Tag: Toronto

Ryerson University Research Cites Urban Containment Policy as Major Factor in Toronto House Price Escalation

A Globe and Mail article on April 25 cites Ryerson University research found that Ontario’s urban containment based growth controls have "spurred soaring increases in house prices in the Toronto region by limiting construction of new low-rise family homes…" This effect was predicted by a number of analysts when the program was being formulated more than a decade ago and has been associated with huge price increases relative to incomes in such widely distributed metropolitan areas as Vancouver, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Sydney, Auckland, Melbourne and others.

According to reporter Janet McFarland, the Centre for Urban Research and Land Development report identified “’a marked mismatch” between the types of units completed and the types demanded, according to the report from the Centre for Urban Research and Land Development at Ryerson University in Toronto." The report concludes that "The public discussion on the fundamental causes behind the rise in prices of ground-related housing (singles, semis and townhouses) in the GTA over the past decade by ignoring or downplaying the role played by the shortfall of serviced sites available to build new homes misses the only viable solution to dealing with deteriorating longer-term affordability – significantly increasing the number of new ground-related housing units built."

Over the 13 years of the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, Toronto’s housing affordability has substantially worsened, with median prices at 3.8 times median incomes in 2004 (before the growth controls were fully implemented) to 7.7 times in 2016. This measure, the "median multiple," had changed little between 1970 and 2004, when land use regulations were more liberal in the Toronto area.

Without liberalization of the housing market to permit supply that meets demand (not only in numbers but also in preferred type of housing), Toronto can expect its house prices to rise even more. Already, Vancouver and Sydney, for example are more than 50 percent higher (at median multiples of 11.8 and 12.2 respectively).

April 26, 2017
Toronto Area Housing Market Rigged Against Millennials

In a Globe and Mail column, Margaret Wente accurately describes Toronto’s housing affordability crisis and its principal cause. The Toronto area’s house prices have escalated strongly relative to incomes since the province enacted its “Places to Grow” urban planning regime. The resulting destruction of the competitive market for new residential has driven prices up, just as oil prices rise when OPEC implements strong supply restrictions.

Wente concluded her article:

“The solution to the affordability crisis isn’t high-density housing and mass transit in the burbs. It’s to give people what they want – by getting the ideologues out of the way and restoring a sensible balance between supply and demand. Can we do that and be environmentally responsible too? Central planners who think we can’t should be required to raise their families in an apartment block in Oshawa and take the bus to work. They’d find a better way soon enough.”

It’s no wonder that international researchers are increasingly pointing to house price escalation as a leading driver of rising inequality. Nor should it be surprising that a new Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation report will issue its first “red warning” on Canada’s housing market, principally due to out of control house price escalation in the Vancouver and Toronto metropolitan areas.

October 25, 2016
California’s Choice – Growth or Decline

I’ve been friends with Charlie Sena for almost two decades. Charlie, a longtime entrepreneur, Democratic political operative and fundraiser for former Gov. Gray Davis, recently chided me about what he sees as my “negativity” about California and its future. My response was that, given its natural advantages, this region should not be in such a weakened condition. Decline, I suggest, is not an imperative here, but largely a choice.

Last week, I decided to confront this issue over lunch at Citrus Grille in Orange, just down the block from Chapman University, where I teach. Charlie noted that the negative points I was making were correct, but I owed it to the readers to “write a piece on why California can be, and should be, a state with the right climate for business growth.”

So, we sat in the restaurant, working on a list of positive things for California to build on. We centered on working with our population, including many immigrants and entrepreneurs, reinforcing our connections to Asia and Mexico and, finally, taking advantage of our climate. “The great strength of California,” Charlie suggests, “is people – people who go out and make it on their own.”

Immigrant Edge

The first group Charlie pointed to are immigrants, a group for which California long has been a lure. Twenty percent of Californians are foreign-born, and one of four immigrants nationally lives in our state. Amidst a general downturn in overall entrepreneurial activities, notes a recent study, the foreign-born have continued to expand their business footprint. In 2011, notes the Kaufmann Foundation, immigrant start-up rates were twice those of the native-born.

Attitudes are important here. To succeed in a highly regulated, expensive state like California, you need to have more than usual perseverance.

Asians, for example, according to the Pew Research Center, are far more likely than other Americans to believe that “hard work” pays off. Not surprisingly, they also tend to have higher levels of education, income and business success than other Americans.

But equally important has been the entrepreneurial growth among Latinos, who became the state’s largest ethnic group in 2014, according to demographers, and could be close to 50 percent of the population by 2050. Indeed, a recent study of Latino business found that Hispanic entrepreneurs have more than tripled since 1990, from 577,000 to more than 2 million. Not only did this growth outpace that of the overall population increase among Hispanics, but at a rate of increase far above the national average.

Anyone who drives out into the vast expanses of the state can see these businesses – new markets, countless restaurants, small factories, farms, local banks and scores of smaller service firms. California’s new commercial signature is not the traditional mall or luxury shopping street, but, rather, multiethnic commercial areas, like the Diamond Jamboree center in Irvine.

Rise of Self-employed

But there’s also signs of greater growth in the ranks of self-employed people across the population. The self-employed proprietor is the one entrepreneurial category that has grown since the recession. This may well represent a pragmatic choice by business people who wish to make money, but avoid the ever-increasing regulations here that make having employees increasingly difficult.

This growth is particularly vibrant in the Riverside-San Bernardino area, notes a recent study by the economic modeling firm EMSI Inc. The inland region expanded its sole-proprietor ranks by 11.8 percent since 2008, second to booming Houston and more than twice the growth rate of either the Bay Area or Los Angeles-Long Beach. All these key California areas greatly outperformed such competitors as Denver, Greater Washington, D.C., Chicago or Atlanta.

Foreign connections

California also has enjoyed a unique connection to the fast-growing economies of the Pacific Rim and Mexico. Texas succeeded in luring Toyota, as Tennessee did with Nissan, but neither state possesses the intense cultural and historic ties California enjoys with Japan and other Pacific Rim countries. To be sure, places like Plano, outside Dallas, and around Houston’s Bellaire Road look increasingly like the San Gabriel Valley or Garden Grove in their ethnic flavor, but they are at least a generation – and an order magnitude – behind.

