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  1. Sax: Un air de jazz GENEVIÈVE VÉZINA-MONTPLAISIR MÉTRO 29 avril 2010 00:52 (...) «Si vous venez à notre bureau des ventes, vous pourrez voir le caractère moderne de notre salle de bain et de notre cuisine modèle, souligne-t-elle. Celles-ci possèdent seulement le fini de base et il est déjà très luxueux.» Tandis que le troisième projet Sax est présentement en construction, le Groupe Kevlar prépare déjà son quatrième projet Sax. Celui-ci sera situé à Longueuil et ses unités seront mises en vente en mai 2010. Pour plus de renseignements, visiter le site http://www.sax-1.com
  2. http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/apr/23/sane-way-run-megalopolis-urban-governance?utm_source=SFFB Protesters march through the streets of Ferguson in August. Aaron M Renn Thursday 23 April 2015 15.39 BST Last modified on Thursday 23 April 2015 16.57 BST The death of Michael Brown, shot by a police officer last year in Ferguson, Missouri, triggered civil unrest and protests that have yet to subside, with two police officers recently shot in the city. The media has blamed lots of things for the chaos that has engulfed Ferguson, from racism to inequality, but one factor might raise an eyebrow: municipal fragmentation in the St Louis area. There are 90 separate cities and towns in St Louis County alone, which has created a landscape of small, cash-strapped cities pulling on tiny tax bases to finance their governments. The US Justice Department has specifically accused Ferguson of using its police department as a revenue-raising arm, with a racial bias and as such it could be argued that municipal fragmentation played a role in creating the conditions that produced police-community tensions in Ferguson. A few year earlier, in 2010 and 800 miles to the north-east, Toronto elected the suburban politician Rob Ford from Etobicoke as mayor. Ford swept into office pledging to “stop the gravy train” and cut spending, cancelling bike infrastructure and streetcars. His sensibilities appalled urban Torontonians. The urban studies theorist Richard Florida called him “the worst and most anti-urban mayor in the history of any major city”. His mayoralty ultimately collapsed in a wave of scandals, including when he got caught on video smoking crack. People in ​​living in cities and those in their suburbs often have different values, priorities and cultures One of the factors blamed for the Rob Ford phenomenon? Amalgamation, or the consolidation of the city of Toronto with several formerly independent municipalities, including Etobicoke. It is amalgamation that allowed suburbanites to take control of governance over the inner city by electing one of their own as mayor. Welcome to the wonderful world of governing urban regions, where between fragmentation and amalgamation no one actually knows what the right-sized box for local government is or how to change it – but everyone can see the problems of most of the existing governance models. An election on 7 April was seen as a critical step toward ending racially discriminatory practices that thrust the St. Louis suburb into the national spotlight last year. An election on 7 April was seen as a critical step toward ending racially discriminatory practices that thrust the St Louis suburb into the national spotlight last year. Photograph: Jim Young/Reuters Municipal fragmentation has been criticised for decades. In Cities Without Suburbs, his influential 1993 book, former Albuquerque mayor David Rusk argued that Rust Belt cities in the US failed to succeed in part because they were unable to expand, and found themselves hemmed in by a jigsaw puzzle of independent suburbs. Advertisement But with cities having become central to national governance in the 21st century, institutions like the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank are weighing in, too. Both recently sounded the alarm about the risks of urban fragmentation on a global level, for the developed and the developing world. “Often, administrative boundaries between municipalities are based on centuries-old borders that do not correspond to contemporary patterns of human settlement and economic activity,” the OECD observed in a recent report. The thinktank argued that governance structures failed to reflect modern realities of metropolitan life into account. Behind the report’s dry prose lies a real problem. Fragmentation affects a whole range of things, including the economy. The OECD estimates that for regions of equal population, doubling the number of governments reduces productivity by 6%. It recommends reducing this effect with a regional coordinating body, which can also reduce sprawl, increase public transport satisfaction (by 14 percentage points, apparently) and improve air quality. The World Bank, meanwhile, is worried about the way rapid growth in developing cities has created fragmentation there, too. Metropolises often sprawl well beyond government boundaries: Jakarta, for example, has spread into three separate provinces. The World Bank calls fragmentation “a significant challenge in the East Asia region”. Urban fragmentation in Jakarta Urban fragmentation in Jakarta. The urban area covers 1,600 sq km and 12 jurisdictions. Photograph: World Bank/University of Wisconsin-Madison “It’s quite a surprise how much fragmentation there is,” says Judy Baker, one of the authors of the World Bank’s recent report titled East Asia’s Changing Urban Landscape. “It’s a challenge for almost every city.” Among the surprising findings of the report is that 135 of the nearly 350 urban regions they surveyed in East Asia had no dominant local jurisdiction. The glaring example here is of course the largest urban area in the world, the Pearl River Delta region in China, a megapolitan region that includes many major cities, including Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and others. In Manila in the Philippines, no less than 85 municipalities are involved in the megacity’s governance. Advertisement Planners love efficiency, but even on a piece of paper it can be hard to know what size box to draw. As the OECD put it: “Even if policymakers try to reorganise local governments according to functional relations within urban agglomerations, it is often difficult to identify boundaries between functionally integrated areas.” In plain English: nobody really knows where to draw the lines. And as the Toronto example shows, amalgamation – bringing fragmented government regions together – comes with downsides of its own. Of course, you can put people in the same governmental box, but that won’t necessarily create common ground – instead, it can create a zero-sum, winner-takes-all dynamic. People in living in cities and those in their suburbs often have different values, priorities and even a different culture. They can be, as was famously said of English and French Canada, “two solitudes”. Urbanites who support regional governance frequently assume that means more power, money and resources for the central city. But as Rob Ford so richly illustrated, that’s not always the case. Among those who stand to lose from regional government are minorities. In Ferguson, black residents were already under-represented in government relative to their population. But as a voting block they would find their strength heavily diluted in a merged government: Ferguson is more than two-thirds African-American, while St Louis County plus the city of St Louis together are about 70% white. Unsurprisingly, central cities tend to prefer regional revenue-sharing without giving up political control. Detroit, despite serious financial problems, has viciously fought sharing control over city assets, even where they serve a broader region. Detroit’s convention centre is a good example of the tensions that can arise: it took years to agree renovations to the building, as despite arguing the suburbs should help pay for the building they partly enjoy, the city did not want to cede any control over it. Part of the city’s bankruptcy “grand bargain” involved raising regional water rates to funnel money back into the city while retaining city ownership over a regional water utility. But simply creating revenue streams, via regional cash sharing or consolidation, doesn’t guarantee better governance, as Detroit proves. Putting people in the same governmental box doesn’t necessarily create common ground, as the example of Toronto shows. Putting people in the same governmental box doesn’t necessarily create common ground, as the example of Toronto shows. Photograph: Alamy Indianapolis is also an instructive case. The city established a consolidated regional government in 1970 called Unigov (which Rusk hailed as a model). Unigov expanded the city’s tax base by amalgamating most of its new, fast-growing suburbs into the city. But the urban region continued to sprawl, eventually going beyond even the newly consolidated boundaries. Today’s growth in Indianapolis is all happening outside Unigov’s borders, and the city now finds itself supporting ageing suburban areas – just like Ferguson in St Louis – that it can’t afford. Consolidated government arguably gave Indianapolis four decades of financial breathing room, but that simply let it put off reform. Similarly, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey was originally a well-functioning regional governance body, but is now a quagmire of dysfunction. The soaring costs of Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava’s $4.2bn PATH subway station at the World Trade Centre – and a proposal to spend $10bn to replace a bus station – are examples of an agency that has lost its grip on fiscal reality. No perfect solution exists, some cities have got it more right than others If no perfect solution exists, some cities have got it more right than others. The Greater London Authority (GLA) – because of its limited scope mostly focused on transport, public safety and economic development – has focused on doing a few things well. Its focus on transportation is targeted at an area where regional coordination really is crucial. Clearly, transport has to be designed and implemented on a regional basis, at least for major infrastructure. New York’s Port Authority arguably went off the rails in the late 1960s when it expanded beyond transportation and got into the real estate business by building the World Trade Centre. So the best way to start charting a middle ground between fragmentation and amalgamation might be for cities to look for ways to better regionalise transport governance. It won’t be easy, not least because of the common fighting over territory, both geographical and bureaucratic. London’s success with the GLA, compared with how amalgamation set Toronto’s transport planning back a decade or more, shows that creating a regional entity is only half the battle. The real drive is to create regional agreement and consensus . As cities mushroom and fragmentation increases, that consensus is becoming more crucial – and harder to achieve – than ever. sent via Tapatalk
  3. Thales opens expanded facility in Montreal By Mary Kirby Thales has unveiled an expanded facility in Montreal to meet the continuing growth of its aerospace capabilities. The manufacturer’s new larger location will house around 145 employees, including after-sales support and a maintenance team, as well as test bench facilities. Today’s inauguration coincides with the 10-year anniversary of Thales’ aerospace activities in Canada. Francois Quentin, Thales senior VP in charge of aerospace activities, says: “Thales has a long and prestigious history as a key partner to Canada’s aerospace and defence establishments. Its roots go back to the early 1980’s, when Thales first established a domestic presence in Canada. “Thales’ Canadian aerospace activities play a key role as the central hub for the regional and business aircraft market and represent a worldwide centre of excellence for flight control systems.” From Montreal, Thales provides avionics systems for regional and business aircraft with customers ranging from Bombardier, Embraer, Sukhoi, Gulfstream and Dassault Falcon. It is currently equipping Air Canada’s entire fleet with its in-flight entertainment systems. Source: Air Transport Intelligence news http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2008/02/11/221483/thales-opens-expanded-facility-in-montreal.html
  4. 2010-06-22 WORLDHOTELS Adds 26 New Affiliate Hotels to Its Global Portfolio Since Jan. 1, 2010 For WORLDHOTELS-The Americas development team, new projects are in various stages of completion for new affiliate hotels in New York (2); Brazil (5), Argentina (2) and Mexico (2). Future regional development plans include hotels and resorts located in Memphis, Washington, D.C., Boston, San Francisco, Houston, Toronto and Montreal. Anybody knows anything about these folks? http: //www.worldhotels.com/hotels-and-resorts.html?&L=0 :)
  5. Toronto doit se séparer de l’Ontario Agence QMI Don Crosby 15/03/2010 22h09 Partager À cause des coyottes - Toronto doit se séparer de l’Ontario Les coyotes ont raison de la patience d’un député ontarien, qui estime qu’il est temps que Toronto se sépare…du reste de l’Ontario! © Courtoisie OWEN SOUND - Les coyotes ont raison de la patience d’un député ontarien, qui estime qu’il est temps que Toronto se sépare…du reste de l’Ontario! «La province est totalement administrée avec une mentalité torontoise. Le gouvernement actuel ne peut arriver à rien parce qu’il est dominé par Toronto» estime le député franc-tireur Bill Murdoch, qui représente la circonscription rurale de Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound située au nord-ouest de Toronto. La suggestion a été lancée lors d’une table ronde qui avait lieu samedi à Chepstow entre la Fédération des agriculteurs du comté de Bruce et les politiciens fédéraux, provinciaux et municipaux, au sujet du manque de compréhension de Queen’s Park lorsque venait le temps de traiter de la question des coyotes en milieu rural ontarien. Le député Murdoch veut que le gouvernement élargisse un programme qui verse une prime pour les animaux abattus, alors que les députés de Toronto sont horrifiés à l’idée de tuer des animaux sauvages. «Parlez aux députés de Toronto et vous verrez qu’ils n’ont pas la moindre idée de ce qui se passe ici. La majorité d’entre eux proviennent de la zone du code régional 416.» Le député Murdoch a proposé que la nouvelle province de Toronto soit territorialement limitée au code 416. «Le code régional 905 sera pour l’Ontario. Nous allons encore avoir des villes comme London, Windsor, Ottawa. On pourrait installer la capitale à London.» suggère-t-il. Le député a toutefois reconnu que la ministre de l’Agriculture, Caroll Mitchell, comprenait les préoccupations de l’Ontario rural. Elle a déclaré samedi qu’il était temps d’apporter des modifications à la réglementation concernant le contrôle des coyotes et des autres prédateurs. Les coyotes causent chaque année des dommages au bétail qui sont évalués à des dizaines de milliers de dollars. Certains détracteurs de la politique du gouvernement avertissent que les coyotes sont de plus en plus enhardis et qu’ils sont maintenant visibles dans les zones urbaines.
