Municipal Reform in Canada

Over the past 15 years Canada's municipalities - in all provinces and territories - have undergone significant reform. Many of these initiatives have sought to restructure municipal systems - through amalgamation and, in some instances, de-amalgamation - but the functions or responsibilities of municipal jurisdictions, as well as their means of financing these responsibilities and their powers vis-a-vis their political masters at the provincial/territorial level, have also been on the reform agenda. "Municipal Reform in Canada" presents analysis of the purposes, processes, politics, and outcomes of reform for each of the provinces and the northern territories. These analyses reveal that reforms during this turn-of-the-millennium period have reconfigured and in some cases re-empowered municipal governance and shifted the balance of roles, responsibilities, and relationships among city and regional municipal governments, and between them and their respective provincial and territorial governments. The reform process, however, has not gone so far as to 'reinvent' municipal governance, and is not likely to in the foreseeable future.
Indeed, the extent of change in recent years, in many jurisdictions, has brought about a degree of reform fatigue so that the principle actors in provincial-municipal politics may be reticent to pursue new initiatives in the near future.