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Carry-on Economics · CityTalk Canada

• 0:11
  Mary Rowe: Hi, this is the City Talk Podcast brought to you by the Canadian Urban Institute or C UI, and I'm Mary Rowe.
• 0:17
  Mary Rowe: Uh, this rather dramatic opening music, courtesy of our producer Andre, is from Airport.
• 0:22
  Mary Rowe: You have to be of a certain age to remember Airport, the original 1970 movie adaptation or adaptation of Canadian author Arthur Haley's best-selling novel.
• 0:30
  Mary Rowe: I forgot that Arthur Haley was Canadian.
• 0:32
  Mary Rowe: Thank you, Andre.
• 0:33
  Mary Rowe: That's quite right.
• 0:34
  Mary Rowe: You can likely guess the three reasons we chose this theme for this episode Airports, obviously, Canadian storytelling, and bestsellers, all of which were in evidence this week in Toronto at the Canadian Investment Summit.
• 0:46
  Mary Rowe: But is there, as in the novel and the movie, a potential disaster looming around this scenario?
• 0:51
  Mary Rowe: I guess it depends on whom you ask.
• 0:53
  Mary Rowe: Right now, Sean Spear of the University of Toronto's Monk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, an editor at large of the Hub Media Center, is here to have a chat with me about what the heck is going on.
• 1:05
  Mary Rowe: Sean, thanks for coming on City Talk.
• 1:08
  Mary Rowe: I just want to add a little quick little connector here, which is that you and I first started to correspond when you were writing at Monk a lot about rural places and what I felt was a kind of reminder that the economy lives in places.
• 1:22
  Mary Rowe: And uh so I wrote you cold and said, you know, could we have a conversation about this?
• 1:26
  Mary Rowe: Because I feel like that narrative is forgotten and that we tend to be so focused on sectors.
• 1:31
  Mary Rowe: And that was probably six or seven years ago that you and I started corresponding when I was first in this job.
• 1:36
  Mary Rowe: And uh uh and then you know, events have overtaken us, and here we are uh kind of seeing in to my mind anyway, the uh geopolitical manifestation of that, that that here we are talking about big sectors, big investments.
• 1:51
  Mary Rowe: So, with that preamble, give us a give us a sense of what you're thinking.
• 1:55
  Sean Speer: I am so grateful to be here.
• 1:56
  Sean Speer: I'm such a fan of Citytalk and the work that you and your team do, Mary.
• 2:01
  Sean Speer: Uh, I hope before we wrap up, we can talk about some of the issues that I know are of shared interest, particularly around the future of Canadian Federation, uh, Canadian federalism, rather.
• 2:12
  Sean Speer: Just in parentheses, Mary, I was uh reading some analysis here in the United States where I where I reside with my family uh in recent weeks, and it made me think of you for all of the problems with Canadian federalism.
• 2:27
  Sean Speer: Man, it's a better system than the what they have here in the United States.
• 2:31
  Sean Speer: And perhaps that's like a through line for a lot of today's conversation.
• 2:36
  Mary Rowe: We had you on a city talk um last year, I think, where you and I kind of looked at each other, locked, we were, I can't remember what the broader topic was, but we locked eyes at each other and said, Well, who is the federation working for?
• 2:47
  Mary Rowe: And and I think you uh, you know, in an apocryphal way said, we've had this discussion for years that the way in which money moves, the way in which governance and policy is being decided from the federal to provincial to the municipal and and then to whoever uh level is broken.
• 3:03
  Mary Rowe: And if we I think you said if we don't fix this in the next eight to ten years, we've got a problem.
• 3:08
  Mary Rowe: And and here we are.
• 3:10
  Mary Rowe: We got we got some referendum around the corner, and clearly it's not working for lots of folks.
• 3:16
  Sean Speer: Yeah, there's like a parallel universe, Mary, where I don't go into politics and journalism and so on, and I am an obscure history professor, you know, in Thunder Bay or something like that.
• 3:30
  Sean Speer: I was really interested as a young person in the efforts of the Rowell-Sirois Commission in the late 1930s, trying to make sense of Canadian fiscal federalism and the aftermath of the Depression.
• 3:43
  Sean Speer: Um, I think that work was really foundational for the kind of unfolding of our system of fiscal federalism in the decades to follow.
• 3:50
  Sean Speer: But the truth is we've been kind of doing it ad hoc almost ever since.
• 3:54
  Sean Speer: Yeah, it's almost been a hundred years since we carried out that kind of systematic review of uh who does what and who pays for what and so on.
• 4:06
  Sean Speer: And in the intervening time, a lot has changed.
• 4:08
  Sean Speer: Uh not only have our cities become uh kind of more fundamental to the country as sources of economic activity and kind of social relations, we've seen major jurisprudence with respect to indigenous governance that in some ways has really challenged a lot of our assumptions of fiscal federalism.
• 4:29
  Sean Speer: So I don't mean to digress uh because I know there are a lot of more urgent issues looming over our country, but I just wanted to make a point that the fiscal federalism concerns that you and I share are kind of a secular issue that we can't afford to kind of take our eyes off.
