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What is a Next City™? Next Cities™ are places with the assets and amenities that attract and retain a young, educated work force. They have bustling city centers, walkable neighborhoods, diverse career opportunities, and vibrant art and music scenes. In 2008, NGC surveyed young professionals in eight cities. These interviews and focus groups with members of the next generation revealed that they choose where to live based on the following seven indexes, listed in order of importance:1. Cost of Lifestyle: Young professionals are just getting started in their careers, and affordability is key. This index includes variables in the national cost of living index, which encompasses a roof over head, food on the table, clothes on the back, and a warm bed at night. 2. Earning: High school guidance counselors tell students that they’ll have between nine and eleven careers in their lifetime. The earning index measures the diversity of employment opportunities, the percentage of jobs in the knowledge-based sector, and average household income.

3. Vitality: How “healthy” is a city? This index measures air and water quality, green space, and a city’s overall health (e.g., obesity, life expectancy, etc.). 4. After Hours: There’s more to life than work. This index counts the places to go and things to do after work and on weekends. 5. Learning: Is the city committed to high quality education for all of its citizens? This index includes measurements related to educational opportunities and expenditures, educational attainment, and accessibility of Wi-Fi hotspots. 6. Around Town: How easy is it to get to where you want to go in a city? This index measures a city’s walkability, airport activity, commute times, and mass transit opportunities. 7. Social Capital: Great talent comes in every race, creed, and color. This index accounts for how open, safe, and accessible your city is to all people. It includes measures of diversity, crime rates, and civic engagement (e.g., voter participation, volunteerism). Jane Jacobs actually coined the phrase “social capital” in The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Assessment Criteria

CRITERION 1: Strategy (20 points)How well does the project fit into the community’s strategic economic development plan? Is the application consistent with DFAIT priority target sectors and markets?How well does the long-term planning principles apply to this project?Is there a BR&E program in place in the applicant’s jurisdiction?How well does the applicant demonstrate the value of the project to the community?

CRITERION 2: Project Components (20 points)How well do the project components support the applicant’s FDI strategy?Are the activities sufficiently focused?Is the budget consistent with the costs for these types of activities?Has the applicant provided relevant documentation to support the request?

Performance reviews corrupt the system by getting employees to focus on pleasing the boss, rather than on achieving desired results. And they make it difficult, if not impossible, for workers to speak truth to power.

performance preview. Instead of top-down reviews, both boss and subordinate are held responsible for setting goals and achieving results. No longer will only the subordinate be held accountable for the often arbitrary metrics that the boss creates. Instead, bosses are taught how to truly manage, and learn that it’s in their interest to listen to their subordinates to get the results the taxpayer is counting on.

Instead of the bosses merely handing out A’s and C’s, they work to make sure everyone can earn an A. And the word goes out: “No more after-the-fact disappointments. Tell me your problems as they happen; we’re in it together and it’s my job to ensure results.”

Measurement of capacity building frequently involves the use of a logic model and self-assessments, which can be useful in helping to focus evaluation and in gathering individual perceptions.  Two drawbacks to the use of the logic model for evaluation are firstly that funder output focus may not match actual organizational goals and outcomes, and secondly that the complex relationships between components in the system are over-simplified or ignored. Self-assessments alone are problematic in that they focus solely on the perception of individuals and lack objectivity because they may be influenced by: effort, bias, discrimination, interpersonal conflict in the organization, desire to avoid scrutiny, fear of reprisal or personal gain.

Canadian Language Benchmark Language Standards As of July 1, 2012, most applicants for semi- and low-skilled occupations under the PNP program will be required to first take a language proficiency test and obtain a minimum standard of CLB 4 across all four categories: listening, speaking, reading and writing. The CLB is the national standard used in Canada for describing, measuring and recognizing the English language proficiency of adult immigrants and prospective immigrants for living and working in Canada. It provides a descriptive scale of communicative proficiency in English as a second language, expressed as benchmarks or reference points. The NCLC are used for assessment of French language proficiency. CLB 4 is considered “Basic Proficiency” and means that an individual being tested who “meets” CLB 4: can communicate basic needs and personal experience; can follow, with considerable effort, simple formal and informal conversations; can read a simple set of instructions, plain language; and can write short messages, postcards, notes or directions. Applicants must provide valid results from a language test administered by a designated testing agency to Citizenship and Immigration Canada. The acceptable tests are: the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) General Training; the Canadian English Language Proficiency Index Program (CELPIP-General); and the Test d’évaluation de français (to test proficiency in French). No other evidence of language proficiency will be accepted.

Mark Anielski

it's the sector in which the government has most directly intervened -- health care -- that has maintained the most robust job growth over the past two years, adding 20,000 new jobs in November alone.

it is harder to avoid the notion that a lot of those old jobs simply weren't adding much to the economy

The story runs as follows. Before the financial crash, there were lots of not-so-useful workers holding not-so-useful jobs. Employers didn't so much bother to figure out who they were. Demand was high and revenue was booming, so rooting out the less productive workers would have involved a lot of time and trouble -- plus it would have involved some morale costs with the more productive workers, who don't like being measured and spied on. So firms simply let the problem lie.

In recent decades, though, many of the fastest-growing cities in America, like Phoenix and Riverside, Calif., have given us a very different urban model. These places have traded away public spaces for affordable single-family homes, attracting working-class families who want their own white picket fences. West and Bettencourt point out, however, that cheap suburban comforts are associated with poor performance on a variety of urban metrics. Phoenix, for instance, has been characterized by below-average levels of income and innovation (as measured by the production of patents) for the last 40 years. “When you look at some of these fast-growing cities, they look like tumors on the landscape,” West says, with typical bombast. “They have these extreme levels of growth, but it’s not sustainable growth.” According to the physicists, the trade-off is inevitable. The same sidewalks that lead to “knowledge trading” also lead to cockroaches

Until a few decades ago, employment discrimination perversely strengthened our teaching force. Brilliant women became elementary school teachers, because better jobs weren’t open to them. It was profoundly unfair, but the discrimination did benefit America’s children. These days, brilliant women become surgeons and investment bankers — and 47 percent of America’s kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers come from the bottom one-third of their college classes (as measured by SAT scores). The figure is from a study by McKinsey & Company, “Closing the Talent Gap.”

Recent scholarship suggests that good teachers, even kindergarten teachers, increase their students’ earnings many years later. Eric A. Hanushek of Stanford University found that an excellent teacher (one a standard deviation better than average, or better than 84 percent of teachers) raises each student’s lifetime earnings by $20,000. If there are 20 students in the class, that is an extra $400,000 generated, compared with a teacher who is merely average.

Consider three other countries renowned for their educational performance: Singapore, South Korea and Finland. In each country, teachers are drawn from the top third of their cohort, are hugely respected and are paid well (although that’s less true in Finland). In South Korea and Singapore, teachers on average earn more than lawyers and engineers, the McKinsey study found.

Productivity in Canada’s cities lags city regions globally

The Institute reports that Canada’s GDP per capita – a measure of the value created by workers and firms in Canada from the human, physical, and natural resources in the country – trailed the US by $9,500 or 17 percent in 2010

Canada’s lower productivity as the key challenge in closing this prosperity gap. “Canadians are among the leaders in developed economies in work effort, hours worked per person, but we are laggards in creating economic value per hour worked