Jobs

There’s some talk here about how to attract more jobs downtown, create more “green jobs,” create good jobs to replace lost manufacturing jobs.  Here’s some space.

One Response to “Jobs”

  1. Ken Wood Says:
    November 20, 2009 at 4:25 pm | Reply

    Realisically, the only place a city can be guaranteed to create jobs is in its own civil service. Such jobs should reflect what citizen priorities are for services.

    To create jobs outside municipal government requires a fine touch. A neat balance between courting developers and corporations with incentives versus maintaining consistency and quality of life for citizens. Anytime we do offer incentives to private job creators, we need a service performance contract that ensures they follow through or they lose their tax incentives. Otherwise the danger is that we could see public dollars go to private companies who later bail on Toronto.

    I believe Toronto is already attractive enough to companies to locate here. In a capitalism model, the market will decide. Cities cannot afford to be the arbitors or managers of economies. Provices can barely do that. Only the federal level can really affect jobs.

    That said, we need to hold the federal government more accountable, no matter what partisan stripe is in power. Cities need to publically and actively promote support for parties and candidates that will be favourable to Toronto.

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