• 4:50
  Sean Speer: And as I say, notwithstanding some of the concerns that we have about the kind of fiscal sustainability of our system of fiscal federalism, of the kind of overlapping and duplicative and oftentimes kind of unaccountable labyrinth of intergovernmental dynamics, in relative terms, there are still aspects of our system that are a model compared, as I say, to the way that they do federalism here in the United States.
• 5:20
  Sean Speer: Uh, but but more generally, just on your point of where we find ourselves, you know, I kind of think of myself as an ideas determinist.
• 5:29
  Mary Rowe: You know, that is to say, I think that all things, you're an ideas determinist.
• 5:35
  Mary Rowe: I'm just writing that down.
• 5:36
  Mary Rowe: Okay.
• 5:37
  Sean Speer: That all things being equal, ideas uh are what ultimately matters.
• 5:41
  Sean Speer: You know, there was a great 20th century American historian named Richard Weaver who wrote a book called Ideas Have Consequences.
• 5:48
  Sean Speer: And there's a contemporary historian named Gary Gertzel who's looked at what he describes as these paradigms that kind of govern our politics, even if we don't necessarily think about them in those terms or see them.
• 6:03
  Sean Speer: But from roughly the period of the Rowell-Sirois Commission until about the 1970s, we had a kind of paradigm, a shared understanding of markets, of government, of society.
• 6:13
  Sean Speer: You might call it the Roosevelt paradigm, you might call it the mixed economy paradigm, whatever.
• 6:19
  Sean Speer: Um, the distinction between, say, the conservatives and the liberals in that era was within the kind of bounds of the 40-yard lines, if I can put it that way.
• 6:27
  Sean Speer: You know, the famous 1974 election where Robert Stanfield calls for price and wage controls, and then after the election, the government of Pierre Elliot Trudeau enacts them in a way as a kind of reflection of that, yeah, of that paradigm.
• 6:39
  Sean Speer: And as that model came to break down for various reasons, uh, it was um almost seamlessly replaced by a new paradigm, what you might characterize as the Reagan-Thatcher paradigm, or the neoliberal paradigm, or the Washington Consensus.
• 6:55
  Sean Speer: It's one that similarly found commonality between Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, or uh Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, or Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien and say Stephen Harper.
• 7:07
  Sean Speer: Um, but it seems to me that that paradigm in hindsight similarly started to kind of break down, probably sometime around the global financial crisis and Donald Trump's election in 2016 when we first started to get to know each other was kind of a disjunctive moment.
• 7:21
  Sean Speer: What's different this time around is that there wasn't a kind of alternative or successor paradigm in waiting.
• 7:29
  Sean Speer: And I think a big part of the destabilized and kind of tumultuous and often unedifying politics in the Anglo-American world and beyond for the past decade or so is in part because we don't have that shared kind of vocabulary or or set of ideas about the proper relationship between individuals in the state and the market and pluralism and all the rest.
• 7:58
  Sean Speer: And um it seems to me that there are a bunch of different constituencies trying to make the case to be the ones who define and shape the next paradigm.
• 8:10
  Sean Speer: Um and I think that's playing out at the level of geopolitics.
• 8:14
  Sean Speer: It's playing out, of course, here where I am in the United States.
• 8:18
  Sean Speer: And I think Canada is trying to kind of navigate a world where we don't have that kind of shared foundation.
• 8:27
  Sean Speer: And that was on display this week at Prime Minister Carney's Investment Summit.
• 8:32
  Sean Speer: And you can see other political actors in Canada trying to kind of make sense of all of this.
• 8:36
  Sean Speer: And yes, of course, there's economics at play, there's politics, but I think at the most basic level, it's us trying to kind of work through what are the underlying ideas that are gonna guide and shape policymaking and politics for you know the coming years.
• 8:58
  Mary Rowe: I'm just taking all that in.
• 8:59
  Mary Rowe: I mean, I I'm agreeing with the through line that you have there, you know, just as a non-academic, non never heading into an academic professorship in Thunder Bay or anywhere else, um, I have my sort of layman's version of what you just described, which is this that I remember Stevie Cameron years ago, a Globe and Mail reporter, a journalist, uh commenting, reminding people that, you know, in the 1970s, when I was young and uh going and collecting the Globe and Mail on the front stoop to bring to my parents' kitchen table, there was no report on business section.
• 9:34
  Mary Rowe: And nobody talked about that.
• 9:36
  Mary Rowe: I I'm trying to remember where I heard her say this, but uh, you know, she said that at dinner parties you didn't talk about business or the economy.
• 9:43
  Mary Rowe: You talked probably about books or culture or gossip or whatever, but that wasn't what happened.
• 9:48
  Mary Rowe: And then something happened, you know, all of a sudden we the the newspapers are all about it.
• 9:52
  Mary Rowe: And uh and I remember, I mean, I think this is like a Clintonism.
• 9:55
  Mary Rowe: You know, it's it's the economy, stupid.
• 9:58
  Mary Rowe: Like that somewhere in there, we have, as you suggested, pushed our attention to this is what matters.
• 10:05
  Mary Rowe: And I I love your quoting of the notion of ideas.
• 10:08
  Mary Rowe: We we a number of years ago, as you may remember, when Jane Jacobs was alive, we started something called ideas that matter because she was the great crafter of ideas and articles and and it were based on observation.
