Empowering Cities: A Necessity for the Future

This week, we read about the future of the relationship between municipalities and the provincial and federal governments. I found that much of the most useful content concerned Eidelman’s “myth-busting,” which highlighted the difficulties in outlining urban policy strategies for urban areas that are governed by a far more complex set of actors (dozens of municipal governments for a single economic region) using far more sophisticated methods (service delivery at the city level often requiring inputs from the feds and the province) than imagined. How then to develop strategies that work for entire regions, balancing the needs of the 80% of urban Canadians? This line of inquiry takes us to the present crisis: The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a necessary re-evaluation of municipal financing, as their inability to run deficits has required costly bailouts from the constitutionally-represented orders of government.

If there is one thing that this course has impressed upon me, it is that we are at a tipping point in municipal governance. Many revelations, such as the fact that researchers at the Munk school have only this year outlined the full scope of legal engagement between the ten provinces and their subsidiary municipal governments. This example, paired with the recent inflection point of costs and responsibilities imposed by the pandemic points to the need for a fundamental shift in governance across the country.

Over the course of this class, we have explored the potential for changes to the revenue-raising powers of cities, which seems to be the most promising avenue for the time being. Beyond this, however, more detail is certainly required. This problem is taken up by Taylor and Dobson, who proposes a range of future innovations, the most notable of which concerns a reformulation of the internal governance structure of cities to best reflect their novel responsibilities, and empower them to adopt a “strong” mayor system, among other measures. Regardless of what changes we see, I am convinced that if we are to usher in a new era of urban prosperity, now is the moment to do so.