Quote:
Originally Posted by FairHamilton
Cheap date, huh. Well my life, travels and experiences extend past Hamilton's city limits. With your reasoning, it seems yours is limited.
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Thanks for your insightful comments on an idea I was trying to flesh out.
What I'm interested in and I didn't explain fully is the idea that Hamilton is subject to strong forces of city primitization with regards to Toronto and Ottawa and what Hamilton can do to combat these forces from making us into more of a bedroom community than we already are. I realize that these centralizing forces aren't just governmental.
With regards to such centralizing forces in the media in Hamilton, Torstar is a perfect example. It owns the Spec, the Star, the KW record and so on. The Spec doesn't even have a fulltime Queen's Park reporter, relying on joint Torontocentric coverage from Coyle and before that Urquhart. Every once in a while Hamilton will get mentioned, but it is usually only a few sentences. Dreschel covers provincial issues too, but a full timer would be better. Obviously newspapers across North America have been cutting back on reporting, but I think that Hamilton loses out on relations with the provincial government when our issues aren't discussed properly.
Commercially in Hamilton, I'm envious of the regionalization of the banks in the US. I'm amazed when I look at the fact that Buffalo (which I admit I'm guilty of deriding at times) has the M&T bank headquartered there, which is fairly sizable with almost 14,000 employees. All across the US there are a litany of regional banks catering to their communities. In Canada we have the big five pretty much, with most of the good employment and decision making concentrated in Toronto. I certainly think that if over the last twenty years communities like Hamilton, London, Windsor and Sudbury had their own regional banks, their local economies would be better off.
Talking about government centralization again, raisethehammer has often commented how in the past Hamilton was an important city in Ontario in relation to some other smaller cities. What are the factors that have led to Hamilton's relative decline over the years? Obviously the decline in local manufacturing from Studebaker on has been critical, but Toronto has lost plenty of manufacturing jobs itself. However over that time, Toronto has benefited from a substantial increase in the government's share of GDP in that time period and the spoils that go with it. Ottawa was a relatively sleepy place until the Trudeau years and has obviously benefited from the increase in the relative size of the federal government to the rest of the economy. I don't have a PhD in geography or the economic history of Ontario, so I'm no expert, but I am interested in these factors and what they have meant to Hamilton and what they will mean going forward.
Finally with regard to the CBC, I think it is a microcosm of how government centralization has benefited Toronto economically, partially at the expense of Hamilton and other communities, regardless of the inherent value of the service. From wikipedia the CBC employed approximately 6000 employees in 2005, which I'm guessing a decent chunk of that is in Toronto. I remember a number of years ago Paul Wilson interviewed the last CBC reporter in Hamilton as he was packing up his office, as they were closing it down. I'm not exactly sure when that was, but I'm pretty sure it was during the Chretien years, so it seems that unfortunately no government has made CBC service in Hamilton
much of a priority. Would I like to see the CBC decentralized somewhat, with a shiny studio on Gore Park and 50 employees telling the stories of Hamilton, Burlington and Niagara? Unlikely, no doubt, but I'd love to see it.
While I'm dreaming I would love to see a provincial ministry with its HQ here (maybe there is one I don't know about) and I'm glad that CANMET is coming although I'm disappointed at how long it has taken. I'll admit that I could well be wrong that increasing governmental, media and commercial centralization has hurt Hamilton over the years, but I think it is worth discussing and what if anything we can do as a city to move forward.
And just one final point, living and working in Germany for three years and observing the relative decentralization that government and industry have across the country and the constituent Bundeslande made me see how centralized some institutions in Canada really are and got me thinking about Hamilton in that regard.