Stressing the Municipality in Municipal-Provincial Relations
This week’s class included a fascinating discussion of how municipal governments function within the broader Canadian federation and, more specifically, how they collaborate with Canada’s higher levels of government. I must admit that exploring this issue and, to be more specific, exploring the state of municipal-provincial relations in Ontario sparked my interest in urban policy. As a result, I intend to spend lots of time writing about the importance of Ontario’s relationship with its 444 municipal governments — and today’s class provides the perfect opportunity to do so with a distinctly municipal perspective.
First, it must be mentioned how vital municipalities are to the everyday lives of Canadians. Municipalities provide countless services and programs, from garbage collection and road maintenance to social housing and employment services, which form the backbone of life in our country. At their core, municipalities are service providers working tirelessly for their communities. Amazingly, they manage to fund all of these services with only a handful of revenue generating tools, most notably property taxes and user fees, while receiving limited financial support from provincial and federal governments.
Understanding this, it might surprise many to hear how little autonomy municipalities have. Essentially, municipalities are expected to do a lot and, as a result, are forced to spend a lot but have very little say over what services they are responsible for and how they are supposed to fund the provision of those services. In Ontario, the division of responsibility for service delivery between the province and municipal governments has been a consistent issue. Despite the Local Services Realignment in the late 1990s and the Provincial-Municipal Fiscal and Service Delivery Review in the mid-2000s, ample research has been done to show that the current division of provincial-municipal responsibilities for planning, funding, and delivering services in Ontario is a complex web of non-uniform agreements. This often leads to the provincial government unilaterally changing how municipalities operate, evidenced by the Toronto ward realignment, or giving municipalities unfunded mandates, where they are told to provide a service without being given a transfer or revenue tool to fund that service. With 280 provincial statutes dictating municipal responsibilities, municipalities must feel like they are being asked to deliver the world without having the necessary tools to do so.
Interestingly, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the good and bad aspects of municipal-provincial relations in Ontario. On one hand, the province has provided unprecedented financial support to municipalities during the pandemic. However, in a recent interview with Matt Elliot (shoutout to his excellent blog CityHallWatcher, which everyone should subscribe to), John Tory details the 5 months of work it took to get the provincial and federal governments to agree on how they should help municipalities, a daunting timeline given the urgent need for pandemic support. While the pandemic has generated immense hardship across Canada, it has also provided provincial, municipal, and even federal governments with a unique inflection point to evaluate and improve the current state of their collaborative relationships. I hope this opportunity is seized and that all levels of government acknowledge the immense responsibility municipalities hold by providing them with the combination of support, tools, and autonomy they need to improve life in Canada. both during the pandemic and beyond.
