For many, Glen Murray's decision to run for a seat in Queen's Park rather than City Hall came as a blow. As mayor of Winnipeg, he'd shown his colours as a true urbanist, someone who understood the theory and could both communicate it to people and actually get things done.

He would almost certainly have made a good councilor, and possibly even become the first person to be the mayor of two major Canadian cities.

But people needn't have worried. The new Minister of Research and Innovation hasn't forsaken his urbanism. He's just broadened it.

"There's a really interesting little graph, a presentation I have, that looks at population growth, GDP growth, energy use and CO2 emissions from 1926 to 2006," he says in his office on the 12th floor of 77 Wellesley West. We're joined by his communications director, former talk show host Ralph Benmergui.

Nineteen-twenty-six, the minister explains, is the year people started driving in real numbers, and oil and gas became a major part of the economy. In the 1960s, the lines start to diverge, and by the 70s, the divergence becomes extreme. "We're using eight times more energy per person than we did in 1926," he says. "It doubled in the first 50 years, and has doubled every decade after that."

That, he says, is not sustainable, and it's directly attributable to the fact that Canada and, more specifically Ontario, the province he's most interested in at the moment, has not really urbanized. "There's a big lie that's told, that we've become a rapidly urbanized world," he says. "It's true in places in Europe. European cities have twice the density that North American cities have." The same goes for Asia, but, he says, "What you've had in North America is not urbanization but suburbanization."

And this, as far as he's concerned, is the primary role for his ministry. "Government is going to have to be more of an enabler of citizenship, whether it's the kind of stuff Dave Meslin is doing, or the Toronto City Summit Alliance [now called Civic Action], or many of the things you see happening in the high-priority neighbourhoods." And he sees an essentially urban ethos, whether in a city core or in outlying areas, as being an excellent way of cultivating and sustaining this kind of citizenship.

Next year, Canada's baby boomers start to turn 65. As the population ages, suburban seniors are in danger of becoming stranded, away from the essentially urban infrastructure they need to support them through healthcare, community services and simple transportation. Dealing with that on such a large scale, he says, is a matter of social innovation. "One of my friends in the cabinet refers to this as the Ministry of the Future."

He sees the top priority being digital technology, specifically, what he calls the digital and mobile economy. The more connected people are digitally, he says, the more the suburbs will be drawn into the urban community, and the greener all of our transactions and interactions become.

Digital technology is followed close behind by transportation. "We're going to be moving into a revolution of what automobiles look like, what public transportation looks like," he says. "Chassis, fuselages, all those things, we're going to go through a materials revolution. The things we move on are going to look very different from what they do now."

Though the factories that end up making and assembling these materials may be scattered around the province, Murray sees the research and innovation stemming from major, urban centres through what he calls "clustering knowledge workers."

To this end, he says his government's adding 120,000 places in Ontario universities and $2 billion in student aid over the next two years, with $30 million a year for foreign students, to further the cluster effect.

"If you want to see the future in one place, you can find it on Yonge Street, right in a movie theatre, part of Ryerson called the Digital Media Zone. One person half my age has invented a 3D technology that's better than anything I've ever seen. It will literally be a virtual environment. Right on through to a guy who has done all the directional work for the Paris subway and a completely integrated system for people with disabilities."

The next major innovation he sees coming is currency, and it's a technological revolution he hopes to see come to Toronto in the next five years, and move out into the rest of the province, and the country, from there.

He holds up a $5 bill. "Most of our lives, you and I used this," he says. "Then they became these." He holds up his VISA card. "And then ATMs.

"You go to Asia, you don't see any of that. Things are often thumbprint initiated on your phone, and if you have this, you don't need a wallet. This has already happened in Tokyo," he says. "I would like to see it happen in Toronto, to get us on to a technology platform that is the best in the world. That involves accelerating the partnerships with the digital information cluster centred largely around RIM."

Making Kitchener-Waterloo the Palo Alto to our San Francisco's not a bad idea. Neither is looking to Tokyo as an example rather than New York or London. And we could do worse than having an innovative urbanist as the minister in charge of innovation.

Bert Archer is Yonge Street's Development News editor.