  6. Indicatif régional: 514, 438, 450 et maintenant 579 (Source: Radio-Canada) Un nouvel indicatif régional fera son apparition l'année prochaine dans la banlieue métropolitaine, le 579 L'épuisement des numéros de téléphone force le Conseil de la radiodiffusion et des télécommunications canadiennes (CRTC) à imposer un nouvel indicatif dans la banlieue métropolitaine. À partir du 21 août 2010, le 579 sera attribué aux nouveaux abonnés de la région du 450
  7. Come on!! je suis certain que les anti-banlieue vont s'amuser avec celle la Source: Les Affaires Le nombre de banlieusards augmente tellement rapidement autour de Montréal, que le Conseil de la radiodiffusion et des télécommunications canadiennes (CRTC) prévoit une pénurie de numéros portant l'indicatif régional 450 d'ici environ quatre ans. Le conseil a donc créé cette semaine un comité pour étudier les différentes solutions possibles pour éviter un épuisement des numéros. On pourrait ainsi rediviser l'immense zone couverte par le 450 et donner à chaque région son code exclusif. Si ce scénario est retenu, la Rive-Nord et la Rive-Sud pourraient éventuellement avoir une identité téléphonique distincte. L'autre solution consisterait à "superposer" un nouvel indicatif régional au 450. Les abonnés du téléphone se verraient attribuer l'un ou l'autre indicatif, sans égard à leur adresse. Cela se fait déjà sur l'île de Montréal où les codes 514 et 438 cohabitent depuis 2006. Le comité entendra les personnes intéressées cet hiver. D'après le CRTC, l'épuisement prochain du code 450 est principalement attribuable à la croissance démographique rapide des zones qu'il couvre. Entré en vigueur en juin 1998, le 450 aura régné sans partage sur les régions limitrophes de Montréal, soit la Montérégie ainsi qu'une bonne partie des Laurentides et de Lanaudière, de la Haute-Yamaska, du Haut-Richelieu et de l'Estrie pendant moins de 15 ans.
  8. La construction résidentielle plonge * Denis Lalonde, lesaffaires.com * 10:08 Les mises en chantier se font de plus en plus rares au Québec. Photo: Bloomberg La construction résidentielle a fortement ralenti au Québec en février selon les plus récentes données de la Société canadienne d’hypothèque et de logement (SCHL). L’organisme soutient que 1 438 habitations ont été mises en chantier durant le mois de février au Québec dans les centres de 10 000 habitants et plus, comparativement à 2 794 il y a un an. Il s’agit d’un plongeon de près de 50%. Cette diminution est plus importante que celle qui avait été observée en janvier. «L'importante régression du nombre de logements vendus sur le marché de la revente au cours des derniers mois traduit bien le contexte actuel. Le recul des mises en chantier n'est donc guère surprenant. Le niveau d'activité enregistré en février 2008, qui est historiquement élevé, a d'ailleurs contribué à l'ampleur du recul observé au même mois cette année», affirme Kevin Hughes, économiste régional à la SCHL, dans un communiqué. L'affaiblissement de la construction résidentielle en février a touché tant le segment des maisons individuelles (-41%) que celui des logements collectifs (-51%). Alors que l'activité était en hausse à Gatineau (de plus de 100 %), Québec (+40 %) et Sherbrooke (+13 %), des baisses étaient enregistrées à Saguenay (-86 %), Montréal (-63 %) et Trois-Rivières (-49 %). http://www.lesaffaires.com/article/0/immobilier/2009-03-09/490243/la-construction-reteacutesidentielle-plonge.fr.html (9/3/2009 13H05)
  9. Air Canada et le transporteur régional Jazz affichent pour octobre un coefficient d'occupation consolidé de 80,2%, résultat sans précédent pour ce mois. Pour en lire plus...
  10. La tension monte entre les représentants régionaux de la FTQ et les membres du groupe écologiste Greenpeace concernant l'exploitation forestière et la protection de la forêt boréale. Pour en lire plus...
  11. Après 19 ans d'antenne, le bulletin de nouvelles régional de Québec sera retiré des ondes vendredi, laissant plusieurs employés sur le pavé. Pour en lire plus...
  12. La venue à Fort McMurray de l'investisseur et du mécène n'est pas passée inaperçue. L'exploitation des ressources et le développement régional étaient au menu de la visite. Pour en lire plus...
