Global futures for Canada's global cities

He is a past president of the Canadian Economics Association and the North American Economics and Finance Association, holds Honorary Doctor of Laws degrees from the universities of Western Ontario, Saskatchewan and Regina, and is an Officer of the Order of Canada. [...] The role of this paper1 is to document the extent of the gulf between the global potential of GCRs and their Canadian reality, and to draw implications and con- clusions from them. [...] In terms of the contribution that reworking federal-munic- ipal relations could make, I look in turn at Ottawa’s gas-tax sharing; at removing the blatant discrimination in the qualification for employment insurance (EI) benefits in selected GCRs; at the proposals emanating from the 2006 External Advisory Committee on Cities and Communities; and finally, at the implications of the fiscal imbalance [...] Thus, GCRs are also the key players in this new economic geography — Castells’ “space of flows.” Subsidiarity Underlying both the KBE and the new role of GCRs is the emergence of indi- viduals as the principal beneficiaries of the information revolution, thanks in large measure to the democratization of technology and the rise of the Internet. [...] As backdrop to the reworking of the division of money and powers in the federation — so as to enable the GCRs to achieve their potential as the dynamic motors of the KBE — it is instructive to compare the existing revenue and expen- diture powers of Canada’s GCRs with those of international GCRs.