ll have been to 44 of the lower 48 states. I spend a lot of time in the New York metro area, which I’ll explain in a subsequent post.

I’ve made a career writing about issues facing North American cities. Housing and transportation challenges facing large cities like Toronto are two of the topics I research and comment on most often. But I’m also interested in the future of smaller and mid-sized cities.

Conceptually, the problems facing big cities are kind of simple. For the most part, they’re not building things fast enough. Toronto is a prime example. The city faces growth pressures like no other North American metropolitan area. We have no trouble attracting people, and we’ve got the resources to pay for what we need. Most communities aren’t that lucky.

The 2016 Presidential election was a stark reminder. While things seemed to be going pretty well in North America, those of us in major cities missed some deep economic challenges facing smaller communities. The “China shock” that lead to rapid de-industrialization of manufacturing towns is something that parts of the American Rustbelt have not recovered from. Trade with China was very good for the continent on the whole, but we failed to ensure that the losers from trade liberalization were made whole. It left behind a lot of resentment. It was right beneath the surface for a very long time, but it bubbled over in 2016.

I was thinking about making a career transition in the run-up to that election. I felt bad for the communities that felt they didn’t have much choice but to roll the dice on a conman. I wanted to help. Not just because I felt bad for them, but because I recognized them. I grew up in a lot of places that aren’t all that different from the types of communities that voted for Trump. I can put faces to those votes.

I know, I know. This is Canada. Things are different here. You don’t have to make everything about the Orange Man. It’s true. At least so far, it seems that Canada has dodged the populist storm that blew threw most of the western world. Even the populists that get elected here have a soft, Canadian edge. We also don’t have that many of the stereotypical single industry towns that aren’t very adaptable to modern economic realities. We’re concentrated along a few metropolitan areas that are mostly doing well.

Mostly. The realities aren’t the same everywhere. Ontario is a microcosm. Toronto and cities within the GTA are mostly doing fine or better. Further flung communities, less so. Southwestern Ontario was hit by a lot of the same forces as the US rustbelt. Northern and Eastern Ontario are beset by long term challenges. People are going to demand better sooner or later. We should get ahead of that.

Diffusing resentment isn’t my primary motivation, but it is what got me thinking about this. It was hard not to spend a lot of time thinking about the forces that brought Donald Trump’s little hands within reach of the nuclear codes. Frankly, it was hard for me not to resent the people who made that happen.

Once the Trump-era (hopefully) ended with the US midterms last year, I started to think a little more clearly about this.

While Canada doesn’t have an archipelago of de-industrialized exurban cities like Ohio or Wisconsin, we do have communities grappling with long-term stagnation or decline. It’s easy to say “find a job somewhere else,” for those of us in dynamic labour markets. If a sector declines in a big market like Toronto, something else will pop up to take it’s place. That’s less automatic in resource or manufacturing towns.

Smaller communities aren’t all bad news stories, though. The land grab that happened during COVID really highlighted that a lot of people in major cities want more space. While some of us are big city dwellers by choice, a lot of people were here mostly to be close to work. With more flexible work options, people can live further from the office than they used to. The results of that have been abundantly clear in smaller cities in and around the GTA. If flexible work continues to prevail, people will keep moving to smaller cities outside of normal commuting distance. That’s both a major challenge and an exciting opportunity.

I want to focus more on the opportunities than the challenges, though I’m sure I’ll touch on both. I haven’t settled on a format yet, but I’ll try a few ideas out and see what works. This will be more personal and subjective than my usual fare. Hopefully it will be interesting and maybe a little funny. It’ll also be disorganized, inconsistent, maybe even chaotic. Such is life - or mine, anyways.

Thanks in advance for following along!

Steve