Back in 2017, when civic leaders from across North America were engaged in a humiliating contest to see who could debase themselves the most by offering the most shameless bribes to Amazon — $7 billion in tax breaks! Renaming the whole city! — the city of Toronto did a strange thing. It declined to participate in the begging.

It did prepare a bid book to present the tech giant with the opportunity to locate a whack of jobs in a new corporate office in Toronto. But instead of opening the bank vault and offering to redevelop the whole city in its image, our governments basically just told Amazon what a great city we are to live and work in.

This approach was as smart as it was surprising. “The submission reads like a manifesto of civic self confidence,” I wrote at the time, “Let Amazon decide whatever it wants. We’ll be fine either way.” I still thought it looked smart when Amazon chose instead to locate in New York City and a suburb of Washington, D.C. “As the winning cities go through internal shouting matches over whether it’s fair to provide helipads and billions of dollars of tax breaks for one company while other priorities are neglected, we can get on with building the city we need,” I wrote in November.

And it looks all the smarter today after Amazon backed out of its New York City project, deciding that dealing with the public concerns there about its plans and the $2.8 billion in incentives it had been promised were too much hassle. These big tech companies, it seems, want a big blank cheque, and they don’t want to have to discuss community concerns and deal with politics to get it.

Before anyone here develops a kink in their shoulder from patting themselves on the back, we might want to keep that lesson in mind, because the other big tech development news of the week — about Sidewalk Labs’ hopes for Toronto, as revealed by my colleague Marco Chown Oved — is a reminder Toronto will need to keep its no-begging resolve handy.

Around the same time cities began lining up for the Amazon H2Q reality-show sweepstakes, Google’s Sidewalk Labs won a competition to develop a 12-acre site in the Port Lands called Quayside. The innovative “smart city” neighbourhood would serve as an experiment and a demonstration, with the hope that what is learned there might be applicable to the exponentially larger area ready for redevelopment right alongside it.

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Now we learn just how high Google’s hopes are: it has its eye on 350 acres in the Port Lands, where it could build all kinds of new area-wide infrastructure, including an LRT line, electrical and heating grids, and a sewer system. Its plan for this, which is not yet approved by the city or any other government, proposes the company would be paid back for this city-building through a mechanism similar to the tax-increment financing Mayor John Tory proposed to finance SmartTrack: Google would get a share of new development charges and tax revenue in the area over the next few decades to compensate it for its investment and risk.

None of that appears nefarious or even unattractive. It is, in fact, the kind of ambition you’d expect from a company like Google, and the kind of proposal that was implied as a possibility for the larger Port Lands when the Quayside development project was announced as a kind of try-before-you-buy sample.

But it is a big proposal, and before anyone gets too far along in planning or committing to it, we want to make sure we have our priorities in order. The privacy concerns about the company and the kind of plugged-in tech surveillance neighbourhood it is building need to be nailed down. In Quayside and any bigger partnership, the city needs to explicitly approve things after community consultation, as it normally would.

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The terms of that partnership need to put the city’s wants and needs first and foremost: What does Toronto want? What is Sidewalk Labs providing to us that we can’t better accomplish through a conventional contracting process? If we are contracting with them for infrastructure building, what are the terms of the payback, at what long-term cost to the city? And finally, shall we let the Quayside demonstration project get far enough along to demonstrate something before anyone starts getting hyped about bigger plans based on its success?

Watching Amazon deal — and then refuse to deal — with New York is a reminder of the kind of overreaching a big tech company can be expected to engage in. Toronto’s approach to that company was a model bid that showed it’s a city that knows its own priorities and won’t bend them to impress a big employer or investor.

Best to keep that model in mind while we plan and build the largest, most important downtown redevelopment site we’ll ever have.

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