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The Economics and Politics of Place · CityTalk Canada

• 0:06
  Mary Rowe: This is City Talk the Podcast, brought to you by the Canadian Urban Institute or CUI.
• 0:11
  Mary Rowe: I'm Mary Rowe.
• 0:13
  Mary Rowe: That moment of economic and geopolitical challenge we're all in just keeps getting longer and larger, especially when you consider the growing number of folks on the ground across Canada feeling its effects.
• 0:26
  Mary Rowe: That's also where most of CUI's programs are.
• 0:29
  Mary Rowe: They live on main streets, downtowns, neighborhoods, communities from coast to coast to coast.
• 0:35
  Mary Rowe: However, being at the ground level can sometimes limit your perspective, which is why the world gave us economists.
• 0:41
  Mary Rowe: One of our best lives just down the road in Ottawa.
• 0:45
  Mary Rowe: Armin e Yalnizyan is, among many other things, the 2023 recipient of the Galbraith Prize in Economics, a former senior economic policy advisor to the Federal Deputy Minister of Employment and Social Development, columnist on business for the Toronto Star, and a longtime driving force at the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives, and currently a fellow with the Atkinson Foundation.
• 1:08
  Mary Rowe: Like many of us, she keeps an ear to the ground and her gaze on the horizon.
• 1:13
  Mary Rowe: Armine, welcome to City Talk.
• 1:16
  Armine Yalnizyan: It's a pleasure to be with you, Mary.
• 1:17
  Armine Yalnizyan: Thank you very much for inviting me.
• 1:19
  Mary Rowe: Oh, not at all.
• 1:20
  Mary Rowe: And I love, you know, I'm used to, of course, this is only audio.
• 1:23
  Mary Rowe: We don't have a video version of this, so nobody knows that you're sitting in front of your LP collection, which I see when I watch The National, I see you with all these.
• 1:31
  Mary Rowe: Are they all record albums behind you?
• 1:33
  Mary Rowe: Yeah.
• 1:34
  Mary Rowe: They they give you a sense of companionship.
• 1:37
  Mary Rowe: Right?
• 1:39
  Armine Yalnizyan: Yeah, well, that's true, I think, of any collection, that some things you return to repeatedly, and every time you return to them, you get something different out of them.
• 1:46
  Armine Yalnizyan: And some of them, like you've listened to once or twice, and you don't want to give them away, but you're really not gonna probably listen to them that often in the course of the channel.
• 1:56
  Mary Rowe: But you can't bear to give it away.
• 1:56
  Mary Rowe: You can't bear to give it away.
• 1:57
  Armine Yalnizyan: Well, this isn't just my collection, so you know, I just I don't have a say in like the lion's share of what's here.
• 2:05
  Mary Rowe: Yeah, there is a sharing component to that.
• 2:07
  Mary Rowe: Well, we are in a moment, huh?
• 2:09
  Armine Yalnizyan: Are we ever?
• 2:11
  Mary Rowe: And the focus for us at the Urban Institute is how do these momentous events land in places?
• 2:18
  Mary Rowe: How does it and when you know I always say that the Urban Institute, we're in the empathy business because people that live urban, and we describe urban really broadly at CY.
• 2:28
  Mary Rowe: You know, we we're basically saying that anybody that lives in a community of 5,000 or or more is urban, which is probably almost 90% of the population.
• 2:37
  Mary Rowe: But my my definition is even looser than that.
• 2:39
  Mary Rowe: My definition is if you go out your back door and scream, will someone hear you?
• 2:43
  Mary Rowe: And you know, years ago I lived in Grey County in an old school, and it was a severed one-acre lot on a farm.
• 2:49
  Mary Rowe: And I'm quite sure that if I'd screamed out the back door, the farmer, you know, a field over would have heard me.
• 2:54
  Mary Rowe: So it's more just that we live in a state of interdependence, which is based in place.
• 2:59
  Mary Rowe: And so when we watch the news and we hear all these conversations of which you are central, about an economy that is being reshaped in front of our very eyes, what is the implication for places?
• 3:12
  Mary Rowe: That's part of what I wanted to talk with you about.
• 3:14
  Mary Rowe: Is from your macro perspective and all the folks that you talk to who are dealing with large data sets and looking at large sectors, how do you think these changes are affecting us in places, in urban communities, in rural communities, suburban communities?
• 3:31
  Mary Rowe: Have you thought at all about that?
• 3:33
  Armine Yalnizyan: I haven't lately, but when I used to work at the Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto, as it was then named.
