THE CONVERSATION: The "State of the Region"

“Three years ago Regional Council and I laid out a vision to combat the complacency that had crept into the Niagara Region and had stilted our progress for far too long,” he said in his speech. Caslin pointed to the Region’s “line-by-line review” of its budget as a way to ensure that “each dollar receives the scrutiny it deserves.”

Caslin also reminded the audience of 500 or so at the Scotiabank Convention Centre of how bleak things were in Niagara ten years ago, as the 2008 recession began.

“If I told you in 2008 that we would have a commitment for daily GO Train service to Niagara Falls, host the 2021 Canada Summer Games, and successfully attract a new large GE manufacturing facility, would you have believed it?” he said.

In his speech, Caslin conceded that in the departments of transit and public housing there remains much to do.

Caslin also announced the launch of “Shape Niagara,” which he called “the largest strategic consultation effort in Niagara’s history.”

Shape Niagara will include five open forums in May and June, and, according to Caslin, form the basis of the Region’s next strategic plan. Last week, the Voice spoke to Caslin about the state of the region.

PICCOLO: Thanks for making the time to speak to the lowly Voice of Pelham.

CASLIN: Are you “accredited” yet?

We’re officially accredited—now you and I are on the phone, so I can’t show you my ID. You’ll just have to take my word for it.

I’m much more comfortable now that you’re accredited.

At this point, we’re joining every organization. The SPCA, the MLBPA—

CAA?

Yep. Got that one too. Anything we can get our hands on. My wallet is stuffed.

Excellent.

Anyhow, the metaphor you used in the speech, “Hands on the Wheel and Eyes on the Road,” is probably an apt one considering your background at GM. Especially with respect to the economic performance that you talked about, I’m wondering if a different transportation metaphor would be more appropriate. I’m thinking of sailing—with a municipality, a lot of the economic momentum comes from above. It’s about getting the sail up in the right direction when those winds come and taking advantage of opportunities.

Absolutely. And tacking when you need to. The direction isn’t always head on, sometimes we have to tack back and forth to get where we need to go. As long as we get there—we get those jobs in Niagara, that’s what it’s all about. A good example is the GE facility. We worked with them for months, months to get that landed. It really didn’t matter where in Niagara it landed, as long as it landed here.

Was that a case in which the opportunities come up, and they’re nationwide, or province-wide, and Niagara’s trying to find a way to make a case that it’s the best place?

It’s no different than when we’re talking to the province. It was just a couple of years ago, maybe a little longer, when [Parliamentary Assistant to the Transportation Minister] MPP Arthur Potts stood up in Niagara-on-the-Lake and said that GO Train to Niagara was just not on the government’s radar. I think those were the exact words he used. Lo and behold, here we are. A couple years later, and we’re expecting GO Train to be in Grimsby by 2021, and 2023 to St. Catharines and the Falls. These things can happen.

You brought the audience back to the bleak years of a decade ago, right after the recession, and you asked them whether these sorts of things—the GE plant, GO Train—would have been believable back then. Your implicit answer was that they weren’t.

At the time, I was obviously working at General Motors. I can remember starting to take inventory of the equipment at the factory, in preparation for closing because there was just no light at the end of the tunnel. It was a pretty bleak time in Niagara. Unemployment rates were at double-digits for sure, with no promise for an end. Here we are ten years later in a much different place.

Going back to your comment on the GE plant, and it not mattering where in the region that it landed, how much of your role as chair—and Regional Council in general—is about this sort of quarterbacking. I was reading the St. Catharines Standard’s “fact-checking” of your speech, and it made some reference to the 2021 Summer Games, saying that it was supported by the Region but that it was headed up by other individuals. In past conversations with you, you’ve described your job as keeping all the puppies in the box—it seems as though the role of the Region in many cases isn’t to take the lead on everything, but to be a facilitator. If someone has an idea for the Summer Games, the Region can support it.

It’s interesting. I don’t need the kudos or attention for anything because it benefits us all. That’s my goal. To illustrate the story on the GE plant—it’s very interesting how it happened. It was on CKTB that we first heard that GE was going to be moving out of Wisconsin and was going to be coming to Canada. I talked to Bob Seguin, our economic development director at the time, and I said, “Bob, why don’t you give GE a call and see if there’s any possibility that we can get on the list.” He said sure. He called first thing in the morning—at ten o’clock I talked to him, and I said: “Well, how did you make out?” He said that by eight o’clock they had already got 140 calls from every corner of Canada. I said, “Oh great. The competition is a lot tougher than what I originally expected.” I asked Bob if he could get me any face time with the CEO or anybody making the decision. He said that it just so happened that Elise Allen, the CEO and President of GE in Canada is also a friend of his, and that he’d worked with her in the past. He said that he might be able to give her a call. She came down for the Ontario Economic Summit at White Oaks. I said: “Bob: All you’ve got to do is get me give minutes of face time with Elise. I know she’s going to be busy.” There was a reception at Jackson Triggs, and I got a private room. I went in with [Niagara Falls Mayor] Jim Diodati and [St. Catharines Mayor] Walter Sendzik, and she was there with a couple of her staff. She asked me what we wanted to talk about. I said: I want you to bring the GE plant to Niagara. She said, “Oh yeah. You and thousand others. So what?” We went to town on her for about fifteen minutes on how Niagara is steeped in manufacturing history, we have the infrastructure in place, we have two education institutes with labour force ready to work. And she looked at her coworkers and said, “get Niagara on the list.” That’s how it started. That’s the reality of how it started. After that everybody got involved, and it was all hands on deck. But whether it was me starting it, or anybody else starting it, it really doesn’t matter. What matters at the end of the day is that we got it here. The three or four hundred jobs that this is going to represent, $50 million dollars in economic revenue that the Canada Games bring—it doesn’t matter who, it matters that we get it here. I’ll help steer the ship, but I need a lot of people behind me to do the work. And they’re the people who need the credit for the achievement. They’re the ones who actually sweat the details and do the work on the ground to make things happen.

