uncontrolled suburban expansion and deindustrialization and created racially segregated metropolitan areas through redlining and other discriminatory real estate practices. Urban renewal programs carried out under the auspices of redevelopment partnerships destroyed African American and working-class white neighborhoods, displaced long-time residents, and lined the pockets of real estate developers. These practices provoked urban uprisings that tore apart central cities, devastated urban tax bases, accelerated middle-class relocation to the suburbs, and led pundits to describe northeastern and mid-western cities as in the throes of an urban crisis.67 By contrast, Canadian central city housing markets were not redlined, and residents could more easily get mortgages and home improvement loans than could residents of U.S. central cities. In the 1960s, Canadian cities did not burn. Instead, when Canadian policymakers talked about a looming urban crisis, they referred to an aging urban infrastructure insufficient to meet the demands of a projected population boom in the next decade.68
To address its urban crisis, the U.S. government focused more attention and greater resources on central cities through Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs; the Canadian government instead turned to regional development. Canada’s federal transfers to other levels of government generally took the form of unconditional equalization payments that, beginning in 1957, redistributed revenue from wealthier to poorer provinces to ensure that all provinces could provide similar services to their citizens at reasonably comparable levels of taxation, regardless of each province’s ability to generate revenue—a program for which there was no analogue in the United States.69 Federal agencies like the Tennessee Valley Authority (1933) and the Appalachian Regional Commission (1965) funneled federal funds for infrastructure projects to distressed regions, while the more ambitious but short-lived Area Redevelopment Administration (1961–1965) encouraged economic development primarily in Appalachia and the South.70 None of these federal agencies, however, redistributed wealth at a national scale.
At the national scale, distinctions in U.S. and Canadian urban and regional development policy shaped the political possibilities for public-private partnership and postindustrial redevelopment in Pittsburgh and Hamilton. Canada’s stronger commitment to regional development and social welfare spending became increasingly evident as national policy orientations toward privatization and decentralization intensified steadily, if unevenly, in the United States and Canada after the political watershed of 1968. On both sides of the Great Lakes, newly elected leaders faced urban crises in cities in the East and the industrial heartland. At the same time, political and economic elites in North American boom regions—the U.S. Sunbelt and the Canadian West—exerted pressure on their national governments to stem what boosters in places like Phoenix and Calgary saw as undue federal aid for troubled manufacturing centers. U.S. president Richard Nixon and Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau set out to quell the simmering tensions between declining and ascendant regions by renegotiating the relationship between components of the federal system. As centers of the old economy and beneficiaries of liberal social programs, Pittsburgh and Hamilton stood to lose their relatively privileged positions in their respective national urban funding hierarchies.
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