• 3:40
  Mary Rowe: As it was then called, yeah.
• 3:41
  Armine Yalnizyan: I very quickly as an economist learned that every story, every economic story has a face, a place, and a race in a place like um Toronto.
• 3:52
  Armine Yalnizyan: But that is just as true in Nunavut as it is in, you know, Fort McMurray, as it is in Sydney, um in Cape Breton.
• 4:04
  Armine Yalnizyan: So I think the macro story, which I generally focus on rather than the micro story, most economists look at microeconomic decision making.
• 4:14
  Armine Yalnizyan: How do certain decisions affect the way the system works?
• 4:18
  Armine Yalnizyan: I love looking at the system.
• 4:19
  Armine Yalnizyan: Yeah, I love looking at the macroeconomics, and I uh I guess I've never thought of it before like this, but it's kind of like the moment we are in is an El Niño moment in a weather system, and the weather system is going to affect different people in different ways in different places.
• 4:36
  Armine Yalnizyan: But the people that will be affected will have very distinctive characteristics uh male and female, different races, small communities, big communities.
• 4:47
  Armine Yalnizyan: It isn't just, you know, a question of interdependence, but what kind of interdependence?
• 4:51
  Armine Yalnizyan: And who's actually conscious of that?
• 4:54
  Mary Rowe: Yeah.
• 4:54
  Armine Yalnizyan: Interdependence and trying to um navigate through a moment that is very much about winner-take all.
• 5:01
  Mary Rowe: And even before, even before Trump, even before the geopolitical dynamic that we're dealing with, if you think of the way in which I know that you've done lots of writing about this, the way in which the economy has organized over decades, more financialization, more capital accumulating away from communities, uh, more extraction, I suppose, in that way, uh, we have people have do start to feel like they have absolutely no agency or control.
• 5:26
  Mary Rowe: Can they invest differently?
• 5:28
  Mary Rowe: Can they build jobs differently?
• 5:30
  Mary Rowe: I'm assuming that that is what motivates you because you're looking at the big systems, but you're thinking about the impact on the people on the ground.
• 5:38
  Armine Yalnizyan: Yeah, I think about it again from a macro lens.
• 5:40
  Armine Yalnizyan: You're talking from a micro lens, what can I do?
• 5:43
  Armine Yalnizyan: And I think about it from my entire career has been, I think about it from the what can we do.
• 5:49
  Armine Yalnizyan: And we really only have two democratic ways of taking season control.
• 5:55
  Armine Yalnizyan: And that would be our governments at all levels, the people we elect to represent our interests, and our unions.
• 6:02
  Armine Yalnizyan: And we're not very unionized, but that's a democratic institution that should be reflecting the wishes of their membership.
• 6:14
  Armine Yalnizyan: So anything that's got a membership base that is vote-driven, one person, one vote, has got that structure in place.
• 6:21
  Armine Yalnizyan: The only other thing that came close to it, but we're now talking about over a hundred years ago where it played this function, is the faith communities that uh drove so much of the immigrant settlement services, that grow drove so much of the way communities developed economic, like a kind of moral economy in the way it used to.
• 6:44
  Armine Yalnizyan: So all you're left with is voting.
• 6:46
  Armine Yalnizyan: All you're left with is voting for somebody to represent your interests properly.
• 6:51
  Mary Rowe: Just on the faith piece, you know, back to CUI's orientation to the built environment.
• 6:56
  Mary Rowe: Uh, we've looked at, we we over the last several years have looked increasingly at streets, that streets are the materiality of community.
• 7:05
  Mary Rowe: And uh that's where, you know, they're owned publicly.
• 7:08
  Mary Rowe: They they are where we go to experience life, celebrate life, protest life, purchase life, uh, uh get services, all the things that happen on streets and downtowns as well.
• 7:17
  Mary Rowe: And what's interesting about faith communities is that if, and this is true of communities across the country in all sizes, is that you could have a uh four corners in a very small community where three of the four corners would be a faith, would be a church.
• 7:30
  Mary Rowe: And none of them, not none of them, very few of them can financially sustain themselves.
• 7:34
  Mary Rowe: I think there are 27,000 faith buildings in the country, and a third of them are gonna are gonna close before the end of this uh decade by 2030.
• 7:42
  Mary Rowe: So all the social, civic functions that those physical places in it, not and it not counting what you're talking about, which is well, what happened, what what is replacing the framing of our values if it's no longer being incubated?
• 7:58
  Armine Yalnizyan: Oh, there's there's nothing that is driving that reflection.
