As we struggle to put our fiscal house in order when this pandemic finally runs its course, one can only hope that the forced intergovernmental cooperation that we have witnessed becomes an ongoing feature and that sufficient resources are allocated to municipalities and other local governing bodies that will be in the forefront of the efforts to rebuild and make safer our country.
Lessons from History
The essential role of our underfunded and often overlooked municipal level is not something new. A century ago, Sir Ernest Simon, a member of the Manchester city council observed that “the city council’s services are the difference between savagery and civilization.” Seventy-five years ago, K. G. Crawford (in his text Canadian Municipal Government, U of T Press, 1954, p.5) described the importance of local government as follows:
"The sanitary conditions, the purity of water, milk and meat supply, the incidence of communicable diseases, the educational standards, the recreational facilities, and many of the cultural influences are in great part the product of local government policies. These are factors which, to an increasing extent, condition the development of the individual throughout his life."
As far back as 1968 the federal government acknowledged the need to increase coordination among all three levels of government by establishing a Ministry of State for Urban Affairs (MSUA). But the Ministry lacked any authority to fulfil its objectives – even in terms of coordinating federal activities. It initiated two tri-level conferences in the early 1970s, which accomplished little, and was disbanded in early 1979.
By the 1990s a series of reports documented the challenges facing Canada’s cities and the need for greater federal and provincial involvement. In 2004, Paul Godfrey became Minister of State for Infrastructure and Communities (a variation of the Minister of State for Urban Affairs of three decades earlier) responsible for overseeing a “New Deal for Cities.”
The increased federal role with municipalities implicit in the New Deal disappeared under the Conservative regime of Stephen Harper from 2006 to 2015. Harper was a strict constitutionalist, opposed to federal forays into provincial jurisdiction. His New Deal would be with the provinces and when their finances improved, they could then address any municipal fiscal imbalances.
Since the Liberals returned to power in late 2015, there have been sporadic attempts to increase financial support for municipalities. But these and other past federal initiatives have often bogged down in jurisdictional battles with provincial governments jealous of any federal involvement with their municipalities, by slow processing of funds through the provincial level to municipalities, and by ineffective use of the funds on small and scattered projects of limited impact on infrastructure and environmental improvement.
Have We Finally Learned?
After a century of reminders and failed efforts, will our federal system and institutions finally recognize and support the vital role that municipalities will play as they pursue new approaches to land use, transportation, public health, and other public services that will better protect us from the inevitable crises of the future? This is our deadliest lesson yet, and one can only hope that we have finally learned from it.