Where Texas eats our lunch, says Charlie, who lived in Houston years ago, is in forging ties with Mexico. Many Californians – particularly on the right but also on the “green” left – tend to regard Mexico as something of a threat to our social and ecological order. But supposedly less-enlightened Texas, where business is king, has developed a powerful passion for closer ties to Mexico, with a growing partnership between the Lone Star State and Mexico, which, for example, is already Houston’s foremost trading partner.

Political dilemma

So, why is California not taking advantage of these assets? One main reason lies with the regulatory and tax agendas of Charlie’s own party, something he is quick to acknowledge. “The Democratic Party,” he suggests, “is on a collision course with reality. They don’t realize that you need a broadly growing economy to support or expand social services.”

This is the dilemma that progressives need to confront in California. An over-regulated, overtaxed economy slows business growth and forces companies to look elsewhere to expand, particularly outside of very high-end functions. Superhigh income tax rates deprive small-business owners of the capital they need to reinvest and grow their enterprises. Under the current regime, many of them, particularly the young, may find starting a business in Colorado, Nevada, Utah or Texas easier and more financially rewarding.

Back to Pat?

Like Charlie, I admire many of the things we created during the great expansion of the Gov. Pat Brown era, a half-century ago – the higher education system, the freeways, the water projects, to name three. All these were paid for by broad-based economic growth, and contributed to accelerating that growth over time. Our success made California a model for other states – including Texas and North Carolina – which wanted to leave behind their feudal, and deeply racist, pasts.

Now, these people are essentially beating us at our own game, and unless we respond, they will continue to attract not only large businesses, such as Toyota and Occidental, but also talented people critical to the grass-roots economy.

Politicians in Sacramento, and many city halls across this state, seem to have little notion of, or even interest in, economic growth beyond serving the interests of public employees and crony capitalists, whether in subsidized “green energy” boondoggles or among rent-seeking developers. These kind of policies are simply transfers of resources from neighborhoods, suburban or urban, to the well-placed; they have not been significant economic drivers.

Charlie’s last point – climate – remains critical. This region is never going to become Detroit, no matter how misguided is our political class, simply because of its weather and topography. People and businesses will want to come here if they can make a decent living and enjoy the option of housing, largely single-family homes, that remains the ultimate goal of most upwardly mobile people, particularly immigrants.

So, if maybe sometimes I get too negative about California, it’s in large part because we squander opportunities and seem determined to ignore all the basic economic data. In this shortcoming, the media, notably the Los Angeles Times, has been particularly gratuitous, acting as if the loss of key companies, such as Occidental and Toyota, was largely irrelevant and, indeed, inevitable.

This is not, in my mind, the California I moved to four decades ago. That we do things differently here is not a negative – it’s why many of us are here – but we need to recognize that you cannot support an ever-expanding welfare state or do much of anything about climate change simply by chasing people and individuals elsewhere. We need to start developing policies that exploit our advantages and not rest on our glorious past. We need to see, as Charlie would say, that decline is not inevitable, but only a choice that too many in the state seem determined to embrace.

This article first appeared in the Orange County Register.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

Photo illustration by krazydad/jbum.

June 16, 2014
The Mad Drive to Subvert Democracy in Toronto

Let me stipulate that I think Toronto’s Rob Ford is a terrible mayor. In fact, while I might not go so far as Richard Florida, who labeled Ford “the worst mayor in the modern history of cities, an avatar for all that is small-bore and destructive of the urban fabric, and the most anti-urban mayor ever to preside over a big city,” I’m willing to say he’s probably in the running for the title.

The roots of Rob Ford lie in “amalgamation,” the forcible merging of the city of Toronto government with various of its suburbs by the Ontario provincial government. The idea was cost savings, but of course costs went up. Also, it created a Mars-Venus situation that ultimately led to Ford, a former city councilor in Etobicoke, being elected mayor. This would be like a consolidation of Chicago with Cook County in which a member of the Schaumburg city council ended up mayor. Not good. The urban intelligentsia that despises Ford now find themselves in the embarrassing position of having to explain to their friends that they are in total agreement with Wendell Cox, an implacable foe of government consolidations, who predicted these results.

But there’s a big difference between Florida’s bashing of Ford, which falls within the principles of democratic discourse as we’ve come to know it, and what appears to be an effort by some to subvert democracy by finding any pretext to run Rob Ford out of office.

I’m not sure where the idea that the loser in an election tries to undermine the legitimacy of the government of the winner came from. But in the modern era it could be the Republican impeachment of Bill Clinton that launched it. This quickly proved to be standard fare. There was the brouhaha over the “selected not elected” George W. Bush as well as the more passionate strain of “birthers” when it comes to President Obama. Given that, especially in the big leagues, there is always some dirtiness in politics, it’s easy to find things to seize upon to claim someone’s holding of an office is invalid. After all, it appears that Clinton really did commit perjury and there was shall we say some murkiness down in Florida. However, these aren’t truly what the people raising a ruckus cared about. What they cared about was the man in office they didn’t like – and getting him out of it.

Canada has a reputation as a kinder, gentler nation, but they now appear to have imported from America what Clinton labeled “the politics of personal destruction.” Rob Ford has been the target of a series of vicious attacks, generally aided and abetted (if not outright instigated) by the old city Toronto media that clearly don’t like him, designed to drive him out of office.

One was a lawsuit that claimed he should be tossed out of office because of events related to his using official letterhead and such to raise $3,500 for a charity. Believe it or not, the trial judge actually agreed with this and ordered him removed from office. If that’s the threshold for getting someone kicked out of office, I dare say every major politician in America would be gone. Yes, politicians do often use affiliated charities as a, shall we say, lubricating mechanism. Yes, there’s the appearance or even the reality of some impropriety in these things. But this is such small fry stuff that to throw the mayor of the biggest city in the country out of office over it defies belief. If you think this is removal worthy, I’m confident I can find something just as bad in almost any politician that you actually like. Fortunately, saner heads at the appeals level prevailed and the ruling was overturned.

Recently we’ve also seen reports originating from, I kid you not, Gawker, in which some shady Somalis supposedly showed a reporter a cell phone video of Rob Ford smoking crack. Shortly thereafter the Toronto Star got in on the act, saying their reporters had seen the video in the back seat of the car, though with the CYA proviso that they had “no way to verify the authenticity of the video.” Other media that may not have directly originated such a story have piled on and thus there’s a firestorm awhirl.

