The price of Amazon

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 15/09/2017 (2727 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The first time many Winnipeggers went to Toronto alone, we were in the bloom of adulthood, maybe 20 years old. The wandering time, when life exists as a dream of what-nows and what-ifs; we were a crocus in spring, unfolding.

Young Prairie eyes always turn to glittered horizons. To freeways and nightlife and glass-clad steel towers. To the promise of what could happen, if we were not so cold and so marooned in a sea of tall grains and long grasses.

This, too, is part of growing up Manitoban: the siren song of Somewhere Else, seducing us out of the plains.

So we went to Toronto, piled in a friend’s van or clutching a cheap Greyhound ticket. When we arrived, maybe the big city was not completely unfamiliar; maybe we had been there before, on a school trip or a vacation to see relatives.

Yet never before had we stood at the corner of Queen and Yonge, all grown-up and alone.

Oh, the city came rushing up at us, then. The black squirrels and the prancing pigeons with jewel-toned heads. The taxicab horns trumpeting the fanfare of all big cities: the sound of great masses of people with places to go, urgently.

When I close my eyes, I can travel back in memory to my first time. I sat on a ledge and watched black suits march down Bay Street; I stepped nervously around the sidewalk grates, frightened by what dangers lurked underneath.

Then I wandered down Queen Street West, making a pilgrimage to a five-storey terracotta building. It was raised in 1913 as the Methodist Church headquarters, but to a Canadian kid of the 1980s, it was a church of a different kind.

The MuchMusic building, its glory by the early 2000s already fading, but no less thrilling to behold in the flesh. Growing up in Winnipeg, television had taught me to yearn for this, and here it was in the crisp light of morning.

In that moment, it felt as if all the cool in Canada flowed to that spot, trickling down through the Prairies and forests and the Canadian Shield. Flowing until it all came to puddle around the northwestern edge of Lake Ontario.

All the cool in Canada, spreading until it filled up the land the Haudenosaunee still call Tkaronto: the place where trees stand in water. To a young woman from Winnipeg, in the bloom of new adulthood, it was like being reborn.

So it is fitting, maybe, that I was in Toronto last week when Premier Brian Pallister made his big announcement.

By now, 15 years after my first grown-up visit, the mythology of Toronto has long faded. It’s not that the city isn’t beautiful — it is, in places — but Queen Street is now just a place to buy things, not a thrilling pop cultural pilgrimage.

Still, it’s fun to play the role of wide-eyed visitor from the Prairies. Baristas and shopkeepers ask where you’re from; when you tell them, they look as if you’ve just announced you were born in an abandoned rake factory, or a barn.

“Ohhhhh, Winnipeg,” they say, after a pause. “My grandfather grew up in Winnipeg, actually.”

It’s always a grandfather, unless it’s an ex-boyfriend, a colleague, a neighbour. If some Torontonians know Winnipeg at all, it is by the people who were from here, but aren’t anymore: the people who chased horizons and found them.

So I am thinking of that one night, while sitting on a rooftop patio overlooking Queen Street, sipping $14 watermelon cocktails and reading the news from back home on my phone. One headline in particular glares the brightest.

“Look at this,” I tell my partner. “Pallister wants to convince Amazon to build its new headquarters in Winnipeg.”

In my chest surges a forgotten, but familiar, feeling. A sharp yearning that once drew this young Manitoban to glittering cities. The aching desire to spin through the world not on the spokes of the wheel, but close to the hub.

Then, a splash of cold water. The yearning subsides, the skepticism grows stronger.

To be sure, it is right for the premier to make a pitch to bring Amazon here. It is a leader’s job to elbow our name into the world’s top conversations, even if, in this case, Winnipeg meets almost none of the retail giant’s requirements.

We do have comparatively affordable housing, but we don’t have more than a million people. We don’t boast non-stop flights to Amazon’s existing home base in Seattle or a particularly progressive approach to public transit.

Right now, according to reports, Amazon is leaning towards Boston. It seems unlikely for Winnipeg to compete with that. Yet, beyond the issue of what’s realistic, there’s another more fundamental question that ought to be considered.

Do we even want it?

To some, it’s a question that doesn’t even need to be asked: of course we want 50,000 highly paid jobs to come here, who wouldn’t? But the answer, to me, is not so self-evident and deserves to be approached with more care.

If Amazon were to come to Winnipeg, it would change the chemistry of the city forever. When we dream about luring its riches, we are also dreaming about a nearly complete remaking of our home. That should give us pause.

Wherever Amazon’s new headquarters wind up, experts say it will be a “prosperity bomb” that goes off. It’s true: many people in Winnipeg would make a whole lot of money, the kind of boom this city hasn’t seen for a century.

At the same time, many Winnipeggers would also be pushed further to the margins.

Cost of living would soar, squeezing out many of us, as it has in other places that megacorporations have established their home bases.

Affordable rents would steadily vanish. So would even the hope of home ownership for many young people. Traffic would explode; Winnipeg streets would become perpetually congested. The steady calm of the city would be gone.

In short: whatever Winnipeg is now, it wouldn’t be that anymore. The city we know would be gone. It would become a company town, an Amazon town, a city inexorably chained to the rise and fall of one massive giant.

That is a trade-off some are willing to make, and to be sure, there are arguments to support that view. Yet, when we are talking about remaking our whole city anew, perhaps we should give some thought to what we would lose.

Prairie eyes always turn to glittering horizons. Sometimes we chase them, sometimes we find them. But as my plane from Toronto dips its wings over Winnipeg, I let out a sigh of relief and gaze at the city, splayed out flat in the sun.

No matter what siren song of wealth the world holds, it’s good to be home.

 

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca