No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
During the 1990s the provincial governments of both Quebec and Ontario established task forces to recommend new arrangements for the governance of their largest areas, Montreal and Toronto respectively. The task forces (Pichette and Golden) faced remarkably similar political environments and arrived at similar conclusions. Despite the fact that the Montreal task force was appointed earlier and reported earlier, its impact appears to have been minimal. Meanwhile, Toronto has experienced an explosive debate about the creation through amalgamation of the megacity, in part because such a course of action was not contemplated by the Toronto task force. With much less publicity, the Ontario government has since proceeded to establish the Greater Toronto Services Board (GTSB), the first municipal institution in Canada that transcends and includes two-tier municipalities. Just as the GTSB is beginning to function, debates about governance in Montreal have begun anew. This paper briefly describes the historical background to governance arrangements in the two urban regions, explores in some detail the similarities in the work of the two task forces, and attempts to explain why the outcomes appear to have been so different. Some scholars have already tried to show how theory relating to urban political economy applies to the organisational changes in Toronto (Keil 1998; Isin 1998; Todd 1998; Horak 1999), but they have not attempted to explain how it accounts for the lack of change in Montreal. One of the additional objectives of this paper is to evaluate the relevance of this theory in explaining recent developments in the two areas. Governmental Arrangements Prior to Pichette and Golden Until 1914 and 1920 respectively, urban growth in Toronto and Montreal was typically accompanied by regular annexations of suburban municipalities to the central city. The process stopped in both places because the central cities could no longer afford to absorb the debts of their bankrupt suburban neighbours. In 1921 the provincial government of Quebec established the Montreal Metropolitan Commission, Canada's first example of a two-tier form of urban government. The main initial function of the commission was to share defaulted suburban debts among more financially stable municipalities and to supervise future suburban borrowing (Sancton 1985). Despite ambitious proposals for various new forms of government in Montreal, the commission had not evolved much beyond its original structures and functions when Ontario established the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto (Metro) in 1953 as a two-tier system embracing thirteen local municipalities. In 1969, the Quebec government created the Montreal Urban Community (MUC), but this institution was functionally weak in comparison to Metro (Figure 1). More importantly perhaps, the original 29 member municipalities of the MUC were never consolidated, except that one, Pointe-aux-Trembles, was annexed by the city of Montreal in 1982. Within Metro, however, the thirteen original members were reduced to six as a result of provincial legislation approved in 1966. The council of the MUC has always comprised the suburban mayors and all council members from the City of Montreal. In 1988, the Ontario government introduced a system of direct election for Metro's council. These were some of the reasons why throughout the period from 1953 to 1992, there was a belief within some municipal circles in Montreal that Toronto's governmental structures were more advanced. There was, however, an important sense in which both systems failed to adapt to changing circumstances. The initial external boundaries of both Metro and the MUC never changed, despite the fact that most growth was taking place outside their original territories and that both organisations were supposed to be engaged in metropolitan planning. …
Loading…
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.
Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.