When richard florida, the American urban studies theorist, relocated to Toronto in 2007, David Miller and many members of the city’s business and cultural elite held a welcoming dinner for him at Grano, the casual Italian restaurant on Yonge that has become the venue of choice for such events. Florida spoke, as did Miller and Councillor Kyle Rae, and much was made of Toronto’s many fine qualities, especially its exceptional “diversity.”

Toward the end of the evening, the mayor surprised Don Drummond, the chief economist of the Toronto-Dominion Bank, by asking him to make some closing remarks.

Diversity is all very well, he declared, but what about the soaring poverty rate among new immigrants? Why are educated newcomers earning half of what Canadian-born people with similar skills are earning? And why are immigrants selected for their occupational skills the most likely to end up poor? “You can talk about how diversity enriches our lives,” Drummond snapped, “but the immigrants’ lives aren’t being enriched. Don’t just sit there and praise it; we’ve got to do something about it.” In the span of a few minutes, the even­ing’s self-congratulatory tone vanished. But Drummond didn’t become Canada’s most sought-after economic commentator by repeating feel-good platitudes.

Anyone who watches national newscasts knows Drummond. He’s the bespectacled 55-year-old with greying hair, calmly explaining why the world economy is collapsing. By day, he heads a group of 14 economists headquartered in a busy suite of offices on the 21st floor of one of the TD Centre’s skyscrapers. He and his team have a knack for churning out controversial forecasts. In April 2008, they warned that Ontario was on the verge of qualifying for equalization payments (the definition of a have-not province); it became official only last November. Then, in February 2009, the day before Toronto was to release its draft budget, TD published a paper saying that soaring welfare costs would inflate the city’s 2009 spending by up to $70 million. Toronto officials were not pleased. TD’s estimate was higher than the city’s, and it called into question the accuracy of their forecast. Drummond’s team did it again in March, calculating that deficit spending would drive the national debt well above what the Harper government was pre­dicting. As is often the case with Drummond’s public pronouncements, it was front-page news.

In the current economic crisis, because people are desperate to know what’s going on, Drummond is averaging one TV and one radio interview a day, along with countless print interviews. Over the past 12 months, TD has fielded 1,000 requests for him to speak to various groups, a rate of three or more per day. About half his speeches are to the bank’s clients in Canada and the United States; the rest are to industry organizations, government departments, universities and volunteer groups, such as the Ontario Association of Food Banks. Drummond strings sentences together in a monotone that would drive a speaking coach crazy, but he is able to hold audiences because he makes economics understandable.

Banks employ economists not to stir up controversy, but to give the bank’s executives and major clients the information they need to make sound decisions. If, for example, a TD client is considering an acquisition in Arizona, the bank’s economists will assemble information about the economy of that state.

Canada’s Big Five banks are deeply involved in every region and industry in the country. That’s why when a bank economist speaks, people listen. Most of them stick to economic issues—interest rates, employment figures, currency values. Drummond doesn’t ignore that stuff, but he also speaks of poverty, AIDS in Africa, education, the environment. His wide range of interests is unusual in the financial industry. Unlike most economists, he knows how to relate numbers to people.

“Economics at its root is breathtakingly easy,” he says. And it’s true. It’s based on one simple principle: the law of supply and demand. When the price of something, such as gasoline, shoots up, people buy less of it. When the price falls, they buy more. So if we want to reduce pollution, for instance, we have to make pollution more expensive. Drummond thinks a carbon tax is a good idea, regardless of whether it’s popular or not, because it raises the price of carbon emissions. “The question is determining what that price is. If it’s too low, we’ll get too much pollution. If it’s too high, we won’t have enough production.”

That’s typical Drummond—annoying right-wingers who abhor the idea of a carbon tax and environmentalists who would prefer stringent regulations. “Don is interested in what works, not in ideology,” says James Milway, executive director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at U of T. “People sense that he’s speaking from the heart and the head at the same time.”