  13. Ontario: the Province that thinks it's Canada Amid regional grievances, McGuinty fights for a fair share of taxpayers' dollars MURRAY CAMPBELL From Saturday's Globe and Mail August 2, 2008 at 12:00 AM EDT Dalton McGuinty was doing a favour for reporters afflicted with summer-brain stupor. “Here's the news,” the Ontario Premier said, helpfully, after a speech late last month. “Ontarians are coming together to more effectively assert themselves in the face of an unfairness caused by the financial arrangements between us and Ottawa.” Indeed, it would be news if this coming-together was actually happening, and it would be momentous given the suggestion by the federal government this week that it is prepared to shift some economic powers to the provinces. But the residents of Canada's most populous province do not have an unbroken history of rising up as one to take on the federal government. Ontario is not Alberta, and the philosophy that provincial rights should be paramount has always had to compete with a powerful sense that Canada comes first. Mr. McGuinty embodies this duality. For more than three years, he has wasted few opportunities to make his claim that Ontario is being treated unfairly in Confederation because it receives, by the latest estimate, about $20-billion less in services from federal government than its taxpayers remit to Ottawa. He criticizes the federal equalization program – financed predominantly by Ontario taxpayers – for redistributing money to provinces that are more prosperous than his. He takes issue with health and other transfer payments that are less generous than those given to other provinces. And he asks why an unemployed worker in Ontario is treated more severely than in the rest of the country and why the Harper government wants to leave the province under-represented in the Commons. Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty gestures during his public lecture 'Ontario's Place in the 21st century' at the London School of Economics and Political Science in London, Monday, May 19, 2008. Hanging over all this is the feeling in Ontario that the 1988 U.S. free-trade pact broke the bargain of Confederation in which Canadians bought their manufactured goods from Ontario in return for a recycling of some of its wealth through programs such as equalization. The Premier is always careful to say that he is a proud Canadian and that he understands his province has been blessed by geography and circumstances that give it a responsibility to share its wealth. But the Premier's sustained effort – reflected in his website fairness.ca – suggests a growing sense of regionalism in Ontario. “My friends, it is time to stand up for our province, time to stand up for Ontario,” he said in his speech last month to the Chamber of Commerce in London, Ont. He suggested that lessons could be learned from other provinces that have gone mano-a-mano with federal administrations although he shied away from emulating Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams, who stormed out of one federal-provincial meeting in protest and then removed Canadian flags from provincial buildings. Ontarians who realize that Newfoundland has a much larger per-capita income than Ontario, thanks in part to $477-million in equalization payments this year may wish their Premier to be as aggressive. But while his tactics may be lower-key, Mr. McGuinty isn't going away. “It's becoming more and more urgent, and there's a continuing need to speak about it, because there hasn't been an appetite at the federal level to really engage in fixing the system,” said an official in the Premier's office. The question is whether Ontarians are likely to respond to his appeal or whether circumstances will transform Ontario into a province with a profound regional grievance. The trend line of estrangement from Ottawa suggests it is possible, but this has to be countered by the strong identification with Canada that Ontario residents have always shown. Mr. McGuinty recognizes other provinces will resent Ontario throwing its weight around. “There is a lazy caricature that is convenient for people, which people can resort to, which is that we're being greedy, we're being uncharitable, we're being un-Canadian,” he told the editorial board of The Globe and Mail in 2006. He also knows that talk of regionalism makes his voters uncomfortable. He is fond of comparing the province's role in Confederation to his own situation growing up as the eldest of 10 children. “My responsibility in the eyes of my parents could be summed up in one word: compliance,” he said in London. “Just be quiet and set a good example. Maybe there is a little bit of that to us here in Ontario.” Neither analysis deals completely with Ontario's complex, shifting history. The province had a very strong sense of identity right from the formation of Canada in 1867 but it also was proud that one of its own, John A. Macdonald, was its first prime minister. And Ontario was conscious that it owed its growing prosperity to the high-tariff walls erected as part of Macdonald's National Policy that sustained its manufacturing industries. But, as historian Randall White notes, long-serving premier Oliver Mowat (1872-1896) battled Macdonald for control of provincial resources (earning the nickname “the little tyrant”) and, later, both Howard Ferguson and Mitch Hepburn fought pitched battles with Ottawa over federal encroachment on provincial jurisdiction. Prevailing attitudes changed during the Second World War, which transformed Canada into a modern industrial state with Ontario at its centre. The postwar province was so diversified economically that it was touched by almost every federal policy. As Queen's University political economist Thomas Courchene has noted, “national policy had frequently had little choice but to be cast in a pro-Ontario light.” Leslie Frost believed that political relations had to reflect these economic ties. When he became Ontario's premier in 1949, he set about building a co-operative relationship with Ottawa. The province surrendered much of its taxing authority and agreed to the equalization scheme that vexes Mr. McGuinty. During