In 17 days Toronto’s divisive, dispiriting Ford era will officially limp to an end. On Dec. 2, John Tory will be sworn in as mayor and the city will have a chance to make a fresh start on the problems we’ve failed to tackle for the past four years.

But this shouldn’t be a new beginning only in the city that’s been finally freed of the Fords. There’s reinvigorated leadership elsewhere in our sprawling city-region — notably in Mississauga and Brampton, where new mayors will soon take over at city hall.

For the whole Greater Toronto Area, this is a moment to think big — as big as the powerhouse region we’ve become despite our dysfunctional politics. Instead of squabbling among ourselves and struggling along with an outmoded patchwork quilt of local jurisdictions, we need to find ways to co-operate much more effectively on the challenges we face.

For that, we need leaders able to rise above local, parochial interests. And crucially, we need the provincial government to use its clout in ways that will allow the entire region to realize its full potential.

This isn’t a new problem. For years, thoughtful politicians, business people, experts and civic leaders of all stripes have been pointing out the obvious: we live and work across this region, without regard to artificial political borders. We’re a single, closely integrated economic zone — by some measures the fourth biggest in North America.

Yet unlike regions as varied as Boston, Chicago and Montreal, we haven’t built structures that allow us to co-operate effectively on such crucial issues as transit, investment and jobs. We risk frittering away our potential and falling behind other dynamic city-regions that are our rivals for growth and prosperity.

See also:Toronto region risks slipping behind its rivals: Editorial

The warnings kept sounding during the past four years, from respected organizations like the Toronto Region Board of Trade and even the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The OECD singled out “lack of co-ordination on economic development, social and environmental policies” as one big reason the GTA was falling behind in competitiveness.

Things haven’t gotten any better since then, even as Toronto was preoccupied by trying to limit the damage from the Ford fiasco.

We need to make up for lost time, and there are encouraging signs that the recent municipal elections make this a moment of real possibility for progress.

Toronto’s mayor-elect, in particular, has made it clear he understands the importance of acting on behalf of the entire region — not just the city he will lead in a little over two weeks. As chair of CivicAction in 2011, John Tory helped to organized an ambitious “Greater Toronto Summit” whose goal was to underline the reality that “we need to think like a region and act like a region.”

Tory wrote in the Star at the time that “social, economic and environmental issues do not respect municipal borders, and neither do the lives of most Toronto region residents.” And, he said, “The rest of the world sees the Toronto region as a single entity and we need to do the same.”

Amen to that. Once he takes over at city hall, Tory should keep that kind of thinking firmly in mind.

The most important actor, though, may well be the province, which alone has the power to make legislative changes that would overhaul regional structures. It’s still early in Premier Kathleen Wynne’s mandate, and her government needs to be prepared to press the issue with regional leaders who insist on putting sectional interests over the greater good.

The stakes are enormous. The GTA has burgeoned to more than six million people, with another three million expected over the next two decades. The region alone produces almost a fifth of Canada’s economic output and 45 per cent of Ontario’s GDP. It is truly the country’s most important economic engine.

Much closer co-operation is vital in several areas:

On transit and transportation, we’re living with the consequences of gridlock and political paralysis. The province’s Metrolinx agency was supposed to cut through the regional clutter and make sure evidence-based solutions triumphed over political expediency. Instead, it has flipped and flopped with the changing political winds.

On economic development and promotion, the GTA has 20 different agencies and organizations, spending some $30 million a year. Instead of promoting the region as a whole, they often work at cross-purposes.

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On basic governance, the GTA has 24 municipalities plus four regional governments. Yet there’s no one to speak for the region as a whole. We need a clear voice to press our case for support from higher levels of government — and to market ourselves around the world.

Smart people have been calling for such changes for a long time. As far back as 1996 the Golden report on the future of the GTA called for a single authority to co-ordinate key policies at the regional level. The details can be debated, but the wisdom of that approach has become even clearer over the years.

It’s high time for the new leaders about to take office across the region, working with the province, to address this issue. We need to leverage our advantages right across the GTA — or risk slipping behind.

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