• 8:01
  Armine Yalnizyan: Uh, and we are firmly in a moment of me first politics and have been for well over a decade.
• 8:09
  Armine Yalnizyan: Yeah.
• 8:09
  Armine Yalnizyan: I mean, after the global financial crisis of 2008.
• 8:13
  Mary Rowe: Is that where you market?
• 8:13
  Mary Rowe: That's when things switched?
• 8:15
  Armine Yalnizyan: No, I think it just it was an inflection point.
• 8:18
  Armine Yalnizyan: I think it switched earlier.
• 8:20
  Armine Yalnizyan: I think the whole me first thing starts around the time when the iPhone and the I Everything becomes pervasive.
• 8:28
  Armine Yalnizyan: It saturates market consciousness as everything should be designed around what I want.
• 8:33
  Armine Yalnizyan: And that's the late 1990s.
• 8:36
  Armine Yalnizyan: But you get to a decade into it and you get a global financial crisis that makes it clear that the I everything isn't functioning for everybody.
• 8:48
  Armine Yalnizyan: And it can't be everybody that is first.
• 8:50
  Armine Yalnizyan: It can't be me first for everybody.
• 8:52
  Armine Yalnizyan: That means that it really did kind of crystallize the whole winner-take-all ethos of trickle-down economics, which had been with us since the 1980s.
• 9:03
  Armine Yalnizyan: So that's 40 years, right?
• 9:04
  Armine Yalnizyan: So it just keeps developing and evolving.
• 9:07
  Armine Yalnizyan: But after the global financial crisis, you see protest without solution.
• 9:12
  Armine Yalnizyan: Yeah.
• 9:12
  Armine Yalnizyan: And that also happened with in the wake of the global financial crisis with the Occupy movement, which was a leaderless, agenda-less no to trickle down.
• 9:24
  Armine Yalnizyan: And money recognized how it could be marshaled.
• 9:27
  Armine Yalnizyan: Deep pockets recognized how to take that agenda and make it so that they could protect themselves with this apparently grassroots movement.
• 9:37
  Armine Yalnizyan: There was an element of grassroots movement in it, but it became Astroturf because the money fueled rage.
• 9:44
  Armine Yalnizyan: Yeah.
• 9:44
  Armine Yalnizyan: And that's all it meant to do was just to rage and conquer and divide.
• 9:48
  Armine Yalnizyan: So that is what has been fueling everything for decades now.
• 9:53
  Armine Yalnizyan: So we are really in a brave new world disorder that we have not witnessed before.
• 10:00
  Armine Yalnizyan: And there's nothing that kind of creates the glue.
• 10:03
  Armine Yalnizyan: There's lots of things that break us up and pit us against one another, and very little that binds us together at this moment.
• 10:11
  Armine Yalnizyan: I I think that'll change, but I don't know how long it'll take, and I don't know what madness we'll descend into before that happens.
• 10:18
  Mary Rowe: Yeah.
• 10:18
  Mary Rowe: As things fall apart, you know.
• 10:20
  Mary Rowe: I often describe CUI as being in the empathy business because congregate living or interdependent living, which is by definition urban.
• 10:32
  Mary Rowe: It's not like the rural isn't interdependent, of course they are, but in urban life, you are constantly negotiating with the other, with someone who may not be like you and may not have the same background as you or the same income as you or anything, that it's part of the deal is that when you throw your lot in together in some kind of shared space, you have to make room for each other.
• 10:55
  Mary Rowe: There's and and as you suggested, when the values piece starts to disintegrate, people their empathy quotient diminishes.
• 11:05
  Mary Rowe: They start to get impatient.
• 11:07
  Mary Rowe: And even what you just said about if people are confronted regularly with situations over which they feel powerless, they have no control.
• 11:14
  Mary Rowe: And that could be rising rents, rising costs, but it also could be uh that you're repeatedly seeing someone on the street who needs support that you cannot provide them with.
• 11:25
  Mary Rowe: It these things just erode our sense that the system is working.
• 11:29
  Mary Rowe: And if you believe it isn't, you start to believe it isn't working, and then you get the disintegration of democracy because people think, well, the system is broken, it's not working.
• 11:37
  Mary Rowe: And that's what I find why our work I think is so important.
• 11:40
  Mary Rowe: Because when you say what's the unifying piece, I do think the unifying piece is people fundamentally care about the place in which they live and where they work or where their kids are working.
• 11:51
  Mary Rowe: There is there is some tangibility to it.