Where is the video, you might ask? Good question. Supposedly it’s for sale for $200K but oddly no one snapped it up, not even one of the extremely wealthy Ford haters that Toronto has in abundance. So you want to buy it? Oh, Gawker now tell us it might be “gone.” Hmmm…..

I’m not saying there’s no video. Rob Ford has certainly acted like he’s guilty of something. But it seems amazing to me that in this era in which all types of tapes and documents spontaneously get loose, this one is no where to be found. Also, the idea of the mayor of Toronto smoking crack with a bunch of Somalis while they film him falls into the “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof” category. The still photo is interesting, but I’ve seen many compromising photos of mayors, who are routinely snapped with all sorts of random people who they may find out later are unsavory characters. I can’t imagine this sort of media feeding frenzy over say, similar allegations against Michael Bloomberg or Rahm Emanuel.

The Toronto Globe and Mail is a serious newspaper that’s roughly Canada’s New York Times. Though they didn’t break the video story, they did follow-up with a rather tabloidesque article about the history of Rob Ford’s family with drugs. Ford’s brother Doug, the focus of the piece, is on the city council himself, so is a legitimate investigative target so to speak, but the piece also digs into other family members.

Not only is the Globe and Mail digging up dirt on Rob Ford’s family, this piece did it entirely with anonymous sources. They claimed to talk to no fewer than ten people who called Doug Ford a drug-dealer, but curiously none of them were willing to talk on the record. That didn’t stop the Globe and Mail from reporting:

Ten people who grew up with Doug Ford – a group that includes two former hashish suppliers, three street-level drug dealers and a number of casual users of hash – have described in a series of interviews how for several years Mr. Ford was a go-to dealer of hash. These sources had varying degrees of knowledge of his activities: Some said they purchased hash directly from him, some said they supplied him, while others said they observed him handling large quantities of the drug.

The events they described took place years ago, but as mayor, Rob Ford has surrounded himself with people from his past. Most recently he hired someone for his office whose long history with the Fords, the sources said, includes selling hashish with the mayor’s brother.
…
There’s nothing on the public record that The Globe has accessed that shows Doug Ford has ever been criminally charged for illegal drug possession or trafficking. But some of the sources said that, in the affluent pocket of Etobicoke where the Fords grew up, he was someone who sold not only to users and street-level dealers, but to dealers one rung higher than those on the street. His tenure as a dealer, many of the sources say, lasted about seven years until 1986, the year he turned 22. “That was his heyday,” said “Robert,” one of the former drug dealers who agreed to an interview on the condition he not be identified by name.

Upon being approached, the sources declined to speak if identified, saying they feared the consequences of outing themselves as former users and sellers of illegal drugs.

The Globe also tried to contact retired police officers who investigated drugs in the area at the time. One said he had no recollection of encountering the Fords.

The article is full of innuendo about the Ford’s such as the idea that Rob Ford recently hired a drug dealing associate of Doug’s from the old days (highlighted above), along with curious mentions and links to beatings, killings, and white supremacy/KKK. (Rob Ford is a white supremacist who likes to smoke crack with Somalis???) It’s capped off by having various anonymous sources given pseudonyms so that they appear to be actual people on the record. As this excerpt notes, the police record and police contacts don’t back up the story, which just adds to the general notion of dubiosity and suggests this is a very exaggerated piece that tries to throw things to the wall to see what sticks.

All it all, given the extreme reactions to financial dealings that, even if they were proven, would have been a non-issue almost anywhere else, along with a firestorm of allegations about smoking crack and so much more with no actual proof, the Rob Ford affair has thus far generated much more smoke than fire.

Rob Ford is the price Toronto is paying for the foolishness of the provincial government and the failure of an urban candidate to offer a compelling vision for the entire amalgamated city. But it strikes me very much that a group of old Toronto city partisans, who are incensed a guy like Ford had the temerity to win an election, are determined to use any means necessary to correct what they see is that injustice. But just as with what happened in America and its politics in the wake of the Clinton impeachment, Canada may come to rue the day a group of its citizens decided to try to overturn an election by destroying the winner rather than waiting for their next opportunity at the ballot box.

Aaron M. Renn is an independent writer on urban affairs and the founder of Telestrian, a data analysis and mapping tool. He writes at The Urbanophile, where this piece originally appeared.

Photo by Wiki Commons user MTLskyline.

June 12, 2013
The Evolving Urban Form: Toronto

Toronto is the largest city (metropolitan area) in Canada and its principal commercial center. However, this is a relatively recent development. Toronto displaced Montréal is Canada’s largest city during the 1960s. Since the 1971 census, when the two Metropolitan areas were nearly identical size, Toronto has added approximately 3 million people, while Montréal has added approximately 1,000,000 (Figure 1).

This shift is exceptional within the high-income world over the past half century. Toronto’s ascendancy was in large part precipitated by the move by Québec, in which Montréal is the largest city, to assert the primacy of the French language even though much of the Montréal business community was Anglophone. Many of these businesses, and some of their employees, decamped to Toronto.

Metropolitan, Suburban and Core Population Growth: 1931-2011

Toronto has grown very rapidly. In 1931, the metropolitan area had little more than 800,000 residents. About 80% of these (630,000) lived in the former city of Toronto. Since that time, nearly all of the growth in the Toronto metropolitan area has been in the suburbs (Figure 2). The area of the former city of Toronto (abolished in 1998 as a part of a six jurisdiction amalgamation, see Note on the Toronto Amalgamation) has added little more than 100,000 residents while the suburban areas have added approximately 4.7 million. By 2011, the metropolitan area had grown to a population of 5.5 million (Figure 3).

In recent decades, Toronto has been among the fastest-growing larger metropolitan areas in the high income world.

The Larger Region: The Golden Horseshoe

The Toronto metropolitan area is at the core of a much larger region of urbanization that is referred to as the Golden Horseshoe. The Golden Horseshoe stretches in the shape of a horseshoe from the US border at Niagara Falls (St. Catharine’s metropolitan area) through the Hamilton metropolitan area to Toronto and on to the Oshawa and Peterborough metropolitan areas to the east. The Golden Horseshoe (which can be defined in various ways), also includes the Kitchener, Brantford, Guelph, and Barrie metropolitan areas.

