Is It Time to Give More Power to Cities?

The City of Toronto provides over 150 services, from childcare to police services to waste disposal. Collectively, local governments in Ontario spend more than $64 billion a year on public services. Despite the vast amounts, when it comes to budgeting, municipalities anecdotally have their hands tied.

Municipalities both do a lot and spend a lot for their residents, yet they do not have much say in how their services are funded or delivered. The easy response to these policy challenges is “federalism.” Under the Constitution, provinces and territories may create public corporations — i.e., cities. As such, putting it in Ontario's context, there are currently 280 statutes in place that dictate municipal responsibilities of municipalities.

In other words, there is no blank slate that cities can start from when developing their services and corresponding budget. Quite literally, provinces direct municipalities to meet provincial mandates and service standards, such as having a particular number of first responders. While this may sound acceptable on the surface, provincial standards don’t always provide funding support to meet such targets.

Given the additional challenges for raising revenue generation to fulfill such service standards, it’s reasonable to question our current model's feasibility. Even more so, municipalities are getting more involved in what can arguably be categorized as macro-level issues. This includes instances related to the housing crisis, environmental concerns and public transit.

From this, is it time to ask, “should we give more power to municipalities?”. As Mayor Tory puts it, should the provinces still hold the legislative authority to treat cities and their respective personnel as “little boy(s) in short pants”? What’s becoming clear throughout the pandemic is that a large segment of the general populace isn’t aware of each level of government's varying jurisdictional and legal responsibilities. Rather, the expectation is that whatever service topic is being spoken of should simply be executed and provided to the public.

What were once distinct categories of responsibilities are now becoming blurred, with numerous governments getting involved. Given these patterns, if the major concern is ensuring that services provided meet residents’ expectations, then wouldn’t providing more power to cities only be beneficial to fulfil this goal?