Latest / The Missing Middle Podcast / The "Empty Land" Myth: Why Canada Can’t Just Sprout New Cities

Transcript

The "Empty Land" Myth: Why Canada Can’t Just Sprout New Cities · The Missing Middle Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you write about the housing crisis as Sabrina and I do, you'll often get comments like this one.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: Not everybody can live in Toronto, so Canada should create more cities to give young people new places they can afford.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's from someone who has already got their home, but sometimes a version of it even comes from people looking to buy a home for the first time.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: If a home in Toronto and Vancouver is too expensive, why does it feel like the only other choice is to move somewhere without jobs or to spend enormous amounts of our lives commuting?
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: Today on Classonomics, we'll talk about why it seems impossible for Canada to create a new city and whether we'd even really want to if we could.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: Classonomics, hosted by Sabrina Maddow and Mike Moffat.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: Creating new cities is a nice idea in theory.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: Toronto wasn't always this giant metropolitan area.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: If we did it before, we could do it again.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: And in theory, the people who are trying to get into the housing market at this point could get in early in this new city where homes would presumably be much cheaper.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: They could invest early, set down their roots there, grow families, and not have to deal with the challenges that come with densifying an older city with infrastructure that wasn't originally built with so many people in mind.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: And let's be honest, Canada has a lot of space.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of it isn't easy to develop, but there's no reason why we couldn't see London or Peterborough or Kingston become their own big cities, similar to Toronto or Vancouver.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: To be clear, everybody should move to London, but you know, when we look at this practically, like in my mind, it comes down to two questions.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: First, the question is what do we mean by a city?
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: And it turns out that's not pedantic that that really matters.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: And secondly, like what is the mechanism that people have in mind when they say, okay, we should create new cities?
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Because, in a very real sense, we are creating new cities, and Canada always has.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, if we go back all the way 25 years ago to 2001, since then the city of Toronto's population has grown by less than 30%, you know, city of Montreal by less than 20%.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: But at the same time, you know, Milton's population has grown fivefold.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's gone from like 30,000 people to 150,000 people.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Brampton's has more than doubled in size.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: They've added a half a million people.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: Vaughan and Surrey and Markham have nearly doubled.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: You know, Kitchener is twice as big as it was in the mid-1990s.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: Even places, you know, Chestermere, Alberta, like it used to have like 4,000 people, is soon going to have 40,000.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: So we are seeing new cities getting created, but they're doing so in an organic way rather than a planned way.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I really don't think that's what people have in mind, though, when they talk about Canada needing more cities.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: I think what they're actually picturing is having more metro areas like the GTA.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: Now, most of the places that you just mentioned on your list, while technically cities, are really just Toronto expanding outward.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: I do think that that is what people have in mind.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: When they say Canada needs more cities, what they really mean is that we need more big metros, not that, you know, the GTA needs to have kind of more satellite uh cities around that.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: But even there, you know, our big metros are often growing slower than some of our smaller ones.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now, it certainly feels like the GTA has rapidly grown over the last couple of decades, but go back to 2001, it's actually only the 14th fastest growing metro out of 41.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: Vancouver's only 12th, and Montreal is all the way down to 34th out of 41.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: So if you look at what's our fastest growing metros, it's Calgary and Edmonton.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: They're one and two.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: And you might think, okay, well, those are those count as big metros.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: But if you look at the next four after that, it's Kelowna, Red Deer, Chilliwack, and Saskatoon.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: You know, these aren't big cities.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: They're not places with NHL teams, or they don't even have CFL teams for that matter.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: You know, though I do think the Rough Riders claim the entire province of Saskatchewan, not just Regina.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: But the point is remaining that these are not places that would be considered big metros, but they are growing faster than your Toronto's, your Vancouver's, and your Montreals.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's really interesting that our existing big metros are falling behind smaller ones on growth, which very much has to do, I would think, with the cost of living, especially housing in these cities.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: And then you add to that decreased benefits like high unemployment and stagnant wage growth in what are supposed to be the country's economic centers.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: So essentially, if you're choosing to live in these places, you're getting all of the cons of city life without a lot of the historical pros.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: But that said, even with all this growth amongst smaller metros, it still feels like we don't have that many metros for a country of our size.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it certainly feels that way, but it it turns out we're kind of right where we should be.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, Canada has six metros that have a million people or more, which are our six metros with NHL teams.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we do have a seventh NHL team, which is in Winnipeg.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: And my apologies to Winnipeg, you don't make the cut here.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: You're not in the million-person club.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know, we could say, okay, six uh metros doesn't feel like a lot, but Canada only has 40 million people.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, you look at that, okay, we do have a limit on how many million-person metros we can have.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: And if we compare ourselves to countries at a similar stage of economic development or population, we're right where we should be.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: You know, Italy and Spain only have five metros with a million people.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: France has seven, South Korea has eight, the UK has 10.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: And these are all countries that have larger populations than Canada, but they are still in the same ballpark.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: You know, so it simply isn't true that Canada has an unusually small number of metros.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: We're right where we should be, or even arguably have more than we should have, or more than you would expect, given the fact that we are only 40 million people.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: All those places are geographically smaller than Canada, though.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: You'd think with our massive size, we'd spread out more and have more metros, or that's what a lot of people say, anyways.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I do think it's one of the reasons why we have six and not say five or four.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: And it's hard to compare Canada to a lot of other countries, uh, because there's not that many other countries that uh have both of our size and our population.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: You know, Canada's population density is less than five people per square kilometer.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: And there's only four countries in the world that have more than 10 million people and a population density of under 10, let alone under five.