Overall the Golden Horseshoe registered a population of approximately 8.1 million in the 2011 census. Approximately 9% of the population lives in the former city of Toronto, 3% in the inner core federal electoral districts of Toronto – Centre and Trinity – Spadina and another 6% in the balance of the former city. Approximately 91% of the population is in the rest of the Golden Horseshoe (Figure 5).
Like many other metropolitan areas, Toronto’s core has experienced a resurgence. Between 2006 and 2011, the inner core two districts added 16.2% to their population (Figure 6). This was a much stronger increase than occurred in the federal electoral districts that roughly correspond to the balance of the former city of Toronto, which grew 1.8%. The inner suburbs grew somewhat more strongly, at 4.2%. This rate of growth, barely one-quarter that of the inner core districts, was a more than 1.5 times the actual population increase of the inner core districts.

The outer suburbs within the metropolitan area grew 13.7%. While the outer suburban growth rate was less than that of the inner core districts, the actual population increase was more than nine times as great. The balance of the Golden Horseshoe grew 4.7%, slightly more than the inner suburbs.

Between 2006 and 2011 the overwhelming majority – 92 percent – of population growth was outside the core roughly corresponding to the former city of Toronto. This is less than the percentage of the total population represented by the inner core in the 2006 census. This is similar to the dynamics of metropolitan population growth in the United States, where inner core districts dominated central city growth, but produce little or none of the overall growth because of the stagnant or declining populations in the areas immediately outside the inner core.

The Urban Area

The Toronto urban area (called “population centre” by Statistics Canada) had a population of approximately 5.1 million according to the 2011 census. With a land area of 675 square miles (1,750 square kilometers), Toronto’s population density is 7,590 per square mile (2,930 per square kilometer). Toronto is the only major urban area in the New World (Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States) that is more dense than Los Angeles, which had 7,000 residents per square mile (2,700 per square kilometer), according to the 2010 census (Note on extended urban areas).

Canada’s Largest Employment Center

It is not surprising that Canada’s largest employment center should be in its largest metropolitan area. Surprisingly it is not downtown Toronto, but rather the Pearson International Airport area, which is shared between the municipalities of Mississauga, Brampton, and Toronto that is the top job center. This large area covers approximately 45 square miles (120 square kilometers), an area as large as either the municipalities of Vancouver or San Francisco. The center is largely made up of low rise transportation and distribution facilities that stretched far from the airport itself. Overall, the Pearson International Airport center has an employment level of more than 350,000.

In contrast downtown Toronto has approximately 325,000 jobs crammed into an area of 2.3 square miles (6 square kilometers). This highly concentrated area is, however, the focal point of transit’s largest commuting market in Canada.

The contrast between these two employment markets vividly illustrates the substantial strengths of transit in serving highly concentrated employment centers, like downtown Toronto, and its virtual inability to provide automobile competitive service in more highly dispersed employment centers (see Note on Transit and Employment Concentration)

Overall, only 13 percent of the employment in the metropolitan area (as opposed to the Golden Horseshoe) is in downtown Toronto.

As Goes Toronto, So Goes Canada

Toronto and the Golden Horseshoe are particularly important to Canada. The Golden Horseshoe has more than one quarter of Canada’s population. This is an unusually high proportion of a nation’s population for one highly urbanized region and boasts an even larger share of its economic output. By comparison, the largest metropolitan region in the United States, New York, represents barely 7% of the nation’s population. In many ways, Canada’s prosperity, which has been impressive in recent years, depends on the success of Toronto and the Golden Horseshoe.

See Also: A Toronto Condo Bubble?

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Note on the Toronto Amalgamation: The former city of Toronto and five other municipal jurisdictions were amalgamated under an act of the Ontario government in 1998. The amalgamation was promoted by the government on efficiency grounds, claiming that hundreds of millions annually would be saved. I was hired by the former city to assist it in an effort to defeat the amalgamation proposal. Our side argued that the cost savings would not occur because of the necessity of harmonizing (the leveling up) labor costs and service levels. Despite advisory referendums that receive a minimum of a 70% no vote, the amalgamation went forward.

The amalgamation is still a controversial subject. The financial argument appears to have been resolved in the favor of the position of the former city. A major Toronto business organization, the Toronto City Summit Alliance reported “The amalgamation of the City of Toronto has not produced the overall cost savings that were projected. Although there have been savings from staff reductions, the harmonization of wages and service levels has resulted in higher costs for the new City. We will all continue to feel these higher costs in the future.” My commentary in the National Post on the tenth anniversary of the amalgamation summarized the experience.

In a spirited debate in 2001 at Ryerson University, in downtown Toronto with a former Toronto transit commission official, my opponent and I agreed on one issue, that the amalgamation of Toronto had been a mistake.

Note on Extended Urban Areas: In fact, the continuous urbanization of Toronto extends further, to the west into the Hamilton metropolitan area and to the east into the Oshawa metropolitan area. If these areas are combined into a single urban area, the population density falls to 7000 per square mile (2,700 per square kilometer). Even with this extension, Toronto would be more dense than an extended Los Angeles urban area (extending to include Mission Viejo and the western Inland Empire, at 6,200 per square mile or 2,400 per square kilometer (These larger urban area definitions are used in Demographia World Urban Areas)).

Note on Transit and Employment Concentration: It is virtually impossible for employees throughout the metropolitan area to reach the airport area on transit that is time-competitive with the automobile. This disadvantage is not easily solved. If grade-separated rapid transit lines (such as a subway or busway) were built to the area, only a small percentage of the jobs would be within walking distance (within one quarter mile or 400 metres). Walks of up to 5 miles (8 kilometers) could be necessary from stations to employment locations. This compares with the virtually 100 per cent of downtown jobs that are accessible by walking from subway and commuter rail (Go Transit) stations (See Improving the Competitiveness of Metropolitan Areas)

Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.

Photograph: Google Earth Image of the Pearson Airport employment area (Canada’s largest employment area)

May 18, 2013
A Toronto Condo Bubble?

Toronto has experienced a virtual explosion in high rise condominium construction in recent years, especially in the downtown area. According to Bloomberg, Toronto has the largest number of high-rise condominium towers under construction in the world.

