Councillor’s travel costs an investment
A year ago, as Toronto struggled to escape the stubborn grip of winter, one of its councillors jetted to Miami; Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Austin, Texas; Panama, then back to Miami; and finished the spring tour of duty with a 10-day marathon through Abu Dhabi, Bangalore, Mumbai and New Delhi.
A month after India, the councillor was in Edmonton, then Paris for eight days and Milan for a week.
The itinerary is either akin to the lifestyles of the rich and famous, or cruel and unusual punishment. But it is the chosen mission of Councillor Michael Thompson, chair of the city’s economic development committee and the prime global promoter and set-up man for Mayor John Tory.
In all, Thompson’s travels cost about $54,762 last year — by far the most of any city councillor. And most of it, $39,704, was funded by city taxpayers.
“I know people think, ‘Oh my God, he’s spending our money,’ but I don’t take offence to that. I make no excuses, because we are not wasting people’s money. If the head of economic development is not working to sell the city of Toronto, then nobody is,” Thompson said Wednesday.
“I’m not going to stop. We have an amazing product. The end result is to create more jobs, more investment and more opportunity. I’m having a lot of fun in the job, but the travel is actually draining,” Thompson said, as he pointed out another busy calendar of global business trips for 2016.
Mayor Tory has already been to San Francisco, Shanghai, Chongqing, Hong Kong and Tokyo this year. Tory says his team will soon report out on the trip’s successes. Thompson was by his side, having been part of the advance team last November that set up the contacts and protocols in China and Japan. “When the mayor appointed me chair, he said he needed me to ‘sell, sell, sell,’ and that’s what I’m doing,” Thompson said.
Nobody can say he’s sloughing off or sleeping on the job.
The people engaged in luring business to Toronto and getting the city’s name in the mix of decisions being made around the globe say this kind of business hunt is essential if Toronto is to be competitive.
Jan De Silva, CEO of the Toronto Region Board of Trade, spent 15 years in Asia, four of them living and working in China. You can’t influence business prospects in that culture by talking to them from Toronto, she says.
When Richard Daly was mayor of Chicago, he travelled to China three times a year. Now, Chicago is the most business-friendly city for China, De Silva says.
A decade ago, Ontario did $1.2 billion worth of trade with China; now it is $2 billion. Illinois, over that span, took its trade from $1.2 billion to $5.7 billion.
An example of Toronto’s underperforming is in the food and beverage industry. Toronto has the second-largest such sector in North America, but not enough people know that.
China’s burgeoning middle class has a seemingly insatiable appetite for our food, De Silva says. They have more disposable income, are looking for richer, more proteinbased foods and are concerned about their own country’s safety standards.
So on Tory’s trip this month, the Shanghai developer of the King Blue condo project in Toronto’s financial district signed a memorandum of understanding to set up a food purchase centre in Toronto, to help supply Canadian food to its supermarkets in skyscrapers in China.
“The fact (Tory) was going to be in Shanghai was the catalyst,” De Silva says.
“The way countries like China work is mayor-to-mayor.”
Last February in Sao Paulo, the Toronto team got lucky, but only because they were physically at a trade mission, representing the Consider Canada City Alliance. They met with a bio-lab firm planning to set up shop in New Jersey or Philadelphia, and the firm had not heard of Toronto’s extensive biomedical sector, Thompson says.
Toronto won out. The investment is worth $20 million and 50 jobs. The trip cost just under $6,669, but the payback was nearly 3,000-fold.
Every year, the city clerk releases the list of conference and travel expenses for each Toronto councillor. Thompson travelled to 18 cities abroad in 2015. He anticipates criticism from those who views such trips as junkets.
He is the chair of Invest Toronto, a board member of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, co-chair of the city’s aerospace committee, leads in the vision to create a more vibrant music landscape in Toronto and is active in the International Economic Forum of the Americas. And he did all that while sitting on the Toronto Police Services Board during the last term of council.
When he took over as chair of the economic development committee under former mayor Rob Ford, nobody wanted the role, Thompson says.
As Toronto plots a Going Global strategy as a matter of economic survival, playing small is not a viable option.
When a Chinese firm is leading 5G research that will lead to self-driving cars and it wants to tap into University of Toronto doctoral and engineering students, a visit from a Toronto politician is no small thing.
It’s a sign of respect.