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: And two of those countries, Australia and Kazakhstan, they have fewer metros than Canada.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: So we look at those and go, okay, well, you know, we're not behind them by any uh stretch of the imagination.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: And if we expanded our criteria and go, okay, let's look at every country with a population density under 20, we're gonna add five additional countries to our list, and four of them have fewer metros than than Canada.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: The remaining exception there is Saudi Arabia, which has seven to R6.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: So outside of one really big underpopulated countries, uh, you know, geographically speaking, big countries with small populations generally don't have that many metros.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so Canada really isn't an exception.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: Part of the problem, though, is obviously that while we're geographically large, a lot of that square footage, so to speak, is northern with climates most people don't want to live in.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there are already enough complaints about whether in quote unquote southern Canadian cities like Toronto or worse, Ottawa.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry, Mike.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm curious what other country is the exception to this rule you mentioned.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm sure everyone's guessed by now.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: And you have if you haven't, or or you want to guess, you could uh throw a comment uh on the comment board.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: But the one exception here is Russia.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now, Russia has 17 metros of over a million persons, and that's uh three and a half times as many as Canada.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: But Russia's population is also about three and a half times as large as Canada.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's kind of scaled that way.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Though when the Soviet Union broke up, Russia's population was over five times that of Canada.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, we're we're growing quite a bit faster than they are.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: But we got to make clear like Russia didn't exactly get that many metros organically.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: Like there was the forced migration of roughly six million people during Stalin's reign, as well as more voluntary migration as the Soviets created new centers of manufacturing um across a country that were, you know, not so close to Europe.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I think it should go without saying that I don't think Canada should be trying to emulate Russia.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and I particularly say that to you because Vladimir Putin banned you from visiting Russia.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I gotta say, that's a badge of honor I'm still jealous of.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: And because of that, because we want to keep you around, I will say Canada should not emulate Russia.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: Definitely not.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the solution is by no means rounding up young people and forcing them to migrate to rural areas or northern areas in hopes that cities will magically spread up around them.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's just it.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: So when people ask, okay, why doesn't Canada simply create more cities?
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: I often wonder what exactly they're picturing, because I I'm quite certain they don't mean, you know, Stalinist relocations of working people.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: So I'd love to get sort of more details on, okay, what exactly do they have in mind?
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, there have got to be other options besides that, though.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there certainly are.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: And the history of them is not great.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the success story of creating new cities that people typically point to are in the United Kingdom.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: And this was some initiatives done between the end of World War II through to the late 1960s, and they're called New Towns.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: And there was this whole kind of new towns movement around them.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: And these were built under some fairly unique circumstances.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: And the most successful new towns were ones that were fairly proximate to existing big cities like London.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: So that's really not that much different than how Milton is growing uh so quickly.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: You know, these new towns were built a little bit more uh planned and a little bit less organically.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: But a lot of these new towns were still in the orbit of big cities.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: They weren't necessarily creating new metros.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: Those are your success stories.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: But if we look at the research, you know, back in 2002, the UK government studied the effectiveness of these new towns and they came to the following conclusion.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just going to read a quote here.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: The new towns are no longer new, and many of the quickly built houses have reached the end of their design life.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: The master plans dictated low density development with large amounts of open space and housing segregated from jobs, shopping, and business services.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: These created a car dependency and are now not considered sustainable.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's the same basic criticisms that urbanists make about uh suburban communities in the 905 around Toronto.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, I'm kind of failing to see the distinction here between you know what was done in the UK and what Canada has kind of done organically.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: Again, with the subtle differences that the UK did it in more of a planned way, we did it in more of an organic way, but we got to the same place.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: Has Canada ever tried creating new towns like that?
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we have.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: So not all of our initiatives were organic in nature.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the famous, most famous example is Don Mills, which is now part of the city of Toronto.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it was built as a planned new town in the early 1950s, but again, that's not creating a metro.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's creating a suburb uh of uh of Toronto.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's creating a part of the GTA.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: Now, there are cases of countries or provinces trying to create entire new metros, not just trying to create new suburban towns.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, my favorite example is in the late 1960s, the province of Ontario developed a plan to create a new manufacturing metro on Lake Erie, just south of Brantford, uh, and they called it Townsend.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: And Townsend was meant to have a population of a quarter of a million people, you know, basically become uh a metro the size of uh Kelowna or some of the ones that we mentioned earlier.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: And the the core idea behind it is that Townsend would attract all of these manufacturing plants, which would attract all of these workers and develop a new metro and take that pressure off of Toronto.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: But as it turns out, uh it didn't go anywhere because it didn't make sense for manufacturers to locate there because Townsend wasn't near supply chains, it wasn't near amenities like Highway 401 or Highway 403.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: Australia is also famous for such schemes, and most of those ended up in failure as well.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: Similar to Townsend, the Australians were trying to create a new city uh that they called Monardo, uh, that was supposed to take uh population pressures off of Adelaide.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: It was about 80 kilometers away.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: And they wanted to build a metro like Townsend that would be about 200,000 people by the year 2000.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: Well, today it has a population of 203.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: Not 203,000, but 203 people total.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: Minor difference, minor difference.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: Just a little bit of a difference, right?
