An Overview of Planning and Political Problems for Canadian Urban Municipalities in the 1990s

Abstract

The dominant image of the ideal Canadian community still nurtured is rustic, even though the living reality is no more arcadian than that of other advanced post-industrial communities. Still, it is a relatively rich new society whose redistributive policies should reasonably be supportable by the sum of the resources available. Canadian urban municipalities have, however, not learned to manage well in times of fiscal austerity; their metier has not been exigency and no recent general local government text even begins to discuss contemporary alternative strategies well. To the casual observer it may appear that any policy can be justified by an appeal to one of several salient aspects of the Canadian urban political culture. At the same time, few decisions seem ever to be final because there always exists another legitimate line of political attack to be fashioned from a competing appeal to some other component of mixed cultural roots. This of course wrecks havoc upon the spreadsheets of management planning and analysis.