January 2014
| Business World Magazine | 27
T
he above quote came from a 2010
meeting hosted by the Federa-
tion of Canadian Municipalities,
a meeting wherein the speakers primar-
ily reflected upon the five years that had
passed since the 2005 federal budget. It
was a budget, spearheaded by Mr. Martin,
which aimed at fundamentally improving
the ways in which small communities in
Canada operate. Dubbed a “New Deal for
Cities and Communities,” the budget had
at its heart a focus on introducing munici-
palities to new, growing, and predictable
sources of funding on the one hand, and a
greater voice at the national table on the
other. The needs of municipalities, Mr.
Martin saw, were growing – but so was
their potential to change Canada for the
“Canadians don’t live in glass boxes, they live in rural communities . . . The
indisputable fact is that it is municipal governments and community agencies
who deliver the services that so many of our social programs guarantee” (The
Rt. Hon. Paul Martin, Prime Minister of Canada)