• 10:20
  Mary Rowe: And they were ideas that matter, and they're still ideas that matter.
• 10:23
  Mary Rowe: So I appreciate you sort of zoning in on this and saying, well, what are our unifying uh ideas?
• 10:29
  Mary Rowe: Or, you know, they get they get short-formed into values and they get kind of layered up.
• 10:33
  Mary Rowe: But what's interesting about the coalitions you just described is that they straddled uh ideology, they straddled political history, and suddenly you found people finding common cause.
• 10:45
  Mary Rowe: And I think that's the moment that we seem to be in, certainly in Canada, is that the uh front of the way in which the Trump administration has uh navigated the relationship with Canada is pushing lots of more folks to be thinking about the places and to be thinking about the lens of analysis that we use at CUI, which is about Main Street and the places where the economy actually lives.
• 11:07
  Mary Rowe: But when you look at this emphasis that we have now from the government of Canada to uh court investment from overseas and big projects, is it an affirmation that it's all gonna kind of trickle down again?
• 11:21
  Mary Rowe: Kind of sorta?
• 11:22
  Sean Speer: Well, look before I r answer that question precisely, let me just take up your point about consensus and coalition because I I think it's so fascinating.
• 11:31
  Sean Speer: And if you'll permit me to add a kind of political layer to it, um in the aftermath of the 1990s, with the rise of the Bloc Quebequois and the fragmentation of the political right, there was a sense that we were entering a world of a kind of multi-party system where the large majority governments of the 20th century were probably past us.
• 11:52
  Sean Speer: Uh, in fact, we had governments winning majorities with 35% of the popular vote.
• 11:59
  Sean Speer: And what's interesting about this current moment is it's challenging that kind of political axiom.
• 12:06
  Sean Speer: If you believe polls, Mark Carney's numbers are pushing up, you know, something approaching 50% popular support, which necessarily means, Mary, that he is pulling people from the kind of traditional left, the traditional right, the traditional center.
• 12:21
  Sean Speer: He has built the broadest and kind of most diverse coalition probably in my lifetime, to be honest, um, because my formative years have been marked by this kind of fragmented political environment.
• 12:34
  Sean Speer: Uh now, of course, Donald Trump is a big part of the story, um, but it seems to me what's really interesting about that, and it gets precisely to your point, is that the absence of that kind of broad-based coalition, it seems to me, has been an impediment to significant political action.
• 12:54
  Sean Speer: You know, if you're a 35% prime minister, there's only so much you can push it before you start to buck up against popular opposition.
• 13:05
  Sean Speer: And so what's fascinating is as Mr.
• 13:08
  Sean Speer: Carney has consolidated support and built what I would characterize as almost like a 20th-century political coalition.
• 13:16
  Sean Speer: He is, as we saw this week, starting to kind of spend down the political capital that he's accumulated.
• 13:24
  Sean Speer: Part of that is reflected in uh some policy measures that him and his government announced.
• 13:30
  Sean Speer: Part of it uh we see today on September 17th is a signal that he is gonna bring back from Europe some type of kind of historic agreement and put it before Parliament and ask Parliament to vote on it.
• 13:43
  Sean Speer: Um part of it is provoking maybe parts of his own coalition.
• 13:47
  Sean Speer: We saw reports, for instance, um, that when Parliament returns in the next week or so, his government's gonna table legislation that will amend the Canadian labor code in a direction that probably progressives in his coalition won't love.
• 13:59
  Sean Speer: So I just think I don't want to get too bogged out in politics because I know you're motivated by ideas, but they're kind of working in parallel, aren't they?
• 14:09
  Sean Speer: That that the state of ideas has contributed to this kind of political dynamic, which is almost beyond the experience of anyone who didn't come of age, you know, after, say, 1988.
• 14:26
  Sean Speer: Right.
• 14:26
  Sean Speer: I mean, if we were to be blunt about it, our politics really since the the 1990s has been a kind of transactional politics.
• 14:34
  Sean Speer: It's been about kind of a management politics.
• 14:38
  Sean Speer: And Mark Carney seems to be embarking on something bigger and bolder than that.
• 14:42
  Sean Speer: And I don't think you can understand that independent of the political coalition that he has developed in the past 18 months or so.
• 14:52
  Mary Rowe: You and I could talk for a long time about this, and there are so many folks that are talking about the Prime Minister's managerial style and his leadership and also the time we're in culturally where people are so ready.
• 15:04
  Mary Rowe: Um, Stuart Cox, our colleague this morning I saw on LinkedIn, posted uh he described it as a 'celebrity of seriousness.
• 15:10
  Mary Rowe: ' I really uh appreciate what he's saying there, that there's a kind of hunger for people to say, to look for someone who just makes sense.
• 15:18
  Mary Rowe: Uh when you say he's appealing to people to believe again that we can do really big things.
• 15:25
  Mary Rowe: I'm over here on the other side.
• 15:27
  Mary Rowe: Yesterday I was uh in a small community in Ontario speaking to the chief executives of the local chambers of commerce for that problem.
• 15:35
  Mary Rowe: And I walked into that room, Sean, and I thought, I mean, quite a contrast to what the room looked like.
• 15:41
  Mary Rowe: I wasn't there, but what I'm assuming the investment conference room looked like.
