Municipal Horizons Part 2: Connect, Converse, Organize, Do Things
"The provincial government is making life miserable for municipalities in a lot of different ways, particularly on planning and housing and I don't think that's going to get any better."
— Regional Councillor for Kitchener Tom Galloway, Morning Edition CBC KW July 29, 2022
Cities are the neglected element of the civic order in both Canada and the United States. Their treatment at the hands of the so-called higher levels of government, as Tom Galloway’s complaint against the province indicates, borders on the abusive. But I’m not proposing a municipal equivalent to the perennial U.S. republican emphasis on “states rights.” The goal is harmony, not separation or independence; nor is it a revolutionary reversal, and not unity or solidarity either. There can be no harmony if everyone goes their own way. There can be no blending of voices if everyone sings the same song, in the same key, hitting the same notes at the same time.
The idea that cities are “creatures of the province” and therefore, in effect, outposts of provincial powers needs to be challenged. There is no natural chain of command that relegates us creatures here below, on the ground in our respective communities, to the position of pawns in provincial and federal manoeuvrings. If there are formulations in the current constitutional order that support such a chain of command, it’s time to start viewing them as vestiges of the colonial order that Canada was designed to replace and gradually improve.
From a grounded perspective, the relationship becomes lateral, rather than hierarchical: With our feet on the ground, we stand side by side, shoulder to shoulder. The difference between the municipal, provincial and federal spheres is one of breadth and scale: We, the people, are the town or city we happen to inhabit. A more comprehensive “we” constitute the province; an even greater “we, the people,” also make up the federated communities of Canada.
Municipalities come into being when a sufficient number of citizens living in proximity to one another come together to form a corporation, a body politic, and begin a separate existence with the power to govern, tax and police themselves. This was something settlers began doing as a matter of right; the province, under the crown, simply made it official and legal.
Counties as we know them here in what was then Upper Canada did begin as “creatures” of imperial authority exercised at the provincial or colonial level. Basically, demarcation of county lines was a critical step in the process of claiming the land (in our case, ceded by the original claimants in 1763), making the prescribed arrangements with Indigenous peoples and nations, surveying the holdings, carving out areas for settlement, and beginning the process of alienating parcels of land to private proprietorship.
Achieving cityhood is leaving the county and township matrix, and establishing a separate corporate existence. It is an act of self-creation, exercising a right that is related to the fundamental freedom to associate. It is similar to what happens when a private, for-profit corporation is formed, or when corporations that exist for a purpose receive a charter, like a college or a university, or when a deed for private property is issued, or, for that matter, a license to get married or practice a profession: the role of the province is to make the arrangement official, at the request of the applicant. In the Ontario setting, Queen’s Park was not the father, the mother, nor the creator in any of these instances.
Kitchener (or Cambridge, Waterloo, Wilmot, Woolwich … ), Waterloo, Ontario, Canada: On whatever the scale they happen to operate, these various bodies politic are integral to one another. The relationship is reciprocal: the purpose of each is to be of service to the others, including functioning as a mechanism for concerted action, and operating as checks and balances to one another.
I’m imagining a movement, rooted in the actual places where we live, dedicated to achieving a better balance between the spheres of Canadian democracy.
We are the cities and towns we inhabit, but we do not have the freedom to make changes to the way things operate. There’s no point even talking about electoral reforms, or, for that matter about amalgamating or separating. But a movement can begin any time. An effort to connect, converse, organize and start working in concert requires no permissions from the higher echelons. Coming together, peaceably, in a civil manner, to serve the general good falls under the fundamental human right to assemble, and to associate
Doing things better doesn’t always require changing policies, orders, systems, laws or constitutional arrangements. Democratic practices are primarily culture, convention, habit. It’s not the structure, but how we utilize the machinery of democracy that matters. Sometimes, even just imagining things differently can make a profound difference.
So I’m going to propose that we start by seeing elections in a different light, and move towards treating them less as contests in which various ambitions, interests and outlooks are pitched against one another, with voters deciding, each of us alone in the privacy of the voting booth, who the “winner” is going to be, and more as a collective deliberation process culminating in a decision on how to best move forward.
There is probably not enough time to begin any major new departure in how we conduct the collective deliberation process that is currently underway in municipalities across Ontario. Monday, October 24 is only about 10 weeks away. What we can do is come together and make the best possible use of the channels of communication that are available to us. We can welcome, encourage, facilitate and participate in discussions among people who care, and do what we can to achieve the best possible outcome in October.
There is still a bit of time left to nominate more candidates for us to consider: the deadline for filing is Friday, August 19. Aiming towards building consensus can help minimize the risk of splitting the vote in detrimental ways. Meanwhile, we can keep an eye out for what we can do better in October, 2026, and before that, when we start deliberating over what the next parliaments of Canada and then Ontario will look like.
If we’re talking about working together to achieve the best possible result in a given election process, the goal has to be the broadest possible agreement: ideally, a general consensus, but at the very least, a plurality so that the candidate we agree on is elected to represent us. If the focus is narrower, it becomes yet another effort to separate the wheat from the chaff, the sheep from the goats, us against them, and we’re back at run of the mill partisanship again.
Just how that final decision on who we’re going to vote for together is made, in preparation for the actual election, is, of course, an area where there is ample opportunity for innovation and experimentation. We have that freedom, we have the right, and the way things seem to be heading, it is the duty of anyone and everyone who cares to imagine new approaches, and try doing things a bit differently when election time comes around.