Provinces: Municipalities’ Most Valuable Partner
Throughout this semester we’ve talked so much about the limitations of municipal governance, all the things cities wish they could do for and provide to constituents, the challenges in doing urban policy. This week we shifted our focus to the federal and provincial level of governance and how these two levels interact with municipalities.
While the federal government has no official urban policy and tends to make little direct engagement effort to work with cities, the provinces and territories are much more involved because cities fall under their jurisdiction. I think there’s a bit of a “cause and effect” discussion to be had here, in that do we argue the federal government has less interest in urban policy and matters of the city because it makes more sense for provinces to deal with these issues at their level? Or has this responsibility largely fallen on provinces because successive federal governments time and again fail to prioritize urban issues?Regardless of how we choose to answer this question, the fact remains that municipal and provincial governments have to work together very closely to bring urban issues to federal attention and lobby for modern policy responses.
This week’s alumni networking sessions were very illuminating, especially in comparison to some of the reflections we heard in past weeks from policymakers at the City of Toronto and other regional governments. Alumni at the municipal level spoke about how much more invested you feel in the work because of the proximity to the populations you serve, and how this makes it feel like your work makes more a direct impact. Undoubtedly, this is a big pro to working at this level, and something that myself and a lot of my classmates have noted as the kind of work we hope to do in our future careers.
In our breakout sessions this week we got to chat with alumni working for the OPS, and one question that Erika posed in several of our groups was if there was any aspect of service delivery that the alumni thought would be better handled exclusively by municipalities instead of going through the province first. A couple alumni used the example of community housing and how it makes much more sense for municipalities to handle this service, as they are most aware of community needs. Reflecting on their answers and other aspects of their experiences I began to see the value in the trade-off of provinces having so much control over municipalities while providing critical support.
I’m not thinking strictly in the sense of administrative capacity, but more so just the vast numbers of public servants working at the provincial level on files that intersect, in ways both big and small, with urban issues. Thinking on my own experience with the OPS and from what we heard from alumni today, there is rarely any file a public servant will work on that won’t require them to work directly with municipalities to some degree. While this might create a bit of a confusing network of people to sort through when doing engagement between the provinces and cities, the provinces are nonetheless the best, if not only, avenue municipalities have to send feedback up the chain to federal offices. I think we are definitely going to see the relationship between these levels of government change in the near future, but regardless of what that change looks like, I think the provinces and municipalities will only grow to be even more dependent on and supportive of each other.
