Beyond Bailouts: Leveraging Public Assets For a Prosperous City

Check in is located on the 3rd Floor at The Quay, 100 Queens Quay East.

Speaker:

• Giles Gherson, President & CEO, Toronto Region Board of Trade

Giles Gherson, President & CEO, Toronto Region Board of Trade

Giles Gherson is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Toronto Region Board of Trade, one of the largest and most influential business organizations in North America. Giles leads the Board’s efforts to advocate on behalf of our members and enhance the business competitiveness of our Region. He is charged with leading the implementation of the Board’s new strategic plan to renew our mission as a catalyst for a vibrant, globally competitive Toronto Region business community. 

Prior to joining the Board in 2022, Giles spent over 25 years in the private and public sector in progressively senior roles. He spent 15 years with the Province of Ontario, where he held multiple influential Deputy Minister roles – most extensively and recently as Deputy Minister, Economic Development. Previously, Giles has led the government’s economic growth and competitiveness policy, overseen the recent creation of two new agencies, Invest Ontario and IP Ontario, and worked to attract a wave of technology and manufacturing investments, including the retooling of the province’s auto sector for next generation battery electric vehicles. He currently sits on Ontario’s Advanced Manufacturing Council, working to boost the long-term competitiveness and resilience of this sector by attracting key investments and creating opportunities for businesses across the province.

Prior to his role in government, Giles worked as editor-in-chief of the Toronto Star, political editor of the National Post and editor of the Globe and Mail’s Report on Business. Giles is the immediate past President of the Board of Directors at the Institute of Public Administration of Canada, the country’s leading professional organization supporting excellence in the public sector.

Enjoy a delectable meal from our event partners, Oliver + Bonacini.

Last fall’s three-year agreement between the City of Toronto and the Government of Ontario marks a positive step forward for Toronto’s fiscal health. However, many of the underlying structural issues remain unaddressed and unresolved. Toronto continues to suffer from unfunded mandates—services it delivers on behalf of other levels of government, without funding to support them.

Can we afford the city we want? What would a ‘Grand Bargain’ for the next two decades look like—one that goes beyond bailouts to establish a sustainable funding base for our city?

Speakers:

• Sabine Matheson, Principal, StrategyCorp

The Copenhagen City and Port Development Corporation is a publicly owned but privately operated corporation that successfully leveraged city assets to pay for $4.2 billion in subway expansions—without raising taxes.

Join this keynote with a leading global expert to learn how Copenhagen used innovative public-private financing to revitalize the city and spur sustainable growth.

Keynote Speaker:

• Luise Noring, Principal and Business Economist in Urban Governance and Finance, City Facilitators

Fixing municipal budgets is not only about securing predictable funding mandates from other orders of government—cities themselves must have the fiscal discipline to get their house in order.

Join two of Canada’s most experienced municipal leaders for a provocative discussion of novel approaches to budget challenges, including innovations in procurement, service-delivery, optimizing land value, leveraging technology, and improving efficiency.

Speakers:

• Paul Johnson, City Manager, City of Toronto
• Don Iveson, Former Mayor of the City of Edmonton, Co-Author Metropolitan Mindset

Stretch your legs, have a coffee and network with fellow attendees.

Is it time to rethink how the third largest metro system in North America is operated? What does a 21^st century, rapidly expanding transit system look like? And how should it be funded?

Transit will consume $16 billion of Toronto’s $29.5 billion in unfunded capital projects over the next decade. The result will be further chronic road congestion, increased commuting times, slow movement of goods and services, and a less productive and attractive region.

This session will consider successful alternative models like France’s TransLink, which operates transit services on four continents, and Germany’s state-owned Deutsche Bahn, which has already come to Ontario as an operations partner for GO Transit. What can we learn from other operating models, and how can these lessons be applied to Toronto to save money, improve the customer experience and expand at the pace our growing population needs?

Debate is intensifying around the municipal development charges imposed on new homes. These charges are crucial for financing new infrastructure needed to support growth. Yet rising housing prices and ambitious provincial housing targets are creating budget shortfalls for municipalities, begging the question of whose role it is to pay for city growth.

This panel will debate the fiscal risks to financing infrastructure growth, and how these may be overcome. What are alternative models that could supercharge sorely-needed housing supply, while maintaining the ability to fund infrastructure needed to accommodate this growth

Speakers:

• Gary Kent, Chief Administrative Officer, Peel Region

Speaker:

• Giles Gherson, President & CEO, Toronto Region Board of Trade

Don Iveson served as Edmonton’s 35th Mayor from 2013 to 2021 with a guiding leadership principle to make things better for the next generation. This longterm view is now embedded in: Edmonton’s smart-growth City Plan; City Council’s Energy Transition Strategy; and Edmonton’s nation-leading work on stormwater management and climate adaptation. Since retiring from City Hall, he continues to live in Edmonton — to see how it all turns out.

Carrying on these themes, he is ramping up Civic Good: a public policy advisory practice working on climate, housing and complex governance projects with like-minded clients ranging from startups to governments — including working with Co-operators as Executive Advisor for Climate Investing and Community Resilience.

Believing strongly in connecting passion with service, he volunteers as Board Co-Chair of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness. More recently he has been appointed Co-Chair of the Task Force on Housing and Climate. Don has also accepted an appointment as a School of Cities Canadian Urban Leader at the University of Toronto.

Dr. Luise Noring, is a business economist, who specializes in urban governance and financing of cities. Noring’s expertise has been sought out by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the European Union (EU), the Brookings Institution and Waitt Institute, and many other organizations. Her firm, City Facilitators, aids cities in addressing complex issues spanning housing, climate, and infrastructure. Her address will focus on how cities around the world have developed public-private models and governance structures for development corporations such as the Copenhagen City and Port Development Corporation with expertise to increase city revenues without raising taxes.

Paul Johnson is the City Manager for the City of Toronto. As the fourth largest city in North America, Paul oversees delivery of programs and services to more than three million people whose diversity and experiences make this great city Canada’s leading economic engine.

A proud public servant, Paul is committed to making community connections and enhancing the quality of life for all Toronto residents. Away from work Paul is a basketball official who has "blown the whistle" at thousands of games at the local, provincial and national levels.