![]() ![]() This implies that unless our GCRs obtain access to broad-based tax sources (or a share thereof), they will never achieve their KBE potential. In contrast, the political limit to property-tax financing is in the range of 3 percent of GDP. For example, Swedish cities are financed from income taxes and have revenues, in aggregate, of nearly 16 percent of GDP. Not surprisingly, part of the problem here is that access to tax revenues in Canada’s GCRs (and those in the English-speaking world generally) tends to be limited to property taxes, whereas continental European cities often have access to a range of broad-based taxes. This suggests that there is ample scope for decentralization in Canada to go beyond the devolution of money and power from Ottawa to the provinces. Cities like Stockholm, Berlin, Vienna and Helsinki spend twice as much and Copenhagen and Amsterdam three times as much per capita as Toronto does. The international evidence on our GCRs’ fiscal weakness is striking. Furthermore, evidence suggests that privileging Canada’s “hub cities” will propel them and their hinterlands forward economically. This leads to a virtuous circle by which GCRs can undertake policies and actions that make them attractive to human capital, which, in turn, allows them to become magnets for attracting KBE enterprises. Part of what underpins the GCRs’ role as the dynamic motors that drive innovation, growth and trade is that they hold the dense concentrations of human capital that increasingly are required by the knowledge-based economy (KBE). Accordingly, the analysis focuses on a variety of alternative structures and processes that would allow our GCRs to reach their potential with respect to the knowledge-based economy. This is especially the case in Canada, where GCRs are fiscally weak and jurisdictionally constitutionless. ![]() ![]() Yet there is sometimes a wide gulf between the potential for these GCRs and their on-the-ground reality. The thesis of Global Futures for Canada’s Global Cities is that the globalization and the information age have led to the economic, political and even democratic ascendancy of global city regions (GCRs). ![]()
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