The chance to make Toronto a global banking hub is being squandered

financialpost.com:

Reports that Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce is on an artificial intelligence hiring spree, seeking to fill 200 well-paying positions , is a hopeful signal that the job-cutting trend at Canadian banks is slowing. For much of 2023, they were “restructuring.” Toronto-Dominion Bank planned to reduce its workforce by three per cent, as did Bank of Nova Scotia. CIBC said it would trim its full-time workforce by five per cent. Royal Bank of Canada job cuts were about half that and over at Bank of Montreal, three per cent of its capital markets workforce was let go last summer.

On the face of it, Toronto and by extension Ontario, and Canada, generally appear to be doing comparatively well versus other North American and global financial centres. In 2022, the Conference Board of Canada declared Toronto the second-largest financial hub based on employment in North America, behind New York City.

Yet the heavy concentration of financial services in Toronto, where Canada’s Big Five banks are headquartered along with some large insurance companies, masks the risks to future employment growth in the Toronto region banking sector if it does not improve its competitive position versus other jurisdictions.

That risk is accentuated by the growing importance and size of Canadian bank operations in the United States, where alternatives to Toronto are abundant.

Those risks have been evident for some time, and efforts were launched in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 to address them.

Canadian bankers, politicians, and regulators had a bounce in their step back then. Ontario’s finance minister at the time, Dwight Duncan, and some financial sector CEOs, launched a working group to leverage this success into something