However concerns are being expressed that the market may be saturated and that a housing bubble is developing. The Toronto Starreports that new condominium sales declined 55 percent in the first quarter of 2013, compared to last year.

At the same time, a huge number of new condominium units is under construction in Toronto. According to The Star, 57,000 units were being built during the first quarter. The first quarter build rate is reported as the largest rate ever. For their part, builders have scaled back plans for new towers

Who is Buying?

In an article entitled, “Toronto Condo Investors Under Water,” the Toronto Condo Bubble|Toronto Housing Bubble website (subtitled Largest Housing Bubble Except for Vancouver of Course) asked: “… if condo living is the way of the future, then why is it that the majority of people who buy condos never actually live in them?”

The question was in the context of a report by Scotiabank that between 45% and 60% of Toronto condominium purchasers were investors, rather than people who actually intended to live in the housing.

Single Family Housing in Toronto: The Holy Grail

At the same time, The Star points to indicators that the single family housing market retains considerable strength. Part of the reason is that this most desired type of housing is made far more difficult to build as a result of provincial land-use policies (urban containment, including the Toronto "greenbelt").According to The Star, "That’s made detached homes, in particular, the coveted Holy Grail of housing."

Despite the explosion in condominium units, Statistics Canada data indicates that 71 percent of net new occupied housing in the Toronto metropolitan area was detached between 2006 and 2011.

These market dynamics, rising detached house prices relative to incomes and heightened speculation are predictable outcomes of urban containment (land rationing) policies.

May 14, 2013
Toronto’s Greenbelt: Pushing up Congestion, Local Air Pollution and House Prices

I had the pleasure of participating on Jerry Agar’s program on Newstalk 1010 in Toronto, with host Tasha Kheiriddin on August 15. The subject was a new report by the David Suzuki Foundation lauding the benefits of Toronto’s greenbelt greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction role as a carbon sink.

Ms. Kheiriddin was interested in the other side of the issue, which I was happy to summarize. First and foremost, for all of their claimed benefits, greenbelts around growing cities have serious consequences. They force population densities up, which makes traffic more congested. This is because as densities rise, traffic volumes increase. There are various estimates of the increase in traffic congestion from a doubling of density, from (for example) 61 percent (Sierra Club) to 96 percent (Ewing and Cervero). The greater congestion produces more intense local air pollution, with the predictable health effects. Beyond that, as any Economics 101 student should know, rationing anything (such as land) tends to be associated with higher prices. It is no wonder that house prices have skyrocketed since the greenbelt was established.

It is important to understand the dynamics of GHGs. It doesn’t matter whether they occur in the Toronto greenbelt or Patagonia. This means that there is no reason for GHG reduction to emanate from the Toronto greenbelt. It would be far better to forest some of the 7.5 million acres of disused farmland in Ontario (since 1951). This is many times as much land as the Toronto greenbelt. In other words, from a global (or local GHG emission perspective), the Toronto greenbelt is irrelevant (Note).

The purpose of the city (metropolitan area) should be to facilitate higher discretionary incomes for its residents, while minimizing poverty, all within the constraints of sufficient environmental protection. The greenbelt reduces discretionary incomes by restricting mobility (more traffic congestion) and raising house prices. It increases poverty by raising costs and preventing job creation. The greenbelt’s claimed GHG emission benefits can readily be replaced by strategies elsewhere that do not reduce economic growth.

Note: Large portions of the farmland in Ontario and Quebec have been taken out of production since 1951, as production has been transferred to the Prairie provinces (Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba). Meanwhile, the real value of agricultural production in Canada increased 160 percent from 1961 to 2005.

August 17, 2012

Toward More Competitive Canadian Metropolitan Areas

The Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCN) and the Canadian Urban Transit Association (CUTA) have expressed serious concern about generally longer commute trip times making Canadian metropolitan areas less competitive. Each has called for additional funding for transit at the federal level to help reduce commute times and improve metropolitan competitiveness.

The Right Concern

The concern over commute times is well placed. Economic research generally concludes that greater economic and employment growth is likely where people can quickly reach their jobs in the metropolitan area. Five of the nation’s six major metropolitan areas (Toronto, Montréal, Vancouver, Ottawa-Gatineau and Calgary) have average one-way work trip travel times that are among the highest in their size classes among 109 metropolitan areas in the more developed world for which data is available. Only Edmonton has an average commute time that is among the shortest (Table 1).

Table 1
Average One-way Commute Times: Major Metropolitan Areas
Compared with International Major Metropolitan Areas
Major Metropolitan Area	One-way Commute Time (Minutes)	Overall One-way Commute: Rank out of 109		One-way Commute: Rank in Population Class
Major Metropolitan Area	One-way Commute Time (Minutes)	Overall One-way Commute: Rank out of 109	Population Size Class	One-way Commute: Rank in Population Class
Toronto	33	97th	Over 5,000,000	11^th out of 19
Montréal	31	90th	2,500,000 – 5,000,000	19^th out of 23
Vancouver	30	86th	1,000,000 – 2,500,000	60^th out of 67
Ottawa-Gatineau	27	60th	1,000,000 – 2,500,000	55^th out of 67
Calgary	26	58th	1,000,000 – 2,500,000	50^th out of 67
Edmonton	23	15th	1,000,000 – 2,500,000	15^th out of 67

The Wrong Answer

Yet the solution – more transit and funding for transit – misses the mark. Transit does many things well, but it does not reduce commute times (Figure 1). According to Statistics Canada, average commute times by transit in the Toronto, Montréal and Vancouver metropolitan areas are from 30 per cent longer to nearly double those of average automobile commuters (Note 2). Some 58 percent of car users (drivers and passengers) reach their work locations in under 30 minutes, something accomplished by merely y 25 percent of transit commuters. Overall Toronto commute times are longer than either Los Angeles – famed for its traffic – as well as much less dense, and far less transit dependent, Dallas-Fort Worth. In Toronto, 21 percent of commuters take transit, compared to two percent in Dallas-Fort Worth. Among Montréal commuters, 20 percent use transit and spend more time commuting than their counterparts in more decentralized Phoenix, where less than two percent take transit. Commute times in transit-focused Vancouver are worse than much larger Los Angeles and indeed longer than nearly American metropolitan area, including Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and Philadelphia (Table 2).