Mr. Frost's 12 years in office, the old confrontations died away and the modern notion of Ontario as a helpful saviour of Confederation – exemplified by John Robarts' Confederation of Tomorrow conference in 1967 – took hold. So complete was this subsuming of Ontario's regional identity that historian Arthur Lower concluded in 1968 that the province had little collective will and asked in an article: “Does Ontario exist?” No one laughed and, indeed, historian Peter Oliver questioned seven years later why “anyone would attempt to write the history of a region which isn't.” Ontario was firmly by the federal government's side during the energy battles of the 1970s, supporting Ottawa's move, through the National Energy Program, to gain a larger share of Alberta's oil revenues. And Ontario forsook its old alliances with Quebec to side with the Trudeau government's push to patriate the Constitution and enact the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The MPs that Ontarians send to Ottawa are still more likely to represent the federal argument to Ontario than vice versa – Mr. McGuinty has found few allies in any federal government caucus – but MPPs at Queen's Park began to fall out of step in the 1980s. The Peterson government was impatient with Brian Mulroney's agenda of fiscal restraint and free trade. In particular, Ontario saw the free-trade pact with the United States – the end of the old National Policy – as evidence that Ottawa was promoting the rest of Canada at its expense. By the early 1990s, Bob Rae concluded that the country seemed to be “based on the premise that everyone else could speak ill of Ontario and that this inherently wealthy place would continue to bankroll Canada.” In a 1993 speech, he described Ontario as “the part of Canada that dare not speak its name.” Mr. McGuinty owes much to Mr. Rae's decision to engage a consulting firm to draft a cost-benefit analysis to buttress his belief that the structure of Confederation in the wake of the free-trade deal and cuts in transfer payments neglected Ontario. Mr. Rae's “fair shares federalism” argument is the precursor of the current premier's “fairness” campaign. Mr. Harris agreed that the structure of Confederation served Ontario ill. He, too, fought the federal government (often along with other premiers) on everything from employment insurance to the Kyoto greenhouse-gas protocol. But the federal government at the time was preoccupied with Quebec, after the wake of the 1995 referendum that narrowly kept that province in the country. The federal Liberals' stranglehold on Ontario gave Mr. Harris's Progressive Conservative government no allies on Parliament Hill and Ontario's fundamental objections remained. Mr. McGuinty has earned some concessions in the past three years but the broad-ranging reform of fiscal relations he is seeking eludes him. His efforts seem to resonate with voters who find the notion of a $20-billion “gap” easy to comprehend. One opinion poll earlier this year gave him two-to-one support over federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty in their war of words over Ontario's economic strategy. But will 13 million Ontarians find a will to act collectively and heed their Premier's call to arms? Mr. White concedes only that the province “is gradually recovering some sense of a regional identity it lost after the Second World War.” Mr. Courchene, too, is careful about predicting the future. “They're thinking of themselves as meriting better treatment from the federal government,” he said. “Does that make them a region? I don't know.” Certainly not in the way that Quebec is distinctive or the West feels it has been victimized by Bay Street and the NEP. It is also hard to define Ontario: The northwest feels closer to Manitoba and there is little identification with Toronto in the eastern part of the province. In addition, immigrants – and Ontario has been getting 125,000 or more a year – have only to look at their new passports to discern their allegiance. But circumstances may yet push Ontario into regional belligerence as the belief grows that the equalization program is unsustainable. Its taxpayers contribute 40 per cent of the cost of the scheme – $13.6-billion now, and growing by leaps and bounds – and this burden rises every year whether its economy grows or not. Conversely, while Alberta's oil revenues are part of the equation that determines payouts, the revenues themselves are off limits to the federal treasury. Mr. Courchene calculates that, partly as a result of this scheme, Ontario's per-capita revenues trail every other province. The prediction that Ontario will soon become a have-not province and qualify for payments that, absurdly, are largely funded by its own taxpayers casts a harsh light on the scheme's shortcomings. Mr. Courchene calls this prospect “fiscalamity,” and if Ontarians catch his drift Mr. McGuinty will have a blank cheque to throw some weight around. The eldest child may decide he's fed up with setting a good example and looking after the other kids.
  14. Montreal projects get $17M The Gazette Published: Monday, June 16 International Science and Technology Partnerships Canada Inc. today announced $17 million in research and development funding to support three Montreal-based projects involving Canadian and Indian companies. Beneficiaries include CAE Inc., Pratt & Whitney Canada Corp. and McGill University, according to an announcement today by Foreign Affairs Ministers David Emerson. The three projects include the application of biofuels for aviation, the design and development of a new generation of regional transport aircraft and an improved system for storing dangerous materials in aboveground tanks. "Our government understands the importance of establishing international research partners and the critical role science and technology plays in the new economy," said Emerson. "These joint projects will enhance the collaboration between our scientists and commercialize their discoveries." http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/business/story.html?id=d92f9f3c-9ed2-48f3-a340-ded06146a499
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