Comment 19287

By statius (registered) | Posted February 25, 2008 at 19:09:09

"Rome came down not by military defeat or economic problems but political problems "like rotten stitching coming out of an old baseball."" Actually I, and many others, would argue that Rome "came down" by all three, and perhaps most importantly, because of a slow societal dissolution which fragmented both geographically and in terms of its class structure, but that's really neither here nor there.

The truth is that Jim Flaherty as the Federal Finance Minister really is not in the pothole business. Any funds coming the way of cities from the Feds are truly largesse. Because of our hopelessly constricting constitutional structure, cities and their infrastructure are the sole responsibility of the relatively cash-poor provinces. We need constitutional reform to really make our cities shine, but the urban situation has generally not reached the point of crisis in this country yet so no one has raised that battle cry. In fact, it probably never will reach such a level of crisis. Our cities are not failing and collapsing; they are rather just static mediocrities. And that's always been good enough for the Feds.

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