Given this pattern, transferring car travel to transit likely would increase commute times and make metropolitan areas even less competitive.

Table 2
30- and 40-minute Commute Shares:
Representative Metropolitan Areas
Population Classification	Work Trip Under 30 Minutes	Work Trip 30 to 44 Minutes	Work Trip Under 45 Minutes
5,000,000 and Over
Dallas-Fort Worth	59%	24%	83%
Los Angeles	55%	24%	79%
Toronto	48%	25%	73%
Paris	45%	22%	67%
2,500,000 – 5,000,000
Phoenix	57%	26%	83%
Montréal	47%	27%	74%
1,000,000 – 2,500,000
Edmonton	68%	20%	88%
Indianapolis	66%	22%	88%
Ottawa-Gatineau	65%	21%	86%
Tampa-St. Petersburg	62%	22%	84%
Calgary	54%	29%	83%
Vancouver	55%	21%	76%

Source: Statistics Canada, U.S. American Community Survey, National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (France)

The Geography of Transit

Rational Transit and Downtown:Transit’s greatest strength is in providing access to the largest downtown areas. These areas have the greatest job densities (jobs per square kilometre) in their metropolitan areas and are typically well served by frequent, rapid and convenient transit service from throughout the metropolitan area. This combination of high employment density and superior transit service attracts one-half or more of all downtown commuters in Canada’s major metropolitan areas to transit (Figure 2). Transit is meets the needs of people who commute to downtown and is the rational choice for many, if not most. However, downtowns contain only a relatively small share (14 per cent) of metropolitan area jobs (Figure 3).

Rational Personal Mobility Elsewhere: Areas outside downtown lack any such intense concentration of jobs. The area outside downtown, accounting for 6 out of every 7 jobs (Figure 4), maintain much lower employment densities and generally lacks transit service. This is illustrated by the nation’s largest employment center, which surrounds Pearson International Airport in Toronto. Its more than 350,000 employees are spread around an area the size of city of Vancouver (or the city of San Francisco) at a density so low that quick and efficient transit is simply impossible.

For the overwhelming share of work trips to outside the downtown area, the car does the job and transit accounts for less than 10 percent of commuters. Thus, the automobile is the rational choice for most people who commute to locations outside downtown. And things are not getting better for transit. According to Statistics Canada, employment has been growing much faster outside of downtown than in the high density core areas suited for transit. The 2011 census indicated a continuing dispersion of population as well.

Transit’s Robust Funding Growth and Declining Productivity

Strongly Rising Transit Subsidies: Transit subsidies have been growing strongly. According to Transport Canada data, from 1999 to 2008 subsidies grew 83 percent (adjusted for inflation), which is more than three times the 26 percent ridership growth rate and 3.5 times the rate of general inflation. Transit’s declining productivity could indicate a substantial potential for improved cost effectiveness and service expansion within the generous present funding levels.

Declining Transit Productivity: At the same time, there are concerns about transit productivity. The Conference Board of Canada has documented a 1.2 percent annual decline in productivity for two decades. The same analysis found productivity in other transport sectors to be generally improving. Transit costs have risen well in excess of inflation, service levels and ridership. Rising costs seriously limit transit’s ability to increase its share of travel in metropolitan areas and limits the important role that it is called upon to play in providing door-to-door mobility for the transportation-impaired, such as disabled citizens, the elderly, and students.

Land Use Strategies that Retard Metropolitan Competitiveness

Policies that Could Make Metropolitan Areas Less Competitive: While the prospects for improving transit commute times are discouraging, some current land use strategies further increase traffic congestion and lengthen commute times and make metropolitan areas and make metropolitan areas less competitive . Compact cities (also called smart growth) policies have been adopted across Canada in an effort to reduce automobile use and increase urban densities. The planning expectation is that housing should be placed near rail stations. Yet job locations throughout metropolitan areas remain highly dispersed, and with the rise of working at home, are becoming more so. The potential for transit systems (or walking or cycling) to materially impact commuting is very limited in the least.

International data indicate that higher densities are associated with greater traffic congestion. Further, higher traffic densities are strongly associated with higher levels of air pollution. Improvements in vehicle technology will make reductions in automobile use to reduce greenhouse gas emissions unnecessary, according to U.S. research by McKinsey & Company. Finally, smart growth type policies have been found to retard metropolitan economic growth in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States (Note 2).

Improving Metropolitan Competitiveness

Strategies that reduce commute times can improve metropolitan competitiveness. Expanded telecommuting reduces average commute times by its very nature (though the reported commute times routinely exclude the working at home sector, both in Canada and the US). There are also lessons to be learned from Edmonton and the international metropolitan areas that have been more successful in maintaining shorter commutes: more dispersed employment, lower population densities and a larger share of travel by car (Table 3).

Table 3
Comparison of Canadian and U.S. Major Metropolitan Areas
Average One-way Commute Times and Urban Area Densities

CANADA	Canada Metropolitan Areas		United States: Metropolitan Area Size Classes
	Commute Time	Principal Population Centre Density (per KM2)	Average Commute Time	Average Principal Population Centre Density (per KM2)


5,000,000 and Over
Toronto	33	2,900	28	1,400
2,500,000 – 5,000,000
Montréal	31	2,200	26	1,200
1,000,000 – 2,500,00
Vancouver	30	1,900	23	1,100
Ottawa-Gatineau	27	1,900
Calgary	26	1,600
Edmonton	23	1,100
Principal Population Centre: Largest population centre (Statistics Canada term for urban area) in the metropolitan area.

Focusing on Objectives: To become more competitive, Canada’s metropolitan areas need to improve their average commute times. This requires focusing on strategies that have the highest potential to reduce traffic congestion.

Residents and businesses in metropolitan areas would be best served by goal-oriented and objective policies squarely directed toward getting people to work faster. The focus should be on what makes commutes shorter, regardless of transport mode, rather than on idealistic notions of how a city should look or how people should travel.

Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life”.

–––

Note: This article is based upon the recently released Frontier Centre for Public Policy report Improving the Competitiveness of Metropolitan Areas by Wendell Cox, who also serves as a senior fellow at the Centre.

Note 1: Data not provided for other metropolitan areas.