• 11:53
  Armine Yalnizyan: I'm just gonna say I come at it slightly differently because it isn't the place.
• 11:57
  Armine Yalnizyan: I I know that when I've been in Newfoundland and Labrador, the smaller the scale of things, the more manageable it is, and also the less you can run away from it.
• 12:05
  Armine Yalnizyan: Everybody literally does know everybody.
• 12:07
  Armine Yalnizyan: Yes.
• 12:07
  Armine Yalnizyan: So it's not so much the place as the scale or the ability to connect with one another that I think makes the difference.
• 12:14
  Armine Yalnizyan: That's why a place like Toronto, at least when I was growing up there, was like a neighborhood of neighborhoods.
• 12:19
  Armine Yalnizyan: It's like I don't know what's going on in this part of town, but I sure know what's going on in my neck of the world.
• 12:25
  Armine Yalnizyan: Yeah, you know, yeah, yeah.
• 12:26
  Armine Yalnizyan: It depends on how a city is structured.
• 12:28
  Armine Yalnizyan: But I do want to, like, I mean, we've been kind of um, you know, crying in our beer here, but um, Mamdani has opened up a sight line to place-based politics that are about not the place per se.
• 12:43
  Armine Yalnizyan: Right.
• 12:43
  Armine Yalnizyan: Though improving the space is part of it.
• 12:46
  Armine Yalnizyan: Yep.
• 12:46
  Armine Yalnizyan: It's about making sure people have what they need.
• 12:49
  Armine Yalnizyan: Right.
• 12:50
  Armine Yalnizyan: Of course, that's going to be place-based, but that is a different way to come at binding us together so that we can have systems that are a bit more functional.
• 13:01
  Armine Yalnizyan: And he has not waited for consensus.
• 13:03
  Armine Yalnizyan: He has just identified the things that people need.
• 13:06
  Armine Yalnizyan: Like they need a place to pee when they're outdoors.
• 13:09
  Armine Yalnizyan: So he opens up 17 uh lavatories that are out there.
• 13:13
  Armine Yalnizyan: Like, who can't relate to I have to go pee right now?
• 13:16
  Armine Yalnizyan: And there's no place to go.
• 13:18
  Mary Rowe: But I'm back to the But to me, that's about empathy.
• 13:21
  Mary Rowe: You know, you have a system that says it has to be responsive to the fact that everybody at some point needs to be able to pee.
• 13:26
  Mary Rowe: During the pandemic, we knew that.
• 13:28
  Mary Rowe: People were saying we've got to get a part of potties into those parks.
• 13:31
  Mary Rowe: How do we do it?
• 13:32
  Mary Rowe: And nobody spent 10 seconds wondering whose jurisdiction that was.
• 13:35
  Mary Rowe: It was literally, have you got a truck?
• 13:37
  Mary Rowe: Do you know where they are?
• 13:38
  Mary Rowe: Let's move them in.
• 13:38
  Mary Rowe: You know, you know, yeah, people will rally around and create those kinds of solutions and until somebody else with money decides, oh, this is a good thing to disrupt.
• 13:49
  Armine Yalnizyan: Because once we disrupt it, you you lose the momentum.
• 13:52
  Armine Yalnizyan: But we don't even celebrate our wins.
• 13:54
  Armine Yalnizyan: And that's one of the things that I love about the Mamdani campaign is he introduces uh free babysitting for date night once a month.
• 14:03
  Mary Rowe: Yeah, it's pretty cool.
• 14:04
  Armine Yalnizyan: You know, for young families.
• 14:05
  Armine Yalnizyan: Like, how often is that?
• 14:07
  Armine Yalnizyan: And then he tells us he did it.
• 14:09
  Mary Rowe: He actually celebrates that they're yeah, yeah, but also reinforces you can do some certain certain things.
• 14:16
  Mary Rowe: Well, but let me just go back to Mamdani, though.
• 14:18
  Mary Rowe: Uh what I would say is that one of the reasons he can do this is because he's working in a specific population.
• 14:23
  Mary Rowe: He's, you know, he's not trying to do it across vast.
• 14:26
  Mary Rowe: I mean, it's our hard enough to be the mayor of New York.
• 14:28
  Mary Rowe: But let's go to some of the specifics of what you're just describing, scale.
• 14:33
  Mary Rowe: I think you're talking about scale.
• 14:34
  Mary Rowe: See, I think Toronto still talks about itself as a neighborhood of neighborhoods, uh a city of neighborhoods.
