The New Poles of Canada
Feb. 27th, 2003 11:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldFrom The Globe and Mail:
Rise of the metropolis suggests two new solitudes: cities - and everywhere else
By ROY MacGREGOR
Thursday, February 27, 2003 - Page A2
Think of it as the New Two Solitudes.
"Absolutely," says Paul Reed. "That's exactly the message we've been trying to get out."
What Reed, a social scientist with Ottawa's Carleton University, and several other academics and statisticians across the country are seeking to do is no less than turn conventional thinking on its ear.
They believe the time has passed for seeing Canada as a French/English split, as Hugh MacLennan originally put it in his landmark Canadian novel Two Solitudes -- or, for that matter, regarding the country as a federal system with a central government in Ottawa and a second layer composed of clearly defined provinces and territories.
That, they say, is merely the national mythology, the "imagined reality" of those who still see this country as a string of smaller communities sprinkled across the continent, with large places like Montreal and Toronto the Canadian anomalies.
In fact, they say, the new reality is that more than half of all Canadians -- 52 per cent -- now live in the four Big City Regions.
They are:
Ontario's Golden Horseshoe surrounding Toronto, the Montreal Urban Community stretching east along the St. Lawrence to Sorel, the Calgary-Edmonton axis and the B.C. Lower Mainland, including Vancouver.
Add in Ottawa/Gatineau, Winnipeg and Halifax and the majority rises even higher.
"Without quite realizing it," University of Toronto political scientist David Cameron argues, "we Canadians are in the process of building a new country within the old one. The new country is composed of the large cities, especially the great metropolitan centres of Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, the old country is all the rest.
"Life in the former bears little resemblance to life in the latter, whether it is a question of cultural expression, crime, the sense of neighbourhood, price and income levels, traffic or the pace of life."
"It is sobering to recognize," adds Reed, "that the Greater Toronto Area would, if designated a province, be fourth largest in population and conceivably largest of all in economic terms."
Reed has recently completed an analysis entitled Metropoles and Peripheries: The Evolution of City-Regions in Contemporary Canada, in which he considers this new perception of Canada that, he says, grew out of a simple rhetorical question asked by his friend Cameron.
Is it possible, Cameron had wondered, that a place like Chicoutimi in Quebec might have more in common today with, say, Ontario's Sault Ste. Marie or Manitoba's Brandon than it does with Montreal?
"It's a preposterous question if one stays within conventional thinking," says Reed. But not so, he argues, if you think of Chicoutimi, a small city with an almost homogeneous population, few cultural differences among the population, a particular economic structure, and largely standard values.
Sounds then more like the Soo, perhaps, than Montreal, which like the other large centres has experienced an explosion of cultural and social diversity in recent years.
The revelations in the latest census merely underline this new reality.
Reed says that these developments have brought about "fresh fault lines" in the Canadian structure.
"The gap between metropolitan centres and hinterlands is widening," he says. The United States, many believe, is evolving much the same way into pockets of virtual city states and then the rest.
"Are We Really One Country?" a recent article in The Atlantic Monthly asks.
The clear answer is no, at least no longer, the United States of America at the present divided between the "Blues" who voted largely for Al Gore in the last presidential election and the "Reds," most dominant in the heartland, who voted for George W. Bush.
Neither side, contends author David Brooks, understands the other at all, the more-sophisticated "Blue" attitude being, "Don't ask us, please, what life in Red America is like. We don't know."
Much the same holds true for those who live within Canada's Big City Regions and the more-isolated smaller communities and rural Canada.
And yet, at a time when the whole structure of the country seems to have shifted, the governance structure remains what was put in place 136 years ago.
Harsh as it may seem to point out, the fact of the matter is that the population of Saskatchewan is approximately that of the small city region of Ottawa/Gatineau, while Prince Edward Island is roughly the size of a small suburb of one of the giants.
The inequities of the new reality are beginning to show up dramatically, the researchers say.
Reed's analysis points out that the federal government posted a $9.1-billion surplus in 2000-2001, while the provinces and territories combined for a surplus of $11.4-billion -- whereas local governments posted a deficit of $443-million in 2000.
Something, they are saying, is badly out of order here.
Perhaps enough to call for a "clean sheet" to consider again how this sprawling country of ours should be organized.
"Federalism," Reed even goes so far as to suggest, "will come to be seen either as irrelevant, or in some radically modified form, as indispensable."