Note 2: On a related note, the Bank of Canada (the central bank) and others have indicated a concern about rising house costs relative to incomes. This is to be expected in metropolitan areas adopting green belts, urban growth boundaries and other land rationing policies. Huge housing price increases have occurred in Vancouver, Toronto, Montréal and Calgary (for example), in response to such policies (This is evident from the annual editions of the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, sponsored in Canada by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy). The Bank of Canada may be virtually powerless to slow this loss of housing affordability, since its cause (constraining metropolitan land supply) is beyond the reach of the Bank’s monetary policies.

Photo: Suburban Montreal (by author)

May 16, 2012

This is Not the Way to Fix Toronto’s Transit

Results and not ideology should guide transportation policy.

Large city officials have been lobbying for a major program of federal transit subsidies for years. The push will likely intensify after the federal election.

A principal resource in this campaign will likely be the Toronto Board of Trade’s third annual Scorecard on Prosperity, which finds Toronto’s transportation system to be among the worst in the world, ranking 19th out of 23 metropolitan areas. Other metropolitan areas also ranked poorly, such as Montreal at 12th, Calgary at 13th and Vancouver at 21st.

However, a deeper look yields difficulties with the Board of Trade report.

Automobiles dominate travel in all but two of the metropolitan areas (Hong Kong and Tokyo). Yet, only two of 11 indicators involve automobiles. Eight relate to non-automobile modes such as transit (one deals with freight). The Board of Trade comparisons are skewed because they give disproportionate weight to modes that are relatively minor in metropolitan mobility.

However, the greatest difficulty with the Scorecard is the implied belief greater reliance on transit is preferable. In fact, transit is slower than cars for the majority of trips. Travel time needs to decrease to encourage metropolitan economic growth, as research at the University of Paris indicates. There is probably no more important transportation indicator regarding the economy.

A Globe and Mail article rightly expresses particular concern that Toronto’s round-trip average work trip time ranks last at 80 minutes per day. However, at least two of the metropolitan areas had longer work trip travel times. The average work trip travel time in the Tokyo metropolitan area was 96 minutes in 2003 (the latest data available), according to the Japan Statistics Bureau. The Board of Trade failed to find a number for Hong Kong, which the government reported at 92 minutes in 2002. Yet, these travel time laggards rank first and second in the Board of Trade rankings.

It should be a source of embarrassment that Dallas-Fort Worth, a bane of urban planners and with less than half the Toronto density, should have a work trip travel time one-third less and one-fifth less, respectively, than Calgary and Vancouver, the highest ranked Canadian metropolitan areas.

It’s worse than that. Among all of the large American metropolitan areas, in or out of The Scorecard on Prosperity, all but New York have better work trip travel times.

Except in the romantic minds of planners, little of the present car travel demand can be replaced by transit. Further, in virtually all of the metropolitan areas ranking above Toronto, the trajectory has been toward cars, so that the present figures are less favourable to transit than they would have been a decade or two ago.

For transport to make the greatest possible contribution to economic growth and job creation, the transport system must provide quick mobility throughout the entire labour market (metropolitan area). Transit-favouring ideology will not do.

The problem is evident. The $8 billion just committed by Mayor Rob Ford and Premier Dalton McGuinty to build an Eglinton subway should be used to reduce travel times as much as possible.

A huge expenditure on a single street will not do that.

So long as ideology trumps reality, Toronto’s calcified traffic will put it at a competitive disadvantage. The focus should be on results — the time it takes to get to work, rather than on means — whether the trip is by car or transit.

Wendell Cox writes here as a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and is a regular contributor to NewGeography.com. This piece also appeared in the Toronto Sun.

May 14, 2011

Toronto: Three Cities in More than One Way

The issue of income disparity in Toronto has once again been brought into the public eye by a December 15th report by University of Toronto Professor David Hulchanski. The report, “The Three Cities Within Toronto,” points to a growing disparity in incomes between Downtown Toronto, the inner suburbs, and the outer suburbs of the city. The report demonstrates that between 1970 and 2005 the residents of the once prosperous outer suburbs have been losing ground compared to the now wealthy downtown core. The results for the inner suburbs have been mixed.

In 1970, 66% of city neighbourhoods were considered middle income. Only 15% were considered high or very high, and 19% were low or very low. In 2005, only 29% of neighbourhoods were considered middle income. The number of high or very high income neighbourhoods rose to 19%, while low and very low income neighbourhoods made up a staggering 54% of neighbourhoods.

The news isn’t all bad. After all, the downtown core is now one of the most desirable places to live in North America, and many of the formerly low income neighbourhoods have gentrified, or are in the process of doing so. However, many of the city’s traditional suburbs have been decimated. The former cities of Etobicoke and Scarborough used to be middle class. Not so much anymore.

In real dollar terms, even the majority of the very low income areas have become wealthier. The trouble with poverty statistics is that they focus on relative poverty, rather than absolute poverty. This means that if Etobicoke’s average income doubled tomorrow, the downtown core would all of a sudden be considered poor. This is a major limitation. Toronto isn’t exactly turning into a Canadian Detroit.

The report rightly points to the need for greater mobility in the outer suburbs. Given that the most lucrative jobs are typically downtown, many young professionals and recent graduates living outside of the core need to be able to get downtown cheaply and quickly in order to build their careers. Where the report goes wrong is that it recommends stricter land use regulations, stronger rent controls, and the revival of the flawed Transit City plan that Mayor Ford vigorously campaigned against in the recent election.

It is easy for academics to blame a lack of social welfare spending, or suburbanization for the problem. The real problem is the loss of local policy making power resulting from amalgamation. For the most part, the areas losing ground the fastest are the formerly middle class suburbs amalgamated into the city. In contrast the “exurbs” just outside of city boundaries have thrived. This is no coincidence. The real takeaway from this study is that the suburbs have different needs than the central core. By attempting to accommodate the needs of both, the megacity has benefitted neither. Short of de-amalgamation, the only hope for the city is to substantially decentralize policy making. No amount of spending can make up for the loss of local autonomy.

Policies have different effects in different types of cities. Take the treatment of automobiles. It might make sense to discourage automobile usage in downtown Toronto, but the benefits of doing so in Vaughan or Pickering would be questionable at best. Similarly, mandating that every commercial establishment have a public washroom probably makes sense as a public health measure in downtown, where public urination is an issue, but not so much in suburban Markham, or Richmond Hill.