• 14:40
  Mary Rowe: I yesterday went to the Polish festival, uh, which I've not been to, and uh, it's on Roncusvales, and I, you know, took me an hour and 15 minutes to get across on transit from where I live to where that is, and I walked the route, and it was fabulous.
• 14:54
  Mary Rowe: Like it was exactly what you want those things to be.
• 14:57
  Mary Rowe: It was the Legion, and then it was, you know, uh people it, you know, who are making pierogies, and then there was the Asian folks who have a uh uh you know have a sushi, so but they're they're putting out their sushi in the Polish festival.
• 15:10
  Mary Rowe: So we know we can do it.
• 15:11
  Mary Rowe: Like even with the huge forces of globalization, we still have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of unique neighborhoods in communities of all scales across this country.
• 15:21
  Mary Rowe: Yet one of the challenges I think we have is we haven't been able to figure out how to get capital, investment capital into those businesses in those communities at an increment that is manageable.
• 15:34
  Mary Rowe: And over the last few weeks, we've listened to Prime Minister Kearney and his colleagues bringing in huge investors whose denominations are in the billions.
• 15:44
  Mary Rowe: And you and I know that we've got a gazillion businesses across this country that don't need a don't even need a million.
• 15:51
  Mary Rowe: They just need maybe 30,000 bucks.
• 15:53
  Mary Rowe: I I strongly guess you have an opinion on this.
• 15:56
  Mary Rowe: Just saying.
• 15:59
  Mary Rowe: So how do we get how do we make money smaller?
• 16:01
  Mary Rowe: That's my that's my colloquial version.
• 16:04
  Mary Rowe: How do I how do we make money smaller?
• 16:05
  Mary Rowe: Because we know we have businesses on our own.
• 16:08
  Armine Yalnizyan: We're not going to.
• 16:09
  Armine Yalnizyan: All the big money is playing for corporate consolidation.
• 16:13
  Armine Yalnizyan: They're all going for control.
• 16:14
  Armine Yalnizyan: We're still in the moment of winner takes all.
• 16:18
  Armine Yalnizyan: He announced this 66-page prospectus with 167 projects worth almost half a trillion dollars.
• 16:27
  Armine Yalnizyan: All of these projects are partly underway.
• 16:30
  Armine Yalnizyan: Right.
• 16:30
  Armine Yalnizyan: This was an invitation, come build with us.
• 16:33
  Armine Yalnizyan: Put your money in the game of building a new future for Canada.
• 16:39
  Armine Yalnizyan: But he stepped on his own story on the very same day he was crafting this brand new story about Build Canada, which, by the way, takes huge amounts of moxie at a time when we are staring down the barrel of a disinvestment gun.
• 16:52
  Armine Yalnizyan: So it was an insurance policy on the one hand.
• 16:56
  Armine Yalnizyan: On the other hand, it was like stretting his stuff.
• 16:59
  Armine Yalnizyan: Uh along with the premiers to say, we're the best bet we've got.
• 17:04
  Armine Yalnizyan: We've got we're reliable, we're trustworthy, and we're growing and we're creating something new.
• 17:10
  Armine Yalnizyan: Come join us.
• 17:11
  Armine Yalnizyan: It was invitational.
• 17:12
  Armine Yalnizyan: Um, and then that same day he says, Oh, no, we're not talking about building Canada, we're talking about buying Canada.
• 17:19
  Armine Yalnizyan: What?
• 17:20
  Armine Yalnizyan: That whole idea of privatization, too.
• 17:22
  Armine Yalnizyan: It isn't privatization, Mary.
• 17:24
  Armine Yalnizyan: It's for profitization.
• 17:27
  Armine Yalnizyan: We privatized the airports in the 1990s under Christian.
• 17:31
  Armine Yalnizyan: They're talking about using the sale money to invest in, you know, Arctic airports or airports, you know, in the in the north.
• 17:40
  Armine Yalnizyan: They're not talking about regional airports that you and I would use.
• 17:43
  Armine Yalnizyan: They're talking about facilitating the airport, the air transport structure for cargo transport, which is especially important when you talk about critical minerals or even just developing the north and bringing, you know, materials in and out.
• 17:59
  Armine Yalnizyan: So, like we are talking about a man that whose oratory cannot be eclipsed by anybody I have heard in my life.
• 18:08
  Armine Yalnizyan: He's the best orator I have ever heard.
• 18:11
  Armine Yalnizyan: He speaks in storing terms.
• 18:14
  Armine Yalnizyan: And then in practice, he is delivering consistently things to his investment banker buddies.
• 18:22
  Armine Yalnizyan: And I look, I feel like saying, you know, Eminem had that song, Will the real Slim Shady Please Stand Up?
• 18:27
  Armine Yalnizyan: It's like, will the real Mark Carney please stand up?
• 18:29
  Armine Yalnizyan: Which one of these Mark Carneys, the guy that wrote the book Values, or the guy that worked at Goldman Sachs and Brookfield, which one is at the head of this country?
• 18:38
  Armine Yalnizyan: And is he outstanding?
• 18:39
  Armine Yalnizyan: Is he standing on guard for me?
• 18:42
  Armine Yalnizyan: I don't feel like he's standing on guard for me.
• 18:45
  Mary Rowe: Take, take the it's almost impossible to do this, but if we're gonna take the personality out of it, it's hard, isn't it?
• 18:51
  Mary Rowe: Because so much of this dynamic is is being driven by the personality of the incumbent in the White House, and then we have an incumbent in in uh uh I was gonna say Sussex Drive, but you know what I mean.
• 19:01
  Mary Rowe: Like we have an incumbent prime minister, and these personalities, it's hard to take it out of that.
• 19:05
  Mary Rowe: That's where I'm back, though, to the basic principles that you and I are part of the economy, and we are participating in the economy every day.
• 19:13
  Mary Rowe: We breathe.
• 19:14
  Armine Yalnizyan: We are not only participating, the economy is nothing without us.
• 19:17
  Mary Rowe: Like the economy is nothing without you and us.
• 19:20
  Armine Yalnizyan: You actually saw it during the pandemic.
• 19:22
  Armine Yalnizyan: People were buying, people weren't working.
• 19:24
  Armine Yalnizyan: You can have all the capital in the world you want.
• 19:27
  Armine Yalnizyan: If you can't deploy the capital, or you can't sell what you're making, you don't got an economy.
• 19:32
  Armine Yalnizyan: Right.
• 19:33
  Armine Yalnizyan: The economy is people.
• 19:34
  Armine Yalnizyan: We are being told that the economy is some kind of reified object above who we are.
• 19:40
  Armine Yalnizyan: We create it.
• 19:42
  Mary Rowe: Can we talk a bit about the care economy?
• 19:44
  Mary Rowe: Because that's not something that you've done a lot of thinking on.
• 19:46
  Armine Yalnizyan: What I mean by the care economy is health, health, education, and social services.
• 19:52
  Armine Yalnizyan: And when I talk about social services, I mean everything from child care and long-term care to shelter services and food banks.
• 19:59
  Mary Rowe: So all publicly funded, pretty much, the care economy.
• 20:03
  Armine Yalnizyan: Deeply publicly funded, but not exclusively publicly funded and increasingly privately funded.
• 20:08
  Armine Yalnizyan: So economies are slowing because more people are living on retirement incomes and spending less.
• 20:14
  Armine Yalnizyan: But what they're spending on is care.
• 20:17
  Armine Yalnizyan: And you can see that in the share of GDP that the care economy is, is now bigger than any other sector.
• 20:25
  Armine Yalnizyan: 13.5% of GDP is generated by services in care, which is health, education, and social services.
• 20:33
  Armine Yalnizyan: It's the most publicly subsidized sector of the economy, but that isn't all that drives it.
• 20:39
  Armine Yalnizyan: And it's the biggest source of jobs, 21, over 21% of all jobs in the economy are in the care economy.
• 20:48
  Armine Yalnizyan: That's been growing like wildfire.
• 20:51
  Armine Yalnizyan: On both sides of the border, by the way, the only consistent source of job growth in the United States and in Canada has been in health care and social services.
• 21:01
  Armine Yalnizyan: So it is the fastest growing source of earned income for Canadians, and it is one of the fastest growing sources of GDP growth.
• 21:11
  Armine Yalnizyan: Now that might change because of all the things that Mr.
• 21:13
  Armine Yalnizyan: Kearney is doing, but my point here is it is a source of organic demand growth.
• 21:19
  Armine Yalnizyan: There isn't a lot of organic demand growth in any nation that is aging, and it's happening there.
• 21:26
  Armine Yalnizyan: And because so many of the mom and pop providers that you identify are aging out.
• 21:32
  Armine Yalnizyan: They want to sell their business, they want to get out, they don't have succession plans, it is very ripe for consolidation, which makes me very, very nervous about the fact that we have no ring fences around our investment policies.
