Gateways To Trade: Global Value Chains And Governance in Canadian Cities

Review By Roger Hayter

June 25, 2026

Gateways to Trade provides a timely focus on Canada’s gateway cities and their governance of transportation infrastructure. The recent onslaught of Trump’s mercantilism and the undermining of established, overwhelmingly continental (north-south) relations has stimulated Canada to attempt to diversify its trading priorities, internationally and domestically. This rethinking, however, has featured re-energized hopes for resource-based exports that in recent decades have been subject to considerable, especially environmental, controversy within the country. Moreover, Canada’s gateway cities have been on the leading edge of post-industrial transformations with rapidly expanding populations increasingly concerned with livability and amenity values and who are not especially supportive of resource exploitation or associated  transportation infrastructure investments Given the importance of transportation (and communication) for defining “the grooves of economic life,” to recall Harold Innis’ famous phrase[1], Canada’s gateways are at the fulcrum of different kinds of winds of change. Gateways to Trade is a comprehensive basis for appreciating the implications.

Gateways to Trade provides an anatomy of the governance of transportation investments and routes centred in the key metropolitan gateway cities of Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and Halifax, particularly in relation to visible (tangible goods) export and import trade. Road, rail, air and sea transportation (but not pipelines) and inter-model connections are the infrastructures under consideration in terms of the decision-making bodies that implement and maintain them. These infrastructures are massively expensive, big space-using activities, major employment generators and vital to national, regional and local development.  In Canada’s gateway cities, the governance of infrastructure is complex, dependent on the networking of an evolving mix of federal, provincial, regional and local organizations that draw members from the public and private sectors. Gateways to Trade adopts an institutional approach that focuses on these stakeholder organizations and their mandates, conventions and interactions. A concise introduction preludes three contextual chapters that respectively reflect on urban Canada in global perspective; conceptual themes especially related to value chains, urban regimes and local governance; and federal transportation policies including the 2006 formal identification of Atlantic, Continental and Pacific gateways and corridors, respectively anchored by Halifax, Montreal and Toronto, and Metro Vancouver.  Beginning with the latter, four chapters then successively focus on these four gateway cities from west to east.

In practice, Gateways to Trade is fundamentally concerned to reveal the actual contemporary governance provided by the four Gateway cities over the flow of goods, whether as their sources, destinations or saddle points en route to and from elsewhere, and collectively summarised (but not examined) as part of global value chains or global production networks. This focus is elaborated for the four gateway case studies via a form of network analysis based on the construction of original data sets that illustrates the centrality and connectiveness of the myriad decision-making agents involved in major infrastructure investments.  Given this emphasis on how infrastructure governance works, Gateways to Trade is especially interested in local variations and consequences.  Moreover, for the authors a key thesis and policy concern evident in all four gateways is that the local governments are not adequately represented and constitute a local “democratic deficit” in governance. Rather, local governance is identified as a form of executive rather than participatory democracy, with members of stakeholder organizations appointed rather than elected and without proper “bottom-up” representation of community-wide concerns.

The variations in local governance of the four gateways are neatly summarized by their different initial controlling influences over trading roles.  The entrepreneurially inspired Metro Vancouver’s Pacific Rim gateway is contrasted with the Federal Government’s orchestration of the Halifax Atlantic gateway. Meanwhile Metro Toronto’s fragmented gateway model of continental integration, reflecting the differing interests between inner city and suburbs and reinforced by the provincial government policies, is contrasted with the Montreal region’s more coherent, dirigiste model of decision-making that is supported by the Quebec provincial government.  The variations in executive democracy that control these evolutionary trajectories and particular anatomies of networking among stakeholders, recognize local consultation occurs but without systematically engaging locally representative agencies in strategic (a priori, long-term) decision-making.

If the democratic deficit in transportation infrastructure revealed in Gateways to Trade is well-taken, what to do about it is problematical. In the concluding chapter the summary discussion of this deficit and the case for more local participation, along with brief recognition of its disadvantages such as potentially increasing bureaucratic layers and costs, is broadly based as a matter of implied advocacy. But how localities should be defined in terms of geographical boundaries or mandates, or how local representatives are to be elected for that matter, are not addressed.  For example, should local participation reflect municipal, metropolitan or some other scales, and how would they relate to established local planning authorities?  Are aboriginal communities part of the deficit? Should local participation be extended throughout the transportation corridors served by the gateways, not least to include many hinterland specialized resource towns and regions? Whether or not the executive model of governance should be modified or even replaced by stronger local participation is a fascinating underlying question raised in Gateways to Trade.

Surely, as Gateways to Trade points out, as Canada’s gateway cities have grown, diversified and become post-industrial service dominated economies, their co-evolutionary ties with their hinterlands in generating wealth and employment have become less intimate. In this regard, as the book observes, in the four gateway cities the rise of the local amenity-driven creative, producer service economy oriented to the different transportation and communication needs of post-industrial economies are part of this delinking and tied to the nature of planning controversies, not least over large-scale investments in transportation capacities and the native externalities associated with large-scale commodity shipments. Yet, if less dominant, the traditional ties between gateway cities and their hinterlands remain important and, for example, the basis of why Metro Vancouver is Canada’s largest seaport in tonnage terms. Indeed, these ties might well be reinforced by Canada’s diversification goals. Moreover, Canada’s gateways are vital to the import of a vast array of goods from around the world demanded by consumers across Canada and that require enormous investments in transportation infrastructure in the service of all.  Further the provision and performance of this infrastructure in Canada’s gateway cities is also affected by congestion, increased difficulties of access, capacity limitations and bottlenecks. Metro Vancouver and Toronto are perhaps under particular stress in this regard.  With continued population growth and rapidly merging debates over trade directions these stresses will likely increase.

Gateways to Trade makes an insightful, original contribution to understanding the contemporary role of Canada’s major metropolitan gateways, and the challenges they face, in the organization of transportation networks, specifically with respect to the movement of goods. Its central contribution is to reveal the anatomy of how governance of transportation networks has evolved and actually works.  Such an appreciation is a key first step for contemplating new imperatives and in dealing with planning dilemmas. Moreover, in raising concerns over the local democratic deficit this book recognizes that the governance systems underlying Canadian transportation networks are problematic and matters of choice. In present times of turmoil, as Canada seeks to reduce its dependence on the US through international trade diversification and enhanced domestic integration, its gateways cities and their governance will doubtless remain policy centres of attention.  The nature of governance, as highlighted in Gateways to Trade, will surely continue as a policy and research priority in developing appropriate institutional arrangements.

[1] Harold A. Innis, “On the economic significance of cultural factors,” In Daniel Drache (ed) Staple Markets and Cultural Change, 297-315. (Queen’s University Press), 301.