Bull Murdoch wants Toronto out of Ontario. It could just be a win-win scenario.

Bill Murdoch, Progressive Conservative MPP for Bruce-Grey-Owen-Sound, thinks Toronto should be made a separate province in order to break the city's hold on the Ontario legislative agenda.

This brings to mind a comment former Toronto mayor Mel Lastman made a decade ago while attending a meeting of U.S. mayors in Miami. Looking at the relatively ample assistance U.S. cities got from the federal and state governments, he said maybe Toronto should separate from Canada in order to get a better deal.

People at the time dismissed it as part of Mel's craziness, and people will likely say the same thing about Murdoch's musing.

But maybe it isn't so crazy.

In my book Urban Nation (2008), I wrote that Canada's cities were the orphans of Confederation, creatures of the provinces locked in constitutional arrangements that are almost a century and a half out of date. Our large urban regions are now the economic, social, and cultural engines of the country. They compete with other large urban regions around the world to create prosperity and well-being.

In Canada, these regions create the wealth that gets shared with the rest of the country through our redistribution and transfer arrangements. It is in our cities that the capital pools are assembled to take the oil, gas, and minerals out of the ground, where the factories and laboratories are built, and where much of our modern industries of information and design are based.

But our cities are not in control of their own destiny. Like Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire, they are very much reliant on the kindness of strangers. They have few residual powers and limited revenue tools, being overly reliant on property taxes and barred from levying income or sales taxes, the big revenue generators. They are closely controlled by provincial governments and generally ignored by Ottawa. Their role in Confederation is to send money and keep quiet.

And they are under-represented in our federal and provincial parliaments. At the federal level, the average rural riding has 75,000 residents, the average urban riding 120,000. Rural topics tend to get more floor time in Parliament – much more talk about hoof and mouth disease than HIV-Aids, about grain rail rates than urban transit.

The big cities might benefit from being cut free. Toronto might enjoy having the powers of a province. It could certainly use the revenue that comes from income and sales taxes. That money could result in better transit, more low income and supportive housing, better immigrant integration services, a renewed lakefront, and a myriad of other benefits.

In fact, it might be so much better that the neighbouring municipalities might want in on the deal. Bill Murdoch thinks just the City of Toronto should go, the so-called 416, but the Toronto region, now called the Greater Golden Horseshoe, shares a common profile of urbanization and has a strong fabric of dynamic threads. The entire area might decide to leave Ontario together.

Of course, being Canadian, the newly autonomous province would want to continue supporting the less wealthy parts of Canada. It might not want to continue exporting all of the estimated $20 billion that currently leaves the region for other parts of the country, but it would certainly be prepared to contribute a fair chunk of it.

Bill Murdoch's comments reflect a view that is common in Canada. Very few people feel our constitutional arrangements are working for them and people in their area. Too much of government seems remote, too many policies and programs ill-tailored, too many politicians unaware.

New provinces are an unlikely solution, given our unhappy history with constitutional change. But empowering local governments to do more, equipping them with revenue tools, and looking for local solutions to local problems might make more people feel like their governments understand and are working for them.