Applause to Richard Florida who is asking important questions of his new hometown government in Toronto -- questions more of us need to be asking.

Toronto Mayor David Miller recently released his Agenda for Prosperity. Florida took the opportunity to comment and turned his focus to the city's service sector.

"Why can't we do for those jobs what we did for my father's job in a factory?" he asked. "Why can't we make those service jobs good, high-paying, secure jobs?

"Sure, it takes some thought. But if we're going to lead on this, that has to be a focus of our work."

In an interview with The Star, Florida gave examples of sectors with potential.

"The food cluster is one," he said. "Everyone knows we have great chefs. What about the rest of the food chain – the food support worker, the food preparation workers and the agricultural sector.

"What about hotel and retail? If we're going to do tourism, if we're going to do trade, if we're going to do retail, how do we strengthen that?

"I think digging into the service economy – figuring out how to bolster it, make it more secure, make it more innovative, make it more creative, would be a huge thing that we could do."

It would, indeed, be huge. I believe it begins with job redesign that makes these jobs more valuable and therefore able to command higher wages.

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