I wanted to ask about another line in the speech. I think you were referring to a line-by-line analysis of the budget, and you said that a business case is now required for every new dollar or investment. That seems like a sensible approach when you’re talking about tax incentives, or development charge policy, but other things in the speech—social housing, or the opioid crisis—some people might look at and say, “Maybe there’s a business case there. If people don’t have a place to live, they can’t work. If they have health issues they won’t be able to work. But a lot of people would say that those things aren’t business issues. We want to be thinking about the social impact of these things first.

Quite frankly, the economy is the catalyst for results. It’s the journey, not necessarily the destination, but the journey itself that makes the difference. Whether we’re talking about social housing or jobs, they’re all part of the economy. Making sure that we have a strong economy makes sure that we have a comfortable living and a comfortable retirement, but it is a determinant of people’s health. It’s a social determinant of health.

It’s certainly no coincidence that a lot of the opioid crisis is occurring in the Rust Belt in the States, and in places hollowed out like Niagara was—and perhaps it’s not as bad in Niagara as other places because we do have that social support.

There are limits to our dollars. We don’t want to over-tax people. We’ve got a record of keeping tax increases below 1.57 percent per year, averaged over four years. We’re looking at other ways, what are called alternative service delivery models, which ask, “How can we use those same dollars and stretch them further to get more social housing built, get more people off the OW rolls, how can we make that happen?” We just went through a significant [one of these] that looked at how we can invest and deliver social housing. We partnered with the private sector and we came up with a really good model. It’s with the Pentarra development group and Bethlehem Housing. We’re essentially three-way partners on getting something built that makes sense for everybody, and it gives us more housing. It’s a lease arrangement for twenty years. Bethlehem will operate it, the Region will fund it. It’s another way to make the dollars go further.

You also talked a lot about transit. I got the sense from the speech that the plan on transit is fuzzy at this point, though you did say that there would be costs, and there would be change. Do you have any idea at this point what those costs and changes are going to look like?

So we’re really looking at the situation in totality. At the forum at the beginning, I said that our greatest opportunity is going to be the 2041 look of Niagara. I said also that our greatest liability is going to be the 2041 look. We have got to get this right, and make sure that staff does the work to determine where the costs are, and what the consolidation work plan is going to look like. A good example is the GO in Grimsby. We have to make sure that when we built it, we’re building a community hub, not a train station. It has to have with it facilities for buses, parking for cars, bike racks—all those services that people will need when they get to the train station. Perhaps restaurants and other business opportunities that we see in Toronto and other major centres. If we plan for that now before we build the station, get the land ready—if we put together a secondary plan, then we can know what to expect.

Transit is obviously one of those things that you have to be looking decades ahead. I think of the Ottawa area, where they decommissioned train tracks in Gatineau, and then a few years later realized that they actually needed them. Or even in Niagara, back in the days when there was a streetcar running from Pelham to Thorold to St. Catharines. In the boom years those were all destroyed. Fifty years later, we’re realizing that this kind of thing would have been good to keep around.

Mass transit in concentrated areas is definitely important. In Niagara things are a little different. We have about 450,000 people, and we’re about 450,000 acres. We’re at one acre per person. We’ve got a vast geography that we need to cover, and transit to cover it would be very expensive. We really need to be careful as to how we plan the routes and maximize the coverage wherever possible.

Let’s move on to the last thing that you introduced, Shape Niagara. As I understand it, this will be comprised of five or so open forums, and then direct consultations with industry and institutions—I assume this means hospitals and schools and so forth. Is that right up to the October election? Is this a way by which people can shape Regional policies in addition to voting for their Regional Councillors and now the Regional Chair?

The first thing I’ll say is that it’s a staff initiative to bring the report together that’s going to be the foundation for the next strategic plan. Our job doesn’t start and stop with the term of council. We’re trying to lay the foundation for the next term of council so that a lot of the work has been done, and public consultation is a big part of that. That’s what is important here—that everyone has a chance to participate. The timeline on that does not go four years to four years. For the people living in Niagara, that’s something that they want to be sustainable. Breaking it up into terms doesn’t really make any sense, although the election process gets in the way, it should bridge the process and be continuous.

Speaking of the election process, another reporter wrote that you took to the stage like someone in a campaign. Have you made a decision yet as to whether you’ll be on the ballot?

I think what he’s referring to is the fact that as I walked in I passed by my wife’s table, and I had to give her a peck on the cheek. So I’m not sure it’s that’s campaigning or not…

I guess that’s the best answer I’m going to get.

Yeah. We’ve got work to do—I’m not trying to be cute. I’m not sure what’s going to happen. Even if I was, nothing can be said until May first anyway. I’m trying to keep my focus on the work before us and trying to get as much work done as we can.

Okay. Thanks for your time. I appreciate it.

Any time. ◆