• 21:45
  Armine Yalnizyan: That we have absolutely nothing stopping private equity from coming into Canada and doing what it has done in the United States, in the United Kingdom, in Australia, where sometimes it delivers efficiencies, but it delivers those efficiencies and transforms.
• 21:59
  Armine Yalnizyan: Into dividends for shareholders.
• 22:02
  Armine Yalnizyan: That money doesn't get plowed back into providing broader access, better access, faster access in the public system.
• 22:10
  Armine Yalnizyan: It turns out to be shareholder dividends.
• 22:12
  Armine Yalnizyan: So we're using publicly funded services to pay investors to take our money out of the country.
• 22:21
  Armine Yalnizyan: Why would we do that?
• 22:22
  Armine Yalnizyan: And yet we're doing nothing to stop it from happening.
• 22:25
  Armine Yalnizyan: And the very people that came in to this investment summit are some of the people that are investing most seriously in long-term care and health care services, because that's where the money is now.
• 22:39
  Armine Yalnizyan: Less so in terms of child care, but that could change.
• 22:42
  Armine Yalnizyan: Canadian private equity investors have invested around the world to create these chains of rapidly growing costs, maybe not degrading services, but jacking up prices over and over again, upselling for field trips or better food or for this or for that.
• 23:03
  Armine Yalnizyan: That's the pattern for profitizing what is was not originally a sector that was designed to generate profits.
• 23:13
  Armine Yalnizyan: It is a deeply human production function where it's relational.
• 23:19
  Armine Yalnizyan: There will be things you can automate and you can use technology to improve.
• 23:24
  Armine Yalnizyan: But at the end of the day, it becomes a relational human task.
• 23:29
  Armine Yalnizyan: And we we really risk doing something that the Norwegians have identified as the tapeworm economy.
• 23:35
  Armine Yalnizyan: Once you let this parasitic for-profit motive move into a sector to be able to extract more profits, uh, then what you've got is a system that gobbles up public resources, degrades the services that are there because it erodes both the quantity and the quality of jobs.
• 23:55
  Armine Yalnizyan: Why would you open yourself up to it?
• 23:57
  Armine Yalnizyan: We've got so much evidence from other countries, but we're doing nothing about it.
• 24:01
  Mary Rowe: The for profitizing and the tapeworm economy, two important concepts that to take away that are a bit depressing, but uh but reality uh checking.
• 24:10
  Mary Rowe: You know, the guardrails thing is is the great question, as you suggest.
• 24:14
  Mary Rowe: And you know, in our work, there is a phrase which is that private equity ate my main street.
• 24:19
  Mary Rowe: Mainstays of main streets, pharmacies, vet clinics, right?
• 24:24
  Mary Rowe: If we homogenize and genericize every kind of business so that suddenly main streets just are a bunch of chains, or or even at least with chains, you you know that the chain might have a franchise or might be a local owner.
• 24:38
  Mary Rowe: I'm not suggesting chains are all bad.
• 24:40
  Mary Rowe: They often aren't.
• 24:41
  Mary Rowe: You know, they often employ local people and they're owned by local families.
• 24:43
  Mary Rowe: But are there things we can do to push back?
• 24:46
  Mary Rowe: 100%.
• 24:48
  Armine Yalnizyan: I mean, you think about where private equity has been most rapacious, has actually bankrupted services in care, whether that's child care, long-term care, or health care.
• 24:58
  Armine Yalnizyan: And that ground zero was the United States.
• 25:01
  Armine Yalnizyan: And that is literally the location of the most uh legislative response, and the most response by people trying to get rid of them in a community.
• 25:11
  Armine Yalnizyan: I've been doing research for two and a half years on what's the response to these guys.
• 25:15
  Armine Yalnizyan: How big are they in Canada?
• 25:17
  Armine Yalnizyan: And what's the response to what has happened elsewhere?
• 25:20
  Armine Yalnizyan: And that book should be coming out in the spring.
• 25:23
  Armine Yalnizyan: The most creative responses come from ground zero of this, which is where they've been burnt the worst, they've come back the hardest.
• 25:31
  Armine Yalnizyan: And it's a fascinating scene.
• 25:33
  Armine Yalnizyan: But why would we wait to get burnt to do something?
• 25:36
  Armine Yalnizyan: We actually have a playbook that we can turn to.
• 25:39
  Armine Yalnizyan: And my concern was uh, by the way, on the same day as the investment summit, not only did they announce the for-profitization of the four largest airports in Canada, but they also said we're gonna give you a super duper extra big mega tax cut, a productivity tax cut.
