Nixon and Trudeau were often politically and personally at odds—Nixon intemperately called Trudeau a “son of a bitch,” a “pompous egghead,” and an “asshole”—but, by the early 1970s, both had implemented bureaucratic reforms intended to temper regional conflict.71 Trudeau tried and failed to centralize power in the national government, while Nixon sought from the outset to decentralize power to state governments. Their original intentions notwithstanding, both leaders ultimately reconfigured intergovernmental relations in a way that pointed to increased decentralization and public-private partnerships for urban development in the 1970s. Pittsburgh’s growth coalition was well positioned to flourish under these conditions, while Hamilton’s political and civic leaders struggled to form a durable partnership that would allow them to respond to a rapidly changing policy environment.
“Trudeaumania” swept the nation after the handsome young Quebecois Liberal formed a government in 1968. Shortly after taking office, Trudeau said he dreamed of a society that provided “individual freedoms, and equality of opportunity, health, and education.”72 He believed it was the government’s responsibility to ensure equal opportunity and fair treatment for all Canadians, and he staunchly defended liberal social programs such as national health insurance, equalization payments, and centralized planning. Trudeau had reason to think his goals would find wide support. In contrast to the United States, where small-government conservatives gained control of the national Republican Party in the 1960s, Canada’s Progressive Conservative party was not particularly concerned with reducing the size of the government or attacking unions. Compared to Democrats and Republicans, the Liberals and Progressive Conservatives, Canada’s two largest political parties, differed more on cultural issues than on the role of government in society. The viability of the New Democratic Party, Canada’s labor party, in regional and national elections meant that neither the Liberals nor the Progressive Conservatives could afford to alienate business, labor, or welfare state supporters if they hoped to win elections.
Trudeau’s critics, however, attacked his liberal economic programs. They complained about federal overreach in relation to provincial governments when Trudeau sought to fund redistributive social programs with oil money from the western provinces—including those programs designed to address the so-called urban crisis.73 In an effort to rationalize urban growth patterns, Trudeau established the Department of Regional Economic Expansion (DREE) in 1969 and the Ministry of State for Urban Affairs (MSUA) in 1971. Through his new agencies, Trudeau embarked on a decade-long effort to centralize urban and economic policy and direct growth from Ottawa. DREE and MSUA were met with substantial resistance from provincial officials, particularly in economically strong Ontario and the western provinces, who thought Trudeau had overstepped his constitutional purview. Undeterred, Trudeau appointed his old friend Jean Marchand, former trade unionist and fellow Liberal Quebecois, head of DREE. Marchand, along with Trudeau and Gérard Pelletier, had been one of Quebec’s “three wise men” hand-selected by the Liberal party to run for national office in the hope that their elections would curtail mounting discontent stirred by the separatist Parti Québécois. Like Trudeau, Marchand believed regional economic disparity stemmed from the uneven development of urban areas across Canada.74
Toronto and Hamilton provided employment opportunities for migrants from Northern Ontario, but the Atlantic provinces lacked dynamic metropolitan areas, and residents often had to leave the region to find work. Instead of targeting small towns and rural areas, as had been the goal of earlier economic development initiatives, DREE sought to stimulate manufacturing enterprises in “growth centers.” The agency designated “Special Areas” in cities and regional centers in disadvantaged provinces, particularly in eastern Canada, to which it funneled federal funds to support development activities. DREE’s industrial incentive programs nominally funded distressed areas in all ten provinces, but Marchand’s focus on the Atlantic provinces stirred resentment in other regions, particularly heavily industrialized Southern Ontario.75 When DREE provided the Montreal region with a substantial two-year subsidy under the Special Areas program beginning in 1970, officials in Ontario and the West were incensed: if Montreal was eligible for federal aid, why not Vancouver, Calgary, or Hamilton? Trudeau and Marchand thought that Montreal could counter sluggish growth with limited federal assistance and, in the process, address some of the economic concerns of separatists, who believed that Quebec’s economy had been hindered by decades of federal policy. To observers outside Ottawa, however, DREE appeared to be using its funds to ensure that only selected regions would grow.76
The Liberals lost seats in the West in the 1972 federal elections, where provincial leaders accused Trudeau of focusing too heavily on eastern Canada at the expense of other regions. As part of his effort to placate voters, Trudeau replaced Marchand with Donald Jamieson, a Newfoundlander who had worked in that province’s Department of Rural Reconstruction in the 1940s and served as Trudeau’s minister of defense production and minister of transport before taking over DREE in 1972. Jamieson quickly tried to pacify irate provincial and municipal leaders in Ontario and the western provinces. In 1973, he eliminated the Special Areas program and introduced General Development Agreements (GDAs) and, in an unprecedented move, decentralized DREE’s administration to provincial and regional offices.77 A “flexible” new joint federal-provincial administrative mechanism driven by provincial initiative rather than centralized planning, GDAs became a politically popular model for federal-provincial cooperation in economic development. GDAs also created a national institutional framework for the type of local public-private partnerships that Hamilton’s civic leaders and elected officials wanted to establish. DREE was legally precluded from working directly with the private sector or municipalities, but the terms of individual GDAs often created public corporations for which municipal governments served as agents. The arrangement gave municipal officials the authority either to undertake projects on their own, using federal and provincial funding, or to hire private developers to carry out publicly funded projects. In this way, municipalities had significant authority over the management of development projects, making GDAs popular with local as well as provincial governments.78
Bureaucratic decentralization and the implementation of GDAs represented a sharp break from Trudeau’s plan to use centralized planning to redistribute wealth between provinces or regions within provinces. DREE’s new structure initially benefited wealthy Ontario and heavily industrialized areas like Hamilton. Under Jamieson, Canada’s economic development activities shifted toward provincially led development projects that leveraged federal incentives to entice private investment.79 Jamieson announced in 1974 that “the process of regional development should not limit itself to rather narrow programs focused on solving problems.” Instead, he said, it should “include the process of identifying and pursuing in a flexible and imaginative manner the many existing development opportunities.”80 The federal government began to use its regional development policy to stimulate private investment in distressed areas through federally financed demonstration projects, infrastructure improvements, and in some cases the relocation of federal offices, rather than to redistribute wealth from more prosperous to less prosperous regions. For municipal officials in cities like Hamilton who hoped to attract private-sector partners, DREE’s decentralization created tantalizing possibilities.
MSUA, too, quickly landed on public-private partnerships as a tool to achieve national urban development goals. Trudeau created MSUA to determine policy options for dealing with population forecasts that predicted an influx of new immigrants in the 1970s and 1980s. Federal and provincial policymakers agreed that people and economic activity should be decentralized out of the primary population centers of Toronto, Montreal,