I was pleasantly surprised to see Richard Florida (Jared might have heard of him) mentioned prominently in an opinion piece in my almost-local¹ paper on Friday morning. Florida has been the director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at U of T for the last few years, and if this blog had an archive then I would have provided a link to Jared’s post about that. And as Jared predicted, Florida is doing consulting for the provincial government.

The opinion piece, “Waterloo Region in the Creative Age” is about a report, Ontario in the Creative Age, commissioned by the government of Ontario and co-authored by Roger Martin, the dean of the Rotman School of Management, and Richard Florida, described as an “urban thinker”. The report says there are exactly three distinct creative clusters in Ontario: Toronto, Ottawa, and Waterloo Region + Guelph.

After the expected self-congratulations, the piece does a decent, brief job of describing what steps should be taken to continue this trend and improve the “creative cluster”, and of identifying the nexus of causes, starting with:

the universities — University of Waterloo for engineering, mathematics, computing, technology; Wilfrid Laurier University for business management; University of Guelph for food, agriculture and biotechnology. Look to Conestoga College, too, for technical training for the new economy.

Now Florida just needs to move to the Centre for International Governance Innovation, to make his report self-fulfilling.

The report has some lofty goals: it wants Ontario to become the first jurisdiction with 50% of its workforce in creativity jobs. It makes suggestions for measures that I assume aren’t surprising to anyone who has actually read Florida’s work, like wage insurance. It is also lauds Toronto to a point that I found slightly jarring and that I expect any Western Canadians who happen across this blog will find annoying. The following statement from the report made me think of Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie‘s lyric that “they dress real bad and they think they’re New York \ In Toronto”.

The Toronto region, which is a core city
steeped in finance, high end services, and
media, culture, and entertainment and has
an industry and occupation mix like New
York City or Los Angeles or London.

¹ – My truly local paper is a much more modest publication (Waterloo Chronicle), but a good source of a small amount of useful information each week, so I don’t discount it.