Local Governance: Gaps and Opportunities

If there has been one constant in my career studying local and multi-level urban governance in Canada, it has been the Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance (IMFG). The Institute supported me with a fellowship during my graduate studies. It gave me the opportunity to explore normative principles in a 2016 paper Good Governance at the Local Level: Meaning and Measurement¹ and a 2020 Forum paper on local autonomy.² It has commissioned state-of-the-art descriptive work on important areas that have received little attention. My IMFG papers on the current state of Canadian municipal law³ and metropolitan governance models⁴ updated our knowledge and pointed toward future research agendas, and the symposium on strong mayor powers in Ontario was an early tour d’horizon of their substance and implications.⁵ These investigations have led to numerous research projects and partnerships, some Canada-focused, some international and comparative. More broadly, IMFG has been an irreplaceable site of knowledge creation about municipal finance and governance in Canada, serving practitioners and university-based scholars alike.

For IMFG’s 20th anniversary, I appreciate the opportunity to reflect on the past and future of Canadian local governance and its study. I will briefly discuss three themes – the persistent local governance knowledge gap and how IMFG can fill it, the role of subprovincial government in the broader system of Canadian governance and how it is changing, and the quality of governance – in each case pointing to opportunities and challenges for IMFG.

Filling the local governance knowledge gap

In our federal state, the national government has the authority and resources to collect and disseminate data and research on the Canadian economy, society, and institutions, yet it has historically had no jurisdictional interest in documenting local government matters. The federal government primarily interacts with provinces, businesses, and individuals through taxation and fiscal transfers. As an area of provincial jurisdiction, local government is not of federal interest, although Ottawa does rediscover its importance from time to time, mainly as an owner, builder, and operator of infrastructure and regulator of the use of land. Data collection by provinces is uneven and rarely comparable across provincial boundaries.

We therefore lack nationally standardized data about local government institutions, finances, and policies. Since the work and financing of local governments vary among and within provinces, we have little systematic insight into the economic, social, and environmental effects of local government in Canada. That is, we do not know whether different institutional and fiscal configurations produce different results in, for example, urban and rural land development outcomes, economic productivity, social cohesion, infrastructure endowments, quality of life, and the fiscal health of local government. The information gap leads us to focus on places where data are most available: big cities in big provinces.

We do not have good answers when international researchers come seeking to understand how Canadian local governance – and multi-level governance – compares with that in other countries. We do not even have a consensus on how many municipalities and other local governments there are, what qualifies as a municipality, and how to categorize local governments. Statistics Canada’s government finance datasets are not collected and disseminated in ways that provide insight on important questions. We do not have, as the United States does, a Census of Governments.

The good news is that this situation is changing. Statistics Canada and CMHC have made fragmentary efforts to collect and disseminate information about housing and infrastructure in Canadian communities. More comprehensively, over the next seven years, the SSHRC-funded Canadian Municipal Barometer project, co-led by the University of Calgary’s Jack Lucas, a former IMFG fellow, will establish new, consistent information about democratic and administrative processes in Canadian local government.⁶ And at Western University we have created the Canadian Municipal Attributes Portal (CMAP), a website that collects the institutional characteristics of the 189 Canadian municipalities with a population greater than 25,000, in which 73 per cent of Canadians live.⁷ But, as others have argued, there is much more to do.⁸

IMFG can help fill this knowledge gap, especially in municipal finance. I propose that IMFG establish and maintain a national, open, longitudinal local government fiscal database containing standardized information on revenues and expenditures by area, federal-local and provincial-local fiscal transfers, and staff complements, covering all municipalities in all ten provinces and three territories. This information will help Canadians answer important questions about local fiscal autonomy and the conditions applied to fiscal transfers, fiscal decentralization and redistribution, and forms of service delivery. If Statistics Canada does not see a national interest in collecting this information, the research community must do it, and IMFG is well placed to take the lead.

