Canada is not immune to the dramatic economic changes that are transforming society in other industrialized countries, where once-thriving factory and resource towns are dying, while educated knowledge workers in more cosmopolitan centres prosper. Where this growing inequality between communities and social classes takes root, worrisome social and political developments can develop, such as the polarization occurring in the U.S. and parts of Europe. Without a change in the pattern of divergence between Canada’s dynamic cities and the rest, the societal and political strife that has unfolded elsewhere could someday happen here.