What role should municipalities play?
My reflection this week was sparked by a question asked during one of the breakout sessions: What role should municipalities play? As my group moved through the rooms, I continued to ask — What are municipalities doing well that they should continue doing and what services are they delivering poorly? How does the province support them?
Often, alumni pointed to the provincial role of providing funding and ensuring fiscal sustainability. For example, when ensuring a municipal lens is being applied to new provincial legislation, policies, or programs, the province asks questions such as: Does it have an impact on municipal finances?, Will municipalities be able to afford to implement these changes on their own?
In it Together: Clarifying Provincial-Municipal Responsibilities in Ontario discusses centralization versus decentralization related to financial oversight, service standards, and service equity. This paper exemplified our break room discussions and the balancing act involved when asking, “What role should municipalities play?”
One argument in favour of centralization related to financial oversight and the idea that the province has the upper hand because they are able to provide a more holistic perspective to ensure fairness and equality. Centralizing responsibility through the province by giving them financial oversight over municipalities was viewed as ensuring efficiency and equity in service delivery across the province. In contrast, decentralization of services was favoured for its ability to tailor needs at the community-level. This approach reinforces the idea that different municipalities have different service needs and its easier to identify those needs in a decentralized structure. For example, the province may have difficulty identifying the needs of youth experiencing homelessness in Thunder Bay but, the local government and community actors would be better equipped to create public services that address their wants and needs.
When defining cities at the provincial level, seeing cities as city-regions becomes evident when discussing the potential disadvantages of decentralization. One prominent example being that municipalities may only make decisions based on the needs of their local residents. This would go against the provincial interests of regional planning and economic development that rely on seeing cities or local governments as large city-regions capable of economic and population growth.
Overall, the intergovernmental context is largely shaped by how cities are defined at each level of government. Urban policy making definitely feels disconnected between the three levels of government. Despite federal and provincial interests in cities at a higher level, both seem happy leaving the day to day operational policymaking to municipalities. Maybe that is sometimes a good thing. I would be interested to learn more about how the political cycle affects urban policy making and shapes how cities are defined in Canada.