• 15:44
  Mary Rowe: And and I think, okay, really big things over here.
• 15:48
  Mary Rowe: And then what about many small things over here where most people work, where most people's families shop, where most of your sense of attachment and belonging comes from is in your local community, spending your money with local businesses, having interactions because your kids worked there or your grandfather did, or you lived above the shop, or whatever the heck it is.
• 16:09
  Mary Rowe: It doesn't have to be nostalgia.
• 16:11
  Mary Rowe: I'm not saying that we're a retraudite saying go back, but I am interested.
• 16:14
  Mary Rowe: We are a vast geography with a relatively small population.
• 16:20
  Mary Rowe: That is the Canadian conundrum.
• 16:23
  Mary Rowe: And we have to build an economy with a market that's only 40 million people.
• 16:27
  Mary Rowe: And we have to the talent pool we draw in is a four, and we got to get you back, and then we'll be 40 million plus one.
• 16:33
  Mary Rowe: Uh, you know, you know what I'm getting at.
• 16:34
  Mary Rowe: Like this is the this to me is the dilemma.
• 16:36
  Mary Rowe: And I don't know how to translate trillions of investment dollars coming in when I know that we have uh thousands of entities, organizations, businesses that do not need a trillion, do not need a billion, don't even need a hundred million, don't even need a million.
• 16:54
  Mary Rowe: They need 25,000 bucks.
• 16:56
  Sean Speer: Yeah.
• 16:57
  Mary Rowe: How do we get to that discussion granular on the ground?
• 17:01
  Mary Rowe: Yeah.
• 17:02
  Sean Speer: Yeah, what a great question.
• 17:03
  Sean Speer: Um, there's so many ways I could respond.
• 17:06
  Sean Speer: Uh let me put a plug in, if you'll permit me.
• 17:09
  Sean Speer: Um for an idea that I've been developing, which maybe you and I should grab a coffee or a or something stiffer to discuss uh when I'm in Toronto.
• 17:18
  Sean Speer: Uh I've been calling it the politics of normalcy.
• 17:21
  Sean Speer: Um I love it.
• 17:23
  Sean Speer: I think in a way, what you're describing is the politics of normalcy.
• 17:27
  Mary Rowe: Uh that's kind of that's kind of on the other side of the celebrity of seriousness.
• 17:31
  Sean Speer: Yeah, exactly.
• 17:32
  Sean Speer: And and and and this isn't a partisan observation, it's not an ideological one.
• 17:37
  Sean Speer: I don't even know this person.
• 17:38
  Sean Speer: But when I close my eyes and I think of the politics of normalcy, you know who I think of?
• 17:42
  Sean Speer: The mayor of Port Coquitlam, um Bradley Brad West.
• 17:46
  Sean Speer: Um Brad West uh is concerned about getting rid of spray paint on the walls.
• 17:53
  Sean Speer: Uh he's worried about delivering, you know, basic functions of the municipal state.
• 17:59
  Sean Speer: He rejects the idea that municipal politicians ought to aspire as he puts it to be representatives at the UN General Assembly.
• 18:07
  Sean Speer: And I don't think it's an accident that he is enormously popular and all things being equal, likely to win re-election.
• 18:14
  Sean Speer: I think it does reflect, like one of the reasons I think that Mark Carney has been so popular, which speaks to Stuart Cox's idea, is that Canadians, I think humans generally, um, don't want kind of national politics to consume so much of their kind of mental headspace.
• 18:35
  Sean Speer: And we had to for a while.
• 18:36
  Sean Speer: And you know, what Mark Carney presented to us was someone whose experience and wisdom and kind of temperament we could trust to kind of like take on some of that mental load for us so we could get back focused on the stuff that we know really matters.
• 18:54
  Sean Speer: Uh, our relationships to one another, our our families, our work, our kind of solving, as you say, civic issues as opposed to spending all of this time, hugely disproportionate amount of time, focused on issues that that kind of transcend us.
• 19:12
  Sean Speer: And this isn't just a sort of rhetorical point.
• 19:16
  Sean Speer: There's a lot of evidence, for instance, through uh the first half of 2025 that Canadians were consuming more news than they had in ages.
• 19:28
  Sean Speer: And I think they were kind of exhausted.
• 19:30
  Sean Speer: And I think they also knew at some instinctive level that their priorities had become disordered.
• 19:36
  Sean Speer: They were focused so much on the national or the international, and they were neglecting the politics of normalcy.
• 19:43
  Sean Speer: And so I think that is the kind of genius of Mark Carney, is he has said, I'm capable of handling this.
• 19:50
  Sean Speer: I can engender kind of trust and confidence, and I can permit you to go back to like where life really happens and where things really matter.
• 20:02
  Sean Speer: And I think that is the kind of politics and normalcy.
• 20:04
  Sean Speer: And, you know, as I say, offline is.
• 20:06
  Mary Rowe: Well, I want I I want them to get to it because I don't feel like I get, I think we have the first half of the phrase, you know, I've got this, I'm, you know, I'm on it clearly.
• 20:14
  Mary Rowe: Uh, but the second part of the phrase that uh you're talking about, well, what's the what does the politics of normalcy look like?
