Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
Toronto suburbia, for the most part, is sprawl extending outward from the central city, not unlike Sunbelt America. Northeastern U.S. suburbia, while plenty sprawly, is more like a bunch of small towns and regional centers merging together in the postwar era.
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This is kind of true of Montreal, and even Quebec City - despite the fact that these cities and their environs have been continuously settled for 400 years.
I mean, Laval, Quebec is a giant suburban municipality spanning over 100 square miles and 400,000 people. Its "downtown" is a series of malls and the overwhelming majority of its built form is relatively dense postwar sprawl not separated by woodlots. Why does a place that's as old as New England have more in common with Mesa, AZ than Quincy, MA?
The fact is that Canadian municipal governance is a very different animal than what is in the US and has been since the beginning. Canadian cities are almost completely at the whim of the provinces in which they find themselves. Even the very biggest and most powerful cities like Toronto and Montreal have been forced by their provinces to dissolve or amalgamate with other independent and incorporated cities nearby. Canadian cities can't levy their own sales taxes or even generate any new forms of revenue without getting provincial permission, and, back in the 1950s-1970s, most provinces had a very heavy hand in actual development planning, deciding how and in what form the city should develop and where transit or road corridors would go. That era of provincial command and control may not be as strong anymore, although there's been a bit of a resurgence in recent years.
The spectre of a community of 5,000 people incorporating themselves into a municipality and then mandating minimum lot sizes to keep others out is just not something that Canadian municipalities had recourse over, even if they wanted to.
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