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's a failure by any definition.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: You know, how uh no matter how much slack you're willing to uh give government, you know, being being off by uh what's that, like 100,000 percent, that's not good.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: And my favorite thing is that they they set all of this land aside uh to be uh an industrial park and to be homes and so on.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's now a zoo.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and I like it's now kind of a safari reserve.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: I I hear it's quite nice, uh, you know, but what they did is basically, you know, create uh a place for zebras to live and not for people.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: So if we look at Australia or other places, you know, the only real success stories are places like Canberra, where Australia created a whole city to house their government.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: So, like, unless the province of Ontario is going to like move Queen's Park to Wawa or something, these plans always end up being a massive waste of tax dollars that end in failure.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: And all of these initiatives you mentioned, though, are quote unquote big government approaches where the government is trying to get people to move to a specific location of their choosing in a highly centrally planned way.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: So isn't there any free market version of this where instead of government doing more, it does less through having lower taxes or regulations in underpopulated parts of the country?
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's a it's a fair question because a lot of this really does show the failures of central planning.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: So we go, okay, can we achieve the same outcomes of central planning by doing so through a free market approach?
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: And we'll say that obviously taxes and regulations do matter on the margin.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: And they determine why a tech firm might choose to locate in Silicon Valley or Austin, Texas, or why a manufacturer might locate in South Carolina versus Ohio.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: But all of the incentives and deregulations are not going to get a tech firm to move to West Virginia.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: It just doesn't make sense.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: That, you know, like the manufacturers with Townsend, companies need access to supply chains and talent and infrastructure.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: And those are only located at a handful of places.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so it doesn't make sense for companies uh to move there and you know, changing regulations and taxes doesn't really change that.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: And frankly, if companies are that mobile, they can do business anywhere, it doesn't matter where on the planet they'd be.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like, why would they move to like Northern Ontario when they could move to like Bangladesh or Mexico or someplace where wages are far below what they would ever be in Canada or the United States?
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: We look at the individual level, you know, getting people to move, people already have a massive incentive to move to places like Northern Ontario where housing is like five times cheaper than it is in the GTA.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: But people, for the most part, aren't making that move.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: So you go, okay, how much more incentives can there be for people to make that move?
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: Because they need to, it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they need to move somewhere that has work, but companies are going to locate someplace that that has workers.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, these schemes don't really work either.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: And they always lead to me to ask, like, if we could reduce these regulatory barriers with no side effects, like, why wouldn't we just do that everywhere?
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: Like, we have some regulation that doesn't make sense in the GTA.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like, why would we just abolish that for Northern Ontario and say, well, this rule doesn't make sense.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: Let's just get rid of it entirely.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: And to be honest, even if we could create a new city and tell job seekers and priced out families to move there, the idea strikes me as unfair because it divides the country then into haves and have nots.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: It creates a situation where only the haves should be able to live in whatever city they want, whereas the have-nots are forced to be in these isolated parts of the country, not of their choosing.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: But fairness aside, would that even be practical?
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: You're right.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not only just not fair, but it's also really not practical.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the idea that young people can all move to one city and older homeowners can remain in existing cities simply doesn't work.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: Like you can't have all the rich older people living in the city of Toronto and all the personal support workers and nurses living in Thunder Bay or Southeast Saskatchewan.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: Like a society simply can't function that way.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: There needs to be room in every single community for people of various wealth and income levels, or else you're not going to have the workers you need in the healthcare system or the education system and so on.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: So every community has to have a diversity of age and has to have a diversity of income levels.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: And this idea of, okay, let's ship all the young people off to more remote parts of the country, it fails to understand why people live where they do and why businesses locate in one place or another.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: Cities are not simply warehouses for humans that could be placed anywhere.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: As I mentioned before, the proximity to amenities and supply chain and infrastructure all matters, right?
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: So you can't build cars and have auto workers in Churchill, Manitoba, you know, any more than you can move the oil sands to Mississauga.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: Like a lot of these places and a lot of these businesses are in specific locations for specific reasons, and you just can't kind of wave that away by government diktat.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: People are going to locate where it makes sense for them.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: For sure.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I think more than that, um, of course, there's economic reasons for moving as well, but people choose to live in existing cities because of culture and access to the arts and all these other things that would take a very long time if they could ever be built up somewhere else to be built up.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_01: So there's that entire aspect of it as well.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much, everyone, for watching and listening.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: And to our producers, Meredith Martin and Kara Stern and our editor, Sean Foreman.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: If you have any thoughts or questions about why everybody should move to London, Ontario, please send us an email to missing middle podcast at gmail.com.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: And we'll see you next time.