Making sensible regulations for a small, relatively homogenous area isn’t all that difficult. Applying these regulations to a large, demographically diverse area can help some areas and hurt others. It’s not that regulations need to be a zero sum game. People in Etobicoke wouldn’t be affected if, say, maximum parking allotments were tightened in the downtown core. They would be affected if they were tightened throughout the entire megacity. Similarly, increasing maximum parking allotments might hurt the core and help the suburbs. The current one size fits all approach sometimes benefits the core and sometimes benefits the suburbs, but ever both.

Perhaps more important than city wide regulations is the centralization of taxing power. Since the merger, the city now sets tax rates across the entire megacity. This also allows the city to control the ratio of residential to non-residential taxes. The city of Toronto has the highest ratio of non-residential to residential taxes in Ontario. This means that businesses carry a higher share of the tax load in the city than anywhere else in the province. The combination of tax and regulatory policies in the city have lead the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses to rank Toronto as the second least business friendly city in Canada. On a scale of 1-100, Toronto came in at 33, slightly ahead of Vancouver’s 31. Meanwhile, the rest of the (Greater Toronto Area) GTA is near the top, at 61. Neighbouring Oshawa took the top spot in Ontario with 69.

GTA Area Cities by CFIB Entrepreneurial Cities Policy Score

Rank (Ontario)	City	Score	Driving Distance to Yonge and Bloor
1	Oshawa	69	0:45
6	GTA (Excluding Toronto)	61
	Mississauga	61	0:27
	Brampton	61	0:41
	Richmond Hill	61	0:32
	Markham	61	0:32
	Vaughan	61	0:32
16	Hamilton	55	0:58
19	Guelph	54	1:15
24	Barrie	52	1:16
27	Brantford	51	1:20
30	Kitchener	48	1:23
33	Toronto	33
	Etobicoke	33	0:20
	Scarborough	33	0:21

Now the share of non-residential to residential taxes in Toronto may actually make sense downtown. The core is home to the third biggest financial sector in North America. These jobs are heavily concentrated in the downtown core.

Downtown Toronto isn’t competing with low tax Vaughan or Barrie for these jobs. They are competing with high tax cities like New York and Chicago. This means that employment in the core is not as easily chased off by taxes and regulations than in the suburbs. But in industries like wholesale and manufacturing, which are far more important outside of the core, employment can easily relocate to Barrie, Mississauga, Oshawa, and so forth. Indeed, jobs have been leaving the city since before the recession hit.

Since 2004 Downtown and North York have prospered but the rest of the city has lost jobs. This should make the results of the Professor Hulchanski’s report unsurprising. The financial sector isn’t enough to keep the entire city employed or lift wages in the city-controlled suburban rings. As a a result despite the thriving financial sector, Toronto was dead last in the GTA in terms of median incomes.

To turn this around, the city must decentralize decision making power so the suburban communities can come up with their own economic development strategies. No matter how much the city improves transit to the outer suburbs, they will not be able to significantly increase median incomes without creating more jobs. The financial sector will continue to grow, but many of jobs created in this sector require specialized training, and thus go to people from outside of the city. This doesn’t do much for former manufacturing workers in Scarborough and Etobicoke. Growth of the financial sector combined with the dispearance of blue collar jobs together guarantee continuing income disparities in the city.

Below is previously published data from Professor Hulchanski that highlights how badly blue collar sections of the city have been hit.

Fundamentally, a strong focus on financial and other so-called “creative class” jobs will do little for these areas. The above map was created by Richard Florida’s Martin Prosperity Institute. It shows that most creative class jobs are clustered around the subway, but this doesn’t mean that expanding rail transit will expand creative class employment. Building a light rail line through a neighbourhood doesn’t suddenly transform the residents into artists and physicians. It may attract more artists and physicians, but this could actually hurt local residents by driving up rent and property values without creating jobs for them. Below is a map of educational attainment by ward. The darker the colour, the higher the number of residents with a bachelor’s degree or higher.

The real problem is that a focus on elite jobs creates exactly the kind of bifurcation that progressive complain about. Given that city wide business policies are tailored towards creative class type occupations, it is unlikely that price sensitive manufacturers will find any reason to locate within city boundaries, rather than setting up shop in Mississauga or Barrie.

Indeed, for all the temptation by urbanists to point to Toronto’s suburban ring as an example of the decline of suburbia, the peripheral suburban areas outside of city limits have been booming. Here is a map of growth in the GTA between 2001-2006. While Toronto grew modestly, suburban cities Milton, Brampton, Vaughan, Richmond Hill, Markham, Ajax, and Whitby all grew by at least 20%. Even Oshawa, which was hit hard by the decline of the auto sector, has managed to survive, and indeed maintained a higher median income than Toronto during this period. Regional rival Mississauga eclipsed Toronto’s growth rate, and emerging regional player Barrie grew by over 20%.

In short, despite its strong financial core, Toronto is losing its standing as the go-to destination in the GTA. And it could get worse. Mississauga is working hard to lure financial services and advanced manufacturing jobs from Toronto. Several other cities, such as Guelph and Waterloo are actually competing for the very creative types that Toronto’s policies are tailored to attract. Other cities, such as Barrie are working hard to cannibalize what is left of Toronto’s manufacturing and distribution sectors. Were it not for amalgamation, Etobicoke or Scarborough could just as easily have undertaken a similar strategy to attract blue collar jobs.

The Three Cities report identifies serious regional disparities in Toronto. Unfortunately, it doesn’t provide much insight into how to fix the problem. Expanding transit options will only go so far towards this. Building more light rail may raise median incomes by attracting wealthier people to these neighbourhoods. Ironically, this will only widen the income gap. The real challenge is finding out how to create opportunities for blue collar jobs in suburban Toronto. Unfortunately, amalgamation has imposed one size fits all policies that may work downtown, but utterly fail in the suburbs and continue to drive people to the periphery outside the city limits. Ironically, the very policies that seek to halt “sprawl” may well end up exacerbating it.

Toronto Skyline photo by Smaku

Steve Lafleur is a public policy analyst and political consultant based out of Calgary, Alberta. For more detail, see his blog.

December 30, 2010