Reshaping Local Government Abroad: Anglo-Canadian Experiments

Abstract

IT IS OF MORE THAN PASSING CURIOSITY to note that the CED's latest report on Reshaping Government in Metropolitan Areas contains an elaborate case study description of The Metropolitan Toronto Experience. 1 This paradox highlights the fact that whereas Americans have become perhaps the world's most prolific writers of how-to-do-it manuals on metropolitan governmental reform, we must still gaze beyond our own borders to see one of those full-blown metro governments in action. With the exception of the now historic Dade County and Nashville experiments-supplemented by recent stirrings in such areas as Minneapolis and Indianapolis -the metropolitan government movement in the United States has languished in a post-war state of suspended animation for a full quarter century. As a result, many of our original metropolitan reform advocates have abandoned all hope of entering into significant programs of structural reorganization, and most have turned instead to more modest council of government cooperative approaches. Obviously something very basic must have gone wrong with the earlier calculations and expectations of the metropolitan government reformers. For one thing, they seriously underestimated the extremely tough political obstacles that have stood in the way of their reorganization proposals. Political opposition to metropolitan government has been so widespread in the United States that it has united such highly divergent groups as the white suburbanites (who have been reluctant to assume their fair share of the central city tax burden) and the black ghetto dwellers (who have been reluctant to give up their growing political control over the central city now that such power is almost within their grasp).2 In contrast, it is significant to note that this same issue has split the theoreticians to a point where,

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