Located at the junction of the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers, Montreal Island is the main contact point between French and English Canadians. Prior to Quebec's "Quiet Revolution" of the 1960s, local governments in Montreal both reflected and perpetuated the mutual isolation of French and English. Residential concentration in autonomous suburbs, together with self-contained networks of schools and social services, enabled English-speaking Montrealers to control the city's economy and to conduct their community's affairs with little regard for the French-speaking majority. The modernization of the Quebec state in the 1960s dramatically challenged this arrangement. The author demonstrates how the English-speaking politicians in cooperation with certain French-speaking allies have succeeded in preventing the wholesale adoption of ambitious schemes for metropolitan reorganization. He describes the workings of a society divided by language and ethnicity, where the pervasiveness of the politics of language impedes all plans for comprehensive metropolitan reform. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1985.

With the demise of the Old Regionalist project of achieving good regional governance through amalgamation, voluntary collaboration has become the modus operandi of a large number of North American metropolitan regions. Although many researchers have become interested in regional collaboration and its determinants, few have specifically studied its outcomes. This book contributes to filling this gap by critically re-evaluating the fundamental premise of the New Regionalism, which is that regional problems can be solved without regional/higher government. In particular, this research asks: to what extent does regional collaboration have a significant independent influence on the determinants of regional resilience? Using a comparative (Canada-U.S.) mixed-method approach, with detailed case studies of the San Francisco Bay Area, the Greater Montreal and trans-national Niagara-Buffalo regions, the book examines the direct and indirect impacts of inter-local collaboration on policy and policy outcomes at the regional and State/Provincial levels. The book research concentrates on the effects of bottom-up, state-mandated and functional collaboration and the moderating role of regional awareness, higher governmental initiative and civic capital on three outcomes: environmental preservation, socio-economic integration and economic competitiveness. In short, the book seeks to highlight those conditions that favor collaboration and might help avoid the collaborative trap of collaboration for its own sake. More specifically, this research concentrates on the effect of bottom-up, state-mandated and functional collaboration, the moderating role of regional awareness, governmental initiative and civic capital on environmental preservation, socio-economic integration and economic competitiveness. In short, the book seeks to understand whether and how urban regional collaboration contributes to regional resilience.

Metropolitan reforms have been implemented in Canada at a scale and frequency greater than anywhere else in the democratic world. The cross-national case studies provide a perspective on the role of different political systems and political cultures in determining the metropolitan governance agenda and the reforms undertaken, revealing considerable similarities in the agenda and diversity in responses.

Interest and research on regionalism has soared in the last decade. Local governments in metropolitan areas and civic organizations are increasingly engaged in cooperative and collaborative public policy efforts to solve problems that stretch across urban centers and their surrounding suburbs. Yet there remains scant attention in textbooks to the issues that arise in trying to address metropolitan governance. Governing Metropolitan Areas describes and analyzes structure to understand the how and why of regionalism in our global age. The book covers governmental institutions and their evolution to governance, but with a continual focus on institutions. David Hamilton provides the necessary comprehensive, in-depth description and analysis of how metropolitan areas and governments within metropolitan areas developed, efforts to restructure and combine local governments, and governance within the polycentric urban region. This second edition is a major revision to update the scholarship and current thinking on regional governance. While the text still provides background on the historical development and growth of urban areas and governments' efforts to accommodate the growth of metropolitan areas, this edition also focuses on current efforts to provide governance through cooperative and collaborative solutions. There is also now extended treatment of how regional governance outside the United States has evolved and how other countries are approaching regional governance.

The story of the fight against the forced merger of Montreal municipalities and the world's first metropolitan de-merger.

A rare glimpse into the world of public policy making in Canada's major cities.

Drawing on the lessons from successful and unsuccessful attempts at the reform of metropolitan governance, this book identifies ways by which central and metropolitan governments can work better to optimise the potential of each urban region.

Popular rhetoric suggests that the 21st century has ushered in an era of homogeneity. Urbanization, globalization, amalgamation, media conglomeration, and technological convergence have become familiar terms to us -- terms coined to reflect the effect of the complex and diverse forces at work in communities across the country. Given such overwhelming pressures, how are people within these communities able to make decisions about their own environment, either individually or collectively? To what extent can they govern themselves? This stimulating text considers questions of influence and power within local institutions and decision-making processes using numerous illustrations from municipalities across Canada. The challenges to local governance are examined from a wide array of perspectives; communities large and small from Iqualuit to Toronto are offered as examples. In an original approach to the subject, McAllister pays particular attention to smaller and more remote cities of Canada. Case studies of Prince George, British Columbia; Sherbrooke, Quebec; Saint John, New Brunswick; Kitchener and Waterloo, Ontario are used to illustrate historic and contemporary challenges for local governance. Governing Ourselves? covers traditional topics related to Canadian local government structures, institutions, and intergovernmental relations. At the same time, it reaches more broadly into other areas of inquiry that are relevant to geography, urban planning, environmental studies, public administration, sociology, and Canadian studies. A wide-ranging exploration of Canadian communities and their politics, this book is relevant to the practitioner, student, academic, and anyone who wonders whether, in fact, we do govern ourselves.

In Governing with the Charter, James Kelly clearly demonstrates that our current democratic deficit is not the result of the Supreme Court’s judicial activism. On the contrary, an activist framers’ intent surrounds the Charter, and the Supreme Court has simply, and appropriately, responded to this new constitutional environment. While the Supreme Court is admittedly a political actor, it is not the sole interpreter of the Charter, as the court, the cabinet, and bureaucracy all respond to the document, which has ensured the proper functioning of constitutional supremacy in Canada. Kelly analyzes the parliamentary hearings on the Charter and also draws from interviews with public servants, senators, and members of parliament actively involved in appraising legislation to ensure that it is consistent with the Charter. He concludes that the principal institutional outcome of the Charter has been a marginalization of Parliament and that this is due to the Prime Minister’s decision on how to govern with the Charter.

This book offers a cross-national analysis of contemporary issues and challenges for the governing of urban regions. The case studies on Germany, Spain, France, Greece, The Netherlands, Finland, the UK, Switzerland, Australia, the US and Canada, place particular emphasis on the tensions building on metropolitan governing capacity and democratic legitimacy. The authors develop and use an analytical framework focused on the dynamics of place and make an original contribution to the debates on the nature of metropolitan governance.