Rise of the metropolis suggests two new solitudes: cities - and everywhere else
By ROY MacGREGOR
Thursday, February 27, 2003 - Page A2
Think of it as the New Two Solitudes.
"Absolutely," says Paul Reed. "That's exactly the message we've been trying to get out."
What Reed, a social scientist with Ottawa's Carleton University, and several other academics and statisticians across the country are seeking to do is no less than turn conventional thinking on its ear.
They believe the time has passed for seeing Canada as a French/English split, as Hugh MacLennan originally put it in his landmark Canadian novel Two Solitudes -- or, for that matter, regarding the country as a federal system with a central government in Ottawa and a second layer composed of clearly defined provinces and territories.
That, they say, is merely the national mythology, the "imagined reality" of those who still see this country as a string of smaller communities sprinkled across the continent, with large places like Montreal and Toronto the Canadian anomalies.
In fact, they say, the new reality is that more than half of all Canadians -- 52 per cent -- now live in the four Big City Regions.
They are:
Ontario's Golden Horseshoe surrounding Toronto, the Montreal Urban Community stretching east along the St. Lawrence to Sorel, the Calgary-Edmonton axis and the B.C. Lower Mainland, including Vancouver.
Add in Ottawa/Gatineau, Winnipeg and Halifax and the majority rises even higher.
"Without quite realizing it," University of Toronto political scientist David Cameron argues, "we Canadians are in the process of building a new country within the old one. The new country is composed of the large cities, especially the great metropolitan centres of Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, the old country is all the rest.
"Life in the former bears little resemblance to life in the latter, whether it is a question of cultural expression, crime, the sense of neighbourhood, price and income levels, traffic or the pace of life."
"It is sobering to recognize," adds Reed, "that the Greater Toronto Area would, if designated a province, be fourth largest in population and conceivably largest of all in economic terms."
Reed has recently completed an analysis entitled Metropoles and Peripheries: The Evolution of City-Regions in Contemporary Canada, in which he considers this new perception of Canada that, he says, grew out of a simple rhetorical question asked by his friend Cameron.
Is it possible, Cameron had wondered, that a place like Chicoutimi in Quebec might have more in common today with, say, Ontario's Sault Ste. Marie or Manitoba's Brandon than it does with Montreal?
"It's a preposterous question if one stays within conventional thinking," says Reed. But not so, he argues, if you think of Chicoutimi, a small city with an almost homogeneous population, few cultural differences among the population, a particular economic structure, and largely standard values.
Sounds then more like the Soo, perhaps, than Montreal, which like the other large centres has experienced an explosion of cultural and social diversity in recent years.
The revelations in the latest census merely underline this new reality.
Reed says that these developments have brought about "fresh fault lines" in the Canadian structure.
"The gap between metropolitan centres and hinterlands is widening," he says. The United States, many believe, is evolving much the same way into pockets of virtual city states and then the rest.
"Are We Really One Country?" a recent article in The Atlantic Monthly asks.
The clear answer is no, at least no longer, the United States of America at the present divided between the "Blues" who voted largely for Al Gore in the last presidential election and the "Reds," most dominant in the heartland, who voted for George W. Bush.
Neither side, contends author David Brooks, understands the other at all, the more-sophisticated "Blue" attitude being, "Don't ask us, please, what life in Red America is like. We don't know."
Much the same holds true for those who live within Canada's Big City Regions and the more-isolated smaller communities and rural Canada.
And yet, at a time when the whole structure of the country seems to have shifted, the governance structure remains what was put in place 136 years ago.
Harsh as it may seem to point out, the fact of the matter is that the population of Saskatchewan is approximately that of the small city region of Ottawa/Gatineau, while Prince Edward Island is roughly the size of a small suburb of one of the giants.
The inequities of the new reality are beginning to show up dramatically, the researchers say.
Reed's analysis points out that the federal government posted a $9.1-billion surplus in 2000-2001, while the provinces and territories combined for a surplus of $11.4-billion -- whereas local governments posted a deficit of $443-million in 2000.
Something, they are saying, is badly out of order here.
Perhaps enough to call for a "clean sheet" to consider again how this sprawling country of ours should be organized.
"Federalism," Reed even goes so far as to suggest, "will come to be seen either as irrelevant, or in some radically modified form, as indispensable."