The big picture: Multilevel territorial governance

Local government does not exist in isolation. Communities in Canada and elsewhere are governed by multiple authorities, and local governance must be comprehended as one component of a system of multilevel governance of territory.⁹ With ten provinces, each with separately exercised constitutional authority over local government institutions, Canada’s variegated geometries of multilevel territorial governance are complex and ever-changing.

While IMFG’s essential purpose has been to illuminate municipal finance and governance, it has inevitably been drawn into analyses of municipalities’ embeddedness in broader governance systems. My IMFG paper with Alec Dobson comparing provincial legal enabling frameworks for local government revealed that municipal acts in all provinces, despite variation in the details, have become increasingly permissive over the past quarter-century, affording municipalities broader discretion to act in the interest of their communities.¹⁰ The IMFG’s Who Does What series identified the municipal role in numerous policy areas.¹¹ Yet there is more to investigate. As we gain a coast-to-coast-to-coast understanding of what local governments do, how they do it, and how they interact with other levels of government to deliver policy outputs, we can begin to draw conclusions about the optimal role of local governments in multilevel states and pose domestic and comparative questions. Do some Canadian governance configurations produce better results in efficiency, equity, and democratic accountability than others? How do Canadian models of multilevel territorial governance compare with each other? What can other countries learn from the Canadian experience and what can Canadians learn from them?

To these ends, IMFG should continue to facilitate policy learning by disseminating state-of-the-art information to practitioners and scholars about changing governance institutions and practices across Canada and by participating in international projects and research networks.

The goal: High quality local governance

Behind these important endeavours lies IMFG’s broader concern with the quality of local governance – and of multilevel governance arrangements for communities – in Canada. As I wrote in my 2016 IMFG paper,¹² governance quality encompasses process, outputs, and outcomes. IMFG-affiliated researchers have studied the quality of process, considering, for example, variations in intermunicipal coordination in metropolitan areas,¹³ relations between Indigenous authorities and local governments,¹⁴ the activities of submunicipal representative organizations such as community councils and business improvement districts,¹⁵ inclusion and public consultations,¹⁶ the fairness of fees and levies,¹⁷ and the representation and responsiveness of local politicians.¹⁸ Beyond some case studies, however, the objective and perceived quality of policy outputs and outcomes have received little systematic attention in Canada, in large part due to the gap in available data.

There is still much more to learn about all three dimensions of governance quality. As socioeconomic inequality increases and municipalities face fiscal challenges, we need to know more about the incidence of locally levied property tax and fees and the scope of implicit and explicit redistribution by provinces and the federal government. As vertical and horizontal intergovernmental partnerships and agreements proliferate, we need to know more about the tension between intergovernmental accountability and local democracy, as well as whether these entanglements deliver equitable and efficient results. The same goes for the many forms of alternative service delivery, including public-private partnerships to deliver infrastructure and facilities, contracting-out of service operations, or agreements with non-profit organizations. As provinces continue to modernize the legal frameworks that authorize and empower municipalities and local special-purpose bodies, we need to understand how local governments use their powers and what may prevent them from doing so fully. And with power comes the temptation to misuse it: we have little systematic understanding of the substance, operation, and effects of ethical and conflict-of-interest regimes in Canadian municipalities.

A national project

For 20 years, IMFG has been Canada’s essential voice in this domain, asking important questions, publishing useful findings, and building bridges between university-based research and practitioners. I hope it will continue to do so over the next 20 years. It seems to me, however, that IMFG’s challenge will be to broaden its focus beyond the big provinces and larger cities to provide a truly national perspective on these important questions. Working with governments and other partners to fill the information gap is a great place for IMFG to start.

About the Author

Zack Taylor is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario, Fellow at the Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance, founding director of Western’s Centre for Urban Policy and Local Governance, and editor-in-chief of the journal Territory, Politics, Governance. He is currently principal investigator for the Local Democracy Project, a national, five-year study of how local elections are run and the candidates who run in them.

