{"id":1049,"date":"2008-08-02T23:05:59","date_gmt":"2008-08-03T06:05:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2008\/08\/02\/canadian-cities-stuck-in-the-past\/"},"modified":"2008-08-02T23:13:29","modified_gmt":"2008-08-03T06:13:29","slug":"canadian-cities-stuck-in-the-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2008\/08\/02\/canadian-cities-stuck-in-the-past\/","title":{"rendered":"Canadian cities: stuck in the past?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christopher Hume takes aim at sclerotic Toronto, but his critique could apply to quite a few Canadian cities, including (much-smaller) Victoria.\u00a0 See his Aug. 1 Toronto Star<\/em> article, The future out of reach for city fearful of change<\/a>. Toward the end, he writes:<\/p>\n

City hall’s resistance to change has been noticed by many observers who point out that few of the new powers made available in the provincial City of Toronto Act two years ago have actually been applied.<\/p>\n

Former chief planner Paul Bedford, for instance, wonders why a city intent on intensification hasn’t implemented minimum height requirements for new buildings. This is obvious and necessary; even the mayor has talked about it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The key thing in that passage is the Canadian subtext: that Canadian cities “are but creatures of the Provinces,” a fact that goes back to the British North America Act of the last half of the 19th century, where Federalists convinced Provinces to join Confederation by promising that they (the Provinces) would retain complete control over “their” municipalities and cities.<\/p>\n

At the time, no one in the wonderland of resource-extraction that was Canada thought that one day cities would figure prominently as independent engines and hubs for the country’s economy.<\/p>\n

What’s interesting with regard to Hume’s passage is that provinces are apparently making moves to empower cities so they can act as independent actors on the political and economic stage — Hume’s reference to the City of\u00a0 Toronto Act (granted by the province of Ontario) alludes to this.<\/p>\n

A very recent parallel in BC would be this province’s Bill 27, which empowers cities to create Development Permit Areas and to initiate “green” development by giving municipalities heretofore unheard of power.<\/p>\n

But as Hume also indicates, the cities — whether from force of habit or entropy — don’t seem to act with any sort of alacrity to wield their new powers.\u00a0 And that really does speak to a failure of leadership at the municipal level.<\/p>\n

PS: Vancouver is really very fortunate in having a City Charter (late 19th century).\u00a0 It’s the only city in BC to have one, probably one of only a very few in all of Canada.\u00a0 Perhaps the Charter has helped to create a climate of assertive independent-mindedness, which can’t have been unhelpful in facilitating Vancouver’s transition to the 21st century.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christopher Hume takes aim at sclerotic Toronto, but his critique could apply to quite a few Canadian cities, including (much-smaller) Victoria.\u00a0 See his Aug. 1 Toronto Star article, The future out of reach for city fearful of change. Toward the end, he writes: City hall’s resistance to change has been noticed by many observers who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1824,1419,1114],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-canada","category-cities","category-leadership"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1049"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}