• 20:20
  Mary Rowe: Often when I give talks, I finish with a slide that says that the only antidote to hopelessness and helplessness, which a lot of people are experiencing there's a very high likelihood now, if you are walking uh into your downtown or you're walking along a main street, that you will every day have some kind of an a counter and exposure to someone who who needs supportive housing, needs a mental health intervention, uh obviously doesn't have uh financial resources, uh and you will be uh exposed to that.
• 20:51
  Mary Rowe: And you and it may be you may be on transit, you may be uh parking your car, you may be walking, you may be in a park and you are reminded of this.
• 20:59
  Mary Rowe: You see a tent or you see someone in distress.
• 21:01
  Mary Rowe: And initially you feel helpless because you're not a professional and you don't have necessarily the tools or resources to be able to support that person.
• 21:10
  Mary Rowe: But the other thing it does is it reinforces for uh for us, for a person like me, the perception that things aren't working.
• 21:17
  Mary Rowe: So it adds to that sense of hopelessness.
• 21:20
  Mary Rowe: I think you add on to that you've got financial anxiety, or your kids have financial anxiety, or you have climate anxiety, or whatever it is, and you've got all the noise nationally and internationally.
• 21:29
  Mary Rowe: And so that but for me, the only antidote to hopelessness and helplessness is local action.
• 21:36
  Mary Rowe: You can go out your door, you can speak to a neighbor, you can engage in some kind of common pursuit, you can go to a uh get access to a public service or get your teeth fixed or whatever it is that you're needing to do if you have the resources to do it, and you and and so it becomes local.
• 21:51
  Mary Rowe: As we say, politics what's that phrase?
• 21:53
  Mary Rowe: Politics is local.
• 21:55
  Mary Rowe: And I'm hoping that they will get to that place where they're reminded of that.
• 21:59
  Mary Rowe: And so So part of what I feel like the work of the Urban Institute is to enable local action.
• 22:04
  Sean Speer: Yes.
• 22:05
  Mary Rowe: Which is why we emphasize get engaged, main streets, take action on how your community is being planned and invested in.
• 22:11
  Mary Rowe: Find your wiggle room.
• 22:13
  Mary Rowe: Don't spend a lot.
• 22:14
  Mary Rowe: You know, during the pandemic, we remembered this.
• 22:16
  Mary Rowe: We didn't, nobody spent 10 seconds saying, well, that's not my jurisdiction.
• 22:19
  Mary Rowe: They went out and they got those washrooms into the parks.
• 22:22
  Mary Rowe: Do you know what I mean?
• 22:24
  Sean Speer: So what in the space may I just jump on that though?
• 22:27
  Sean Speer: I mean, that is such a powerful message.
• 22:29
  Sean Speer: And of course I agree.
• 22:31
  Sean Speer: I would just add also, don't let unrepresentative minorities take control of the agenda on both the left and the right.
• 22:40
  Mary Rowe: Okay, well, tell me what that means.
• 22:41
  Mary Rowe: What do you mean by that?
• 22:42
  Sean Speer: When I talk about the politics and normalcy, I'm of the view, um, some of this is empirical, some of it is more intuition, um, that there exists, particularly at the kind of local level, actually a lot of consensus on how we should organize ourselves, what the expectations are should be for government, and so on.
• 23:05
  Sean Speer: Um, but as you know, we've got relatively low turnout at the local level.
• 23:09
  Sean Speer: And my fear that is that that enables kind of unrepresentative minorities uh to kind of take control of the agenda.
• 23:18
  Sean Speer: I I'm living in New York City, as you know, and we're seeing that play out.
• 23:22
  Sean Speer: And it's not a comment about the mayor or anything.
• 23:23
  Sean Speer: We just but we just had um Democratic Party nomination races here in the spring.
• 23:29
  Sean Speer: Very low turnout, very galvanized populations who did indeed participate.
• 23:36
  Sean Speer: And I think like you could build a consensus around we need to have we need to support people who can't care for themselves.
• 23:43
  Sean Speer: You know, we need policing services to protect public spaces and protect public order, uh, an immigration system that's welcoming and inclusive, um, but is also kind of hard-headed about ensuring we have resources in place to help people integrate.
• 23:58
  Sean Speer: You know, that there are like probably five or ten or maybe even 15 propositions that transcend one's kind of political identification, um, but that in too many places, those propositions go kind of underrepresented in our politics because people don't participate and they permit unrepresentative voices on both the left and the right, this is not an ideological or partisan point at all, to kind of take control of the agenda.
• 24:30
  Sean Speer: So, all this to say I agree with you 100%, and I would just say uh to reinforce it that if you want to see your intuitions about society and politics and so on reflected in civic action, then you can't just be an observer.
• 24:49
  Sean Speer: You have to be a participant.
• 24:52
  Mary Rowe: I mean, democracy is not a spectator sport, as we say.
• 24:54
  Mary Rowe: When when I uh yeah, I wish I'd said it first.
• 24:57
  Mary Rowe: I didn't, I like I'm unlike Prime Minister Harper, wished I'd thought of that.
• 25:00
  Mary Rowe: Um, you know, um the the politics of normalcy could as e could easily be the politics of place.
• 25:08
  Sean Speer: Yes.