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Endnotes

[1] Zack Taylor, Good Governance at the Local Level: Meaning and Measurement, IMFG Papers on Municipal Finance and Governance No. 26, 2016.

[2] Kristin Good, Enid Slack, Zack Taylor, and Patricia Burke Wood, Charting a New Path: Does Toronto Need More Autonomy? IMFG Forum No. 10, 2020.

[3] Zack Taylor and Alec Dobson, Power and Purpose: Canadian Municipal Law in Transition, IMFG Papers on Municipal Finance and Governance No. 47, 2019.

[4] Zack Taylor, Theme and Variations: Metropolitan Governance in Canada, IMFG Papers on Municipal Finance and Governance No. 49, 2020.

[5] Zack Taylor, Karen Chapple, Matt Elliott, Alison Smith, and Gabriel Eidelman, Strong(er) Mayors in Ontario – What Difference Will They Make? IMFG Forum No. 13, 2023.

[6] Jack Lucas and Sandra Breux, Canadian Municipal Barometer, 2024, http://www.cmb-bmc.ca/

[7] Martin Horak, Charlotte Kurs, and Zack Taylor, “Dimensions of Local Authority: Mapping Local Political Institutions in Canada’s Cities,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 57, no. 1 (2024): 139–55; Martin Horak and Zack Taylor, “CMAP: The Canadian Municipal Attributes Portal 2.0,” Centre for Urban Policy and Local Governance, University of Western Ontario, 2024. https://westernurban.shinyapps.io/CMAP/

[8] Gabriel Eidelman, Kate Graham, and Neil Bradford, “Our Cities and City-Regions Need an Urban Policy Observatory,” Policy Options, Institute for Research on Public Policy, 2020. https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/june-2020/our-cities-and-city-regions-need-an-urban-policy-observatory/

[9] Jefferey M. Sellers, Anders Lidström, and Yooil Bae, Multilevel Democracy: How Local Institutions and Civil Society Shape the Modern State (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

[10] Taylor and Dobson, Power and Purpose.

[11] Gabriel Eidelman, Kass Forman, Tomas Hachard, and Enid Slack, Who Does What Series, Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance and Urban Policy Lab, University of Toronto, 2024.

[12] Taylor, Good Governance at the Local Level.

[13] Zachary Spicer, The Boundary Bargain: Growth, Development, and the Future of City-County Separation (Montreal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016); Zack Taylor, “Regionalism from above: Intergovernmental relations in Canadian metropolitan governance,” Commonwealth Journal of Local Governance 26 (2022): 139–59.

[14] Doug Anderson and Alexandra Flynn, Indigenous-Municipal Legal and Governance Relationships, IMFG Papers on Municipal Finance and Governance No. 55, 2021.

[15] Alexandra Flynn, Filling the Gaps: The Role of Business Improvement Areas and Neighbourhood Associations in the City of Toronto, IMFG Papers on Municipal Finance and Governance No. 45, 2019; Alexandra Flynn and Zachary Spicer, Re-imagining Community Councils in Canadian Local Government, IMFG Papers on Municipal Finance and Governance No. 36, 2017.

[16] Aaron A. Moore and Alexandra Caparole, Reforming Statutory Public Hearings for Planning, IMFG Papers on Municipal Finance and Governance No. 66, 2024; Brittany Andrew-Amofah, Alexandra Flynn, and Patricia Burke Wood, A New Agenda for Local Democracy: Building Just, Inclusive, and Participatory Cities, IMFG Papers on Municipal Finance and Governance No. 60, 2022.

[17] Almos T. Tassonyi and Harry Kitchen, Addressing the Fairness of Municipal User Fee Policy, IMFG Papers on Municipal Finance and Governance No. 54, 2021.

[18] Jack Lucas, Lior Sheffer, and Peter John Loewen, “Pathways to substantive representation: Policy congruence and policy knowledge among Canadian local politicians,” Political Behavior (2024). https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-024-09982-2 Back to All Essays