• 25:55
  Mary Rowe: Um, as we wrap up here, I mean, what would you say to the localists among us, you know, folks that are engaged in building their local community, building local economies?
• 26:04
  Mary Rowe: Because we, you know, we want to engage obviously with the investment community.
• 26:08
  Mary Rowe: We want to engage with the political leadership that has, you know, any remarkable degree of public support.
• 26:14
  Mary Rowe: People feel that this, the kind of muscularity, or what uh one of our colleagues has called the uh celebrity of seriousness, people are appreciative of the way in which these things are being talked about.
• 26:25
  Mary Rowe: But on the ground, let's think about what we can all be doing to support, invest in, start.
• 26:31
  Mary Rowe: Any last thoughts from you?
• 26:33
  Armine Yalnizyan: Well, I I mean it would be a bad paraphrase of Margaret Mead.
• 26:36
  Armine Yalnizyan: Yeah.
• 26:36
  Armine Yalnizyan: Never underestimate what a small group of people can accomplish.
• 26:40
  Armine Yalnizyan: Indeed, that's the only way change has ever occurred.
• 26:42
  Armine Yalnizyan: That was a bad paraphrase, but you know what I'm talking about.
• 26:45
  Armine Yalnizyan: I got the gist of it.
• 26:46
  Armine Yalnizyan: Yeah, yeah.
• 26:46
  Armine Yalnizyan: Yeah, just uh get yourself together for a you know, a coffee club or drinks after work and just talk about what's happening and what you can do.
• 26:55
  Armine Yalnizyan: Lean into your power.
• 26:56
  Armine Yalnizyan: You've got a lot of power.
• 26:58
  Armine Yalnizyan: And we do seem to be at some kind of inflection point from stupid to less stupid, right?
• 27:03
  Armine Yalnizyan: Let's not make things worse.
• 27:05
  Armine Yalnizyan: Let us let us get to the place where we can discuss things that work, that we know work, and let's get her done.
• 27:12
  Mary Rowe: On that note, Armin, thank you for joining us on City Talk.
• 27:16
  Mary Rowe: I knew that we would have an interesting macro-micro conversation.
• 27:20
  Mary Rowe: I'm thankful that there are people like you looking at the systems, looking at the larger issues, looking at all the levers up there that are pullable that I don't even know they exist, but someone like you does, and you're holding everybody to account about what are the guardrails and how are we how are we enforcing them or how are we introducing them and then enforcing them.
• 27:37
  Mary Rowe: So thanks for joining Sig Talk.
• 27:39
  Mary Rowe: Great to have you here.
• 27:40
  Armine Yalnizyan: Thank you very much for inviting me.
• 27:41
  Armine Yalnizyan: It's always fun.
• 27:44
  Mary Rowe: I wasn't really expecting to find much comfort in our means insights on our shift in the economy, but that tape room analogy is particularly creepy.
• 27:52
  Mary Rowe: And I don't think guardrails can stop tape rooms.
• 27:55
  Mary Rowe: I think this moment demands some new analogs as well as innovative solutions.
• 28:00
  Mary Rowe: But I have a tip on a place and time where you're likely to hear innovative ideas and solutions, and likely some additional colorful metaphors.
• 28:08
  Mary Rowe: CUI's fourth annual State of Canada City Summit, which we're producing with many partners, happening at the Rogers Center in Ottawa, November 12th and 13th.
• 28:18
  Mary Rowe: And it is a happening, as the kids in the 60s used to say.
• 28:21
  Mary Rowe: So go to canerb.org and you can register to make sure you've got a seat.
• 28:26
  Mary Rowe: Now, before you join us in Ottawa, please join us again next Thursday when the next episode of City Talk drops at your favorite podcast outlet.
• 28:33
  Mary Rowe: I'll be speaking to two of this country's most thoughtful localists.
• 28:38
  Mary Rowe: That's all I'm gonna say.
• 28:40
  Mary Rowe: Tune in.
• 28:41
  Mary Rowe: You'll hear who they are.
• 28:42
  Mary Rowe: And we'd appreciate any comments you may have on what you've heard in this episode or anything else you think the CUI podcast team should know about.
• 28:49
  Mary Rowe: Drop us a line at Citytalk at Canurb.org.
• 28:52
  Mary Rowe: That's City Talk, all one word at C A N U R B.org, or click the Talk to Us From Your City link under the episode description to send us an instant video or a text message.
• 29:04
  Mary Rowe: I'm Mary Rowe.
• 29:06
  Mary Rowe: Thanks for listening.