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Originally Posted by someone123
I don't. Do you? Was there a time when we both would have known? My impression is that there was a time when almost all of the capital in Canada was controlled by a tiny circle of businessmen in Montreal or Toronto, and international investment was harder to come by. If that is true then Canada was closer to having an "imperial capital" back then.
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I'm not suggesting I know where capital comes from, and capital has always been much more fluid than people. But capital can be managed and directed from one project to another from certain financial centres, and Toronto is one of those places. In fact, this is an extension of the axiom of my first sentence: while money can move, people generally can't - so the giant support network for a financial industry has to aggregate in one place, as firms generally do. Even if that financial institution has roots and headquarters somewhere else in Canada, they would be remiss not to have at least some presence in Toronto.
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Is it really true that there is an exclusive "world city" network? What is the evidence of this? This is how a lot of people talk; certain cities ascend to the pantheon and others are left out. Toronto got its secret invitation in 2014 or something (and also in 1989 right before the housing bubble burst; the Globe and Mail has been writing "we've arrived!" articles for at least 25 years).
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I don't think there's some club of cities that met in secret and agreed to run the world, but I think it's pretty clear that most of the wealth and power in the last 40 years has concentrated itself in a handful of cities even more than it was in the past. And I think it's also clear that there's a large group of people who migrate from city to city across the world. Just like society itself, only a handful of them are rich. There are also many professionals who are lured (or are pushed) to work at their multinational's foreign office, of which if one would exist in Canada, it would be automatically in Toronto. Then there are the masses of immigrant service workers who flock to these cities. Their family network may extend to their brothers and sisters who emigrated to similar world cities a continent away; I knew the sons and daughters of Filipino warehouse workers in Toronto who had cousins in Frankfurt, for example. Many of them barely knew of Canada beyond Niagara Falls, and as soon as they earned money (which they all did, very successfully), they went to Montreal and Vancouver, but did all of the rest of their traveling in the US or abroad.
And that leads to another consequence of all this. And that is that Toronto is increasingly - maybe finally - shedding its perception of itself as the centre of Canada. It didn't really do a good job at that, anyway, and it wasn't exactly loved for it. In the last 5 or so year, it has actually been doing a much better job than anyone expected at being more of a global hub.
Incidentally, while Vancouver receives more than its share of global capital flows, I feel that it hasn't received any of the benefits of globalism (they exist). Vancouver is getting screwed over by globalization, but more in the way that Venice is getting screwed over, not in the way that West Virginia or the British Midlands are.
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One argument against this idea is that connectivity everywhere in terms of communication and transportation is increasing.
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I think the opposite is happening. The spread of transportation links has ironically strengthened the pull of these cities, rather than the other way around. For example, HSR is used in places like France as basically a commuter rail to funnel workers into Paris from the hinterlands, rather than injected new life into the countryside. North America has a decentralized transportation system, but it hasn't stopped firms and people from concentrating in major metropolitan areas.