Toronto’s tips on how to woo Amazon — or anyone
Unlike some suitors, we’re taking the ‘you’d be lucky to have us’ route
“Please, baby, pleeeease. I’d do anything for you. I’m nothing without you. I neeeeeeeed you. Please!” That’s an enduring theme of pop music lyrics, but it’s actually a really terrible romantic overture. “I’m a desperate lonely loser who needs you to make me less desperate and lonely” is the kind of pitch that will turn almost no one on. No one you want around, anyhow. What’s in it for them? And yet it remains common among lyricists and heartsick wannabe romantics. And as it is in love, so it is, apparently, in business.
I was thinking about those pleading crooners while scanning news items about cities making their bids for Amazon’s affection. The online retail giant announced it was accepting offers for a city to host its second headquarters (and the 50,000 high-tech jobs expected to come with it) and suddenly mayors were on their knees belting out ballads.
Stonecrest, Ga., promised to create a whole new city, name it after Amazon and install the company’s founder, Jeff Bezos, as mayor-for-life. Chula Vista, Calif., offered $400 million (U.S.) in tax incentives. Newark, N.J., upped the grasping bribery stakes to $7 billion.
All of this was enough to make a Torontonian cringe while waiting to see what sort of sorry self-abasement our own region’s bid package was likely to contain. And yet, when the Toronto region bid book for Amazon came out this week, it didn’t contain a rendition of “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg.” Instead, it was more like something from the independent women period of Destiny’s Child: “Don’t you want to dance with me? Can you handle, handle me?”
No begging involved. What incentives were we willing to offer? None.
Well, not none, exactly. The city’s bid offered the incentive of locating in Toronto: an amazing city to live in, and an amazing place to do business. It explains what we are, why we’re attractive, and why anyone would be foolish to overlook us. Amazon would be lucky to locate here. And that ought to be incentive enough. How absolutely refreshing. After all, this is a city that has never failed to contemplate how an Olympics or a World’s Fair or some other bit of external validation might finally “make us want to be a better city,” to paraphrase Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets. That’s our history: If we win our bid for this BIG DEAL THING, maybe we can finally develop the Port Lands! If we land that GIANT EVENT, maybe we’ll get around to building the transit we should have built for ourselves decades ago. Affordable housing construction? Maybe we could DO IT FOR THEM, if only they’ll reward us with their affection.
And yet somehow, finally, in considering the prospect of inviting a new global tech giant to the city, we became aware of our own attractiveness. And felt some confidence in ourselves, with or without them. It’s like a recipe for success from a selfhelp manual: love yourself first.
The submission reads like a manifesto of civic self-confidence: “From safety, crime, health care and education, to housing, culture and economic as well as geophysical stability, the Toronto region leads North America on every important quality of life metric,” it says. “Ontario was the first province in Canada to legalize same-sex marriage in 2003. We remain signatories to the Paris Climate agreement. We believe in — and enforce — gun control. Abortion is in no danger of being repealed, and birth control is accessible. We have universal health care and robust public schools,” it goes on. “We are also fun,” it also says, maybe protesting too much.
Of course, it makes the economic case for a large American company, too. It emphasizes that Toronto has the most educated workforce of any major North American city. It clues them in that our government health-care system would save a company like Amazon $600 million a year. It points out that our talent level ranks very high but, in comparison to a major American city, our average wages are very low. The corporate income tax rate is 12.5per-cent lower than the American average and business operating costs here are “26-per-cent lower than comparable tech markets.”
Presumably, all of this is what helped drive Google’s decision, announced formally last week, to locate a new city-building laboratory here. And it’s also why Toronto is already the third-largest tech hub in North America, and is the fastestgrowing tech market in the world.
But beyond those specific business benchmarks, it’s fascinating to see what this proposal emphasizes. There are two pictures of the Pride parade. Another picture of bike lanes. A picture of a graduating university class that shows off the city’s obvious ethnic diversity alongside bragging points stats: “We welcome more new immigrants each year than New York, L.A., and Chicago combined. We speak over 180 languages and dialects.” Lots of fawning over our walk scores and the growth plans for our transit system.
It’s great that we put all this stuff down to entice a business to locate here. It’s a document aimed at Amazon, but it’s there ready to send out to virtually any other company looking to see what we offer.
Let Amazon decide whatever it wants. We’ll be fine either way.
But I kind of wish our local politicians would also look at it and see what we’re bragging about when we talk to other people about why they should move here. Because it seems too often they forget those things when they’re talking to those of us who already live here.
If transit and cycling and walkability are big selling points, why do so many of our provincial and municipal debates revolve around protecting the commute times of car drivers, at almost all costs? If transit expansion and service is such an economic asset, why are we always hacking our plans back over budget worries?
All these things we want to show to other people: why don’t we focus on building them up even better for ourselves? Take some pride in those things, even when no one else is looking? Edward Keenan writes on city issues. ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire