John Deutsch
Institute
Queen's
University, Canada
The geo-economics of the FTA and NAFTA and, more generally, the emerging information era, are triggering profound and permanent impacts in the economic and political underpinnings of Canadian society. In particular, Canada-US trade now exceeds east-west or interprovincial trade, so much so that is increasingly the case that Canada less and less a single national economy and more and more a series of regional, cross-border economies. In this light, the first half of the paper focuses on the dramatic transition of the province of Ontario from Canada's heartland to its new reality as a North American region state, replete with an arsenal of policies designed to generate "untraded interdependencies" or positive locational advantages within the NAFTA environment. But there would be no region-state Ontario were it not for the existence of Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) as an international city. Thus, the second half of the paper focuses (through the lens of region-state Ontario) on the evolution of Toronto and the GTA toward a global city-region. Attention is directed in turn to the strategic locational and economic motors that drive Toronto within North America, to the recent institutional and provincial-municipal reforms bearing on Toronto, and to the likely further economic, institutional and political evolution of Toronto and the GTA as a global city-region. Emphasis is also directed to one key difference between Toronto and its sister US city-regions, namely that Toronto and the GTA account for 20% of Canada's GDP and have assumed the role as the natural and national economic, industrial, financial and cultural capital of the country. Given that this privileged position evolved in part to create an east-west economy and society, the decision to re-deploy these powerful assets in a north-south direction is, not surprisingly, creating tensions elsewhere in the nation. But Toronto has no real alternative.