• 25:09
  Mary Rowe: That that that people experience, they have a visceral direct experience, back to you know, that the term that the left use, agency, you know, that you want to empower people, provide, you want enabling conditions for people to be able to make their way.
• 25:21
  Mary Rowe: That's what we're about.
• 25:23
  Mary Rowe: Society is about making your way.
• 25:24
  Mary Rowe: So let's let's round this out and go back to our first topic, which was the federation.
• 25:30
  Mary Rowe: Because the dilemma that we've got, I I'm a rabid decentralizer.
• 25:37
  Mary Rowe: You know, I I really want to have all sorts of responsibility at the local level.
• 25:42
  Mary Rowe: Uh I I would and and I that puts me at odds with lots and lots of my colleagues.
• 25:46
  Mary Rowe: And I've become over time more of a fan of federal conditionality because I have heard directly from staff working in municipal governments that they will not be able to get certain kinds of policy initiatives passed because of the way in which politics is so divided on councils and they may know what the right thing to do is, but because counselors think only of their own ward and don't think bigger, even and even when they have uh at-large counselors, they can't get the kind of consensus.
• 26:16
  Mary Rowe: We see that with downtowns and main streets.
• 26:18
  Mary Rowe: And so I've become a an appreciator that federal conditionality gives some incentive to be able to overcome those what you just described, uh hyper-local or hyper what did you how did you describe it?
• 26:31
  Mary Rowe: Uh Sean, not interest-based, but you know what I mean.
• 26:34
  Mary Rowe: That it it allows you to get a bit higher in terms of yes, we need affordable housing, yes, we need to have zoning change so that we have more capacity to to and do mixed uses.
• 26:45
  Mary Rowe: But but aside from all that, I still would like to see us decentralized more.
• 26:51
  Mary Rowe: And and but also the resources have to follow.
• 26:54
  Mary Rowe: So I, as a regular old folk, want to be able to know well, which order department is actually responsible for this, and who do I hold accountable?
• 27:02
  Mary Rowe: And that's when we're back to the question of the future of the Federation.
• 27:06
  Sean Speer: Yes.
• 27:06
  Sean Speer: Yeah, I care about this issue a great deal.
• 27:10
  Sean Speer: I I understand it's a bit wonky and technocratic.
• 27:13
  Sean Speer: And you know, the average Canadian doesn't spend time thinking about the section 91 and section 92 as much as you and your colleagues do.
• 27:21
  Mary Rowe: Well, we're no no, we're glad you do, but but but they but they experience it.
• 27:25
  Mary Rowe: Yeah.
• 27:25
  Mary Rowe: They we we experience it.
• 27:27
  Mary Rowe: And so for instance, if you and this seems to be a trait that people in living in their own cities are completely seized with complaining about them.
• 27:34
  Mary Rowe: But so often what we complain about are things over which our local government doesn't actually have the levers or the resources to correct.
• 27:42
  Mary Rowe: But what I'm tired of is those politicians then let's take housing, just blaming each other.
• 27:47
  Mary Rowe: Yes, and it's ridiculous.
• 27:49
  Mary Rowe: As a as a person, you just start to pull your hair out and say, I don't really, you know, how do we get to a place where we get starting to say I don't really care whose jurisdiction it is, let's mental health on main streets.
• 28:00
  Mary Rowe: It enough is enough.
• 28:02
  Mary Rowe: We need it, we need to collectively fix it.
• 28:04
  Sean Speer: I agree with that.
• 28:05
  Sean Speer: Um, but I would say in the same vein, we also need politicians at higher orders of government to resist that temptation when they're asked at the doors, for instance, what do you, you know, what's your position on garbage?
• 28:16
  Sean Speer: To say, I'm afraid I don't have a position on garbage.
• 28:19
  Sean Speer: We are not gonna have a national garbage collection strategy.
• 28:22
  Sean Speer: And I think that is really hard.
• 28:24
  Sean Speer: And I've worked for federal politicians, and as you know, Mary, oftentimes when they're speaking to constituents, they're not asked about Section 91 issues.
• 28:33
  Sean Speer: There are of Section 92 ones.
• 28:35
  Sean Speer: And they, it's you know, they don't want to get into a you know a constitutional debate.
• 28:40
  Sean Speer: So they say, yeah, we're doing X, Y, and Z.
• 28:42
  Sean Speer: And as you say, I think oftentimes that X, Y, and Z risks gumming things up more than it does.
• 28:49
  Mary Rowe: Not just often, always.
• 28:52
  Sean Speer: So it I think, you know, this is probably provocative with some of your audience, many of whom I suspect are more comfortable with cooperative federalism.
• 29:01
  Sean Speer: Um, but I've really come to be one like you, a kind of inclined towards decentralization, not radically rewriting the Constitution, but honoring kind of Section 1 and 92 in a way that has become kind of gray.
• 29:16
  Sean Speer: Bear with me because this might be a bit long, but I think it's worth underscoring.
• 29:19
  Sean Speer: One of the consequences of successive governments, including the Harper government of which I was a part, dedicating so much of its kind of mental headspace and fiscal resources on Section 92 issues, is I think we've discovered over the past 30 years or so, we had national governments, successive national governments come to neglect Section 91 issues, you know, defense, borders, uh, etc.
• 29:45
  Sean Speer: Uh and now when those issues, and those issues didn't matter for a long time, or they seemingly, we felt like they didn't matter.
• 29:52
  Sean Speer: Um, but now that they matter, you know, not only has uh federal involvement had so-so results with respect to provincial and local responsibilities, I would argue it's fundamentally came at the expense of a kind of atrophying of uh a national government focused on the kind of awesome responsibilities set out in Section 91 for our national government.
• 30:17
  Sean Speer: And so I think both because of your instinct towards decentralizing and uh on the other hand, a need for national government prepared to kind of assert itself in a world where Section 91 issues are gonna matter a lot more moving forward than they've had in a long time, we are gonna need a kind of rebalancing.
• 30:37
  Sean Speer: And uh I don't, it's not obvious to me how that happens, um, what the kind of catalyst is.
• 30:44
  Sean Speer: Um, but I don't think we can go back to a world where we have successive national governments who, to kind of put it over in an oversimplified way, were more concerned with kind of health care than they were with Canada's place in the world.
• 31:00
  Sean Speer: Um that that there have been costs and consequences that we didn't see at the time, but they've become more evident.
• 31:07
  Sean Speer: And now poor Prime Minister Carney is trying to make up for like 20 or 30 years of like neglecting Section 91 responsibilities.
• 31:16
  Sean Speer: And he's doing the tremendous job, but it's not easy.
• 31:19
  Sean Speer: And you know, if I had a criticism, he is doing that while not actually kind of reconciling with the trade-offs of what it means for what the national government can do uh in other areas, and that seems to me to be probably where change is eventually going to come.
• 31:37
  Sean Speer: Uh, we can't have a national government that is increasing defense spending and increasing spending in provincial and local areas too, like something ultimately has to give.
• 31:46
  Mary Rowe: Yeah, I'm I'm with you.
• 31:47
  Mary Rowe: I don't think the trade-offs, well, maybe they haven't become clear yet.
• 31:50
  Mary Rowe: And and people, as you say, are cutting him a lot of slack because they're so appreciative of his leadership globally.
• 31:56
  Mary Rowe: I don't know whether you watched, you're probably not a pop culture person, Sean.
• 31:59
  Mary Rowe: You're too busy thinking about section 91 and 92.
• 32:02
  Mary Rowe: But on on Monday night, the Emmys were on, and uh I was really struck by Sally Field, who got up and thanked everybody and thanked Canada.
• 32:10
  Mary Rowe: And then she was subsequently on the red carpet talking about uh, you know, that uh Canada are our friends, are they our allies?
• 32:17
  Mary Rowe: And then she quite stridently said, and they'll be running the world soon.
• 32:21
  Mary Rowe: You know, it's uh I think this is the sentiment that we get caught up in.
• 32:25
  Mary Rowe: And in the meantime, as you just uh you know alluded to, we have billions of dollars of deferred maintenance and infrastructure in places across this country.
• 32:32
  Mary Rowe: So you can have all the investment you want coming in and building pipelines and oh like we should probably talk about airports uh and what you thought of that thing being thrown in at the last minute.
• 32:42
  Mary Rowe: But uh but at the meantime, you know, if you don't have places where people can live, where the water runs, where the garbage is picked up as you suggested, and where there's a climate where you can actually start a business, employ folks, uh, you know, then where does that money go?
• 32:55
  Mary Rowe: I you know, I think my short form of this is that city building, community building is nation building.
• 33:01
  Mary Rowe: Yeah.
• 33:01
  Mary Rowe: And and we are the the people that listen to this broadcast are people engaged in uh made in major projects.
• 33:08
  Mary Rowe: Yeah.
• 33:08
  Mary Rowe: Major projects in their place.
• 33:09
  Mary Rowe: So as we finish, um, let's talk a little bit about what you think is ahead.
• 33:14
  Mary Rowe: Can I like it?
• 33:15
  Sean Speer: Can I can I see can I see something very I I suspect, I don't want to misrepresent things or overstate.
• 33:21
  Sean Speer: I suspect that your audience may not be attuned to some kind of intraconservative debates happening on a lot of these issues.
• 33:32
  Sean Speer: So do you mind if I let you in a bit?
• 33:34
  Sean Speer: Um uh let me in.
• 33:36
  Sean Speer: There is there is, particularly in the face of Trump's threat, there are those on the right who are kind of inclined to double down on national identity that probably likes risks smoothing out our diversity a bit, that you know is inclined towards nostalgic uh symbols uh of Canadian nationhood, you know, that has a kind of anglophilic dimension to it, uh for instance.
• 34:05
  Sean Speer: And I mean, there's just I don't think it's ill-intended.
• 34:08
  Sean Speer: Uh that is sort of part of the Canadian form of pluralism, but I think it one risks or underrepresenting those who don't see themselves in that story.
• 34:19
  Sean Speer: But moreover, and this comes, I think, to your point, it misunderstands how people think about themselves and their lives.
• 34:28
  Sean Speer: Um, you know, my parents in Thunder Bay don't understand the intricacies of the 1931 Statue of Westminster, and they don't know all of the ins and outs of the kind of succession act.
• 34:44
  Mary Rowe: But that's but that's not a function of their living in Thunder Bay.
• 34:46
  Mary Rowe: We got a gazillion people in downtown Montreal and Toronto and Vancouver who don't know it either.
• 34:50
  Sean Speer: No, no, but it's not a it's not a it's not a claim of ignorance.
• 34:52
  Sean Speer: It's it's that that's that's not where they get their meaning and purpose.
• 34:56
  Sean Speer: Right.
• 34:56
  Sean Speer: Um, they get their meaning and purpose around them, in place, as you put it.
• 35:02
  Sean Speer: And as I get older, I'm 44 now, and I'm sort of involved on the margins of some of these debates on the right about how do you conceive of a national identity and national symbols and so on in the face, both of the threats that we're experiencing, but also demographic change.
• 35:18
  Sean Speer: And I'm inclined to double down on place and double down on pluralism.
• 35:23
  Sean Speer: And, you know, Joe Clark was kind of ridiculed decades ago when he talked about community of communities.
• 35:30
  Sean Speer: Um, but yeah, man, Mary, at my age, community of communities sounds pretty good.
• 35:35
  Sean Speer: Yes, of course, we want to be more than just a random collection of communities.
• 35:40
  Sean Speer: Um, but I think starting with the premise that that's where the vast majority of people find meaning, find purpose, find actualization, make their way, as you put it, is a kind of starting point, not just of like an economic agenda, as you've set out over the course of our conversation, but also this bigger discussion we're having as a society about like what is it going to mean to be Canadian in a world where our continental identity may not be as strong as it used to be, and where demographic change is changing the kind of face and complexion of the country.
• 36:17
  Sean Speer: I think doubling down on community of communities, doubling down on the insights of Alexander Galt at the Confederation meetings where he said, let's try to push those issues down so that they themselves don't become like fault lines or tensions in our new country or in our society, remains, you know, more than 150 years later, basically the right way to think about these things.
• 36:42
  Sean Speer: And that's because they kind of have like an understanding of anthropology.
• 36:46
  Sean Speer: I think that is kind of shot through the work that you do, and something I've learned a lot from you and your and your colleagues, and and I hope that other policymakers are kind of taking count of, because that's that is the way we're gonna kind of succeed in the 21st century.
• 37:03
  Mary Rowe: Very hard to say anything on top of that.
• 37:05
  Mary Rowe: Thanks, Sean.
• 37:07
  Mary Rowe: You know, I the politics of normalcy, the politics of place, doubling down on place, doubling down on pluralism.
• 37:15
  Mary Rowe: Um I I'm interested in your comment about anthropology.
• 37:19
  Mary Rowe: I think we're also we we look at nature.
• 37:21
  Mary Rowe: Yes, natural systems self-organize, natural systems cars, correct.
• 37:26
  Mary Rowe: Natural systems enable connection, and that's really what our work is about collectively, with you and uh with all of the folks that we speak of.
• 37:33
  Mary Rowe: And it's really at the you know, I as you say, at the hyper-local level, the politics, the partisanship, ideology matters less and less.
• 37:40
  Mary Rowe: I always say that ideology, and it's interesting for you in New York, I appreciate what you're implying there, or what I'm inferring from what you're saying, around the way in which it can get divisive at the local level.
• 37:49
  Mary Rowe: But I always say that living in a congregate setting, whether you're in a small community or in a large community, fundamentally it's about empathy.
• 37:57
  Mary Rowe: Yes.
• 37:57
  Mary Rowe: Fundamentally, it's about how we coexist together.
• 38:00
  Mary Rowe: And that is not a political concept, that is not an ideological concept.
• 38:03
  Mary Rowe: So I appreciate you joining us.
• 38:06
  Mary Rowe: Uh, not the last conversation we're gonna have about these topics.
• 38:10
  Mary Rowe: And I so appreciate, honestly, Sean, your level of analysis and your historical perspective and your broad uh sort of sucre political uh um view is so useful to us.
• 38:20
  Mary Rowe: So thank you for joining City Talk.
• 38:22
  Mary Rowe: Next week we're coming back to uh I was just gonna suggest from you know, CUI often talks about we're about the skylines and we're about the sidewalks.
• 38:30
  Mary Rowe: And so the next episode of City Talk, we're gonna be talking with Amy Robinson, founder and director of the Vancouver Indie Business Advocacy Organization, Loco BC, Google it now, and Chris Rickett, freelance and freewheeling local business enabler and uh supporter to CUI of Main Street Canada.
• 38:45
  Mary Rowe: We'll be talking with them about investments on Main Streets and other tariff-fueled strategies for communities from coast to coast to coast.
• 38:53
  Mary Rowe: And we appreciate any comments you may have on what you've heard.
• 38:56
  Mary Rowe: Certainly on this show, you're gonna have heard lots of things to give us some feedback because Sean's keen to hear it.
• 39:01
  Mary Rowe: Uh anything you hear, anything else you'd like us to be covering, please drop us a line at Citytalk at Canorb.org.
• 39:07
  Mary Rowe: That's City Talk all one word at C A N U R B.org.
• 39:11
  Mary Rowe: I'm Mary Rowe.
• 39:12
  Mary Rowe: Thanks for listening.