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Posted Oct 23, 2007, 7:53 PM
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Change is good
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Join Date: Oct 2005
Posts: 8,349
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Quote:
IPAC Address, 19 April, 2006 Jim Lightbody
The Constant Garden: Continuing questions about city-regional government for Edmonton
OUTLINE:
1. Canada is a nation of cities (2001 census)
2. The basic issues in metro governing
3. Pressure points in the Edmonton city-region
4. Several points I’ve been pondering
1. Canada is a nation of cities (2001 census)
FIRST, as a general introduction:
The census of 2001 establishes the backdrop, and preliminary reports indicate that trends set then have continued:
(a) Over 80 per cent of Canadians live in 139 urban spaces (of 10,000 or more people);
(b) Most population growth has accrued in the 27 CMAs (of 100,000+);
(c) 57 per cent of Canadians live in the 15 largest CMAs (over 300,000);
(d) Just 6 of these CMAs – Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa-Gatineau, Calgary, Edmonton – contained 42 per cent of all residents (and these city-regions captured two-thirds of all population growth from 1991-2001);
(e) The four largest urban regions (not CMAs) accounted for 51% of the population, up from 49% in 1996 and 41% in 1971.
What this means is that massive sustained urbanization over the last political generation has placed tremendous pressure on governments to adapt public policy and governing institutions to new circumstances.
(f) Finally, in 1996, on the eve of the city-region consolidation period in central Canada, the 10 largest CMAs accommodated 292 general purpose local governments – or, one for each 50,000 residents. Today, of these ten, only Edmonton (with some 2 dozen municipalities) remains a multi-centered and governmentally dispersed city-region.
SECOND, hidden within these numbers is a general social trend (that is relevant to Edmonton’s city-region) which reveals that specific groups of Canadians have had to live in central cities and not their suburban fringes.
(a) 94 per cent of the 2.2 million new arrivals to Canada, from 1991-2001, settled in a city-region and about three-quarters chose to live in Toronto, Vancouver and Montréal. Over three in five foreign born residents of Canada live in the three largest CMAs, but only 30 per cent of Canadians born in this country live there. By chance and by design, most newcomers must live in core cities.
(b) Until 1961 almost all urban immigrants (92 per cent) came from Europe but today only about one fifth do. Vancouver, for example, has 37.5 per cent foreign-born residents, many of whom were hardly ‘marginalized’ economically having arrived under the aegis of the 1986 Investor Program. Even in Montréal during the 1990s, the immigrant population grew at more than twice the rate of the Canadian-born population.
(c) Also of demographic and policy importance is that the great majority of the 1990s cohort of migrants was from visible minority groups (68% in Montréal, 78 in Toronto, 83 in Vancouver).
(d) By 2001, 85 per cent of all immigrants lived in an urban area, but only 56 per cent of native born Canadians. What this means is that there has developed a significant demographic separation as indigenous Canadians have hightailed it to the quasi-sylvan joys of the separated suburb leaving the central city for new arrivals.
Recent immigrants are not only attracted to major cities where economic advantage is foreseen but also, as in 19th century America and early 20th century Canada, are drawn to same-ethnic enclaves within them. These enclaves (or, ghettos) can constitute a source of psychological support and physical protection, yet also spatially separate first generation new residents in an identity preserve. These cultural islands provide networks for those who speak another language at home, are not university educated, and younger. On the other hand, “Negative effects come from increased strains on urban infrastructure and increased use of health services, income support and other social programs” (McDonald, 2004: 91, 82).
Today, city-regions face policy consequences as new arrivals place new pressures on the urban policy agenda. Newcomers to Canada immediately suffer an ‘income penalty’ partly due to inadequate language skills, non-recognition of credentials earned in origin countries, and the genteel practice of discrimination. Recent studies have shown that, “immigrants, on average, contribute less in taxes and receive slightly greater public transfers than the Canadian born” (Grant, Sweetman, 2004: 20). At least for an adjustment period they will require a measure of employment support and access to city social services. Implicitly required is a community commitment to language education and the means to align professional qualifications with Canadian standards.
While some policy consequences for central cities, like demands for racial equity in employment and culturally-aware policing, are obvious and direct, others may not be. For instance, new urban immigrants use public transit: one recent survey found “that recent immigrants are much more likely than the Canadian born to use public transit to commute to work, even after controlling for age, gender, income, distance to work, and distance between place of residence and the city centre” (Heisz, Schellenberg, 2004: 187). So, the internationalizing of Canadian city-regions has increased demand for effective public transit, (even if these demands have yet to penetrate into Edmonton’s suburbs).
2. The basic issues in metro governing
The well documented middle-class flight from North American core cities pre-dated the 20th century. In 1888, James Bryce noted its American origins in these terms: “Taxes are usually so much higher in the larger cities than in the country districts or smaller municipalities, that there is a strong tendency for rich men to migrate from the city to its suburbs in order to escape the city collector” (Vol. I, 566).
Similar conditions were not unknown in Canada. In 1905 for instance, the Edmonton Journal carried an advertisement by Crawford and Weeks, realtors, for town lots in the neighbouring city of Strathcona: “Closer in than lots in Edmonton …that are close enough for a business man to live. A wonderful chance for speculation” (2 September).
Typically, Canadian city-regions have been comprised of a well-established city core ringed by both dormitory and industrial satellite suburbs. These, together with the partially rural municipal districts within the city-region’s most proximate trading and commuting hinterland, can be labeled a ¬metropolitan system. Each has been uniquely configured, but all have been subject to centripetalizing pressures due to the persistence of three problem areas for policy-makers.
The roots of these problems are simply to be found in urban development where expansion of an urban centre in conjunction with the permanence usually accorded local boundaries of municipalities presents the classic dilemma for metropolitan areas (anywhere on earth) as population growth spills across traditional community lines.
Policy problems that are either area-wide or are the concern of adjacent municipalities are no longer met with any policy-making apparatus with appropriate authority.
All major city-regions, despite the unique social, economic and political configurations of each, have had to come to grips with generally similar, or generic, standing policy issues.
Comparative experience reveals that these general issues may be grouped into three public policy arenas, any one of which may provide the cathartic spark for a reorganization initiative. Very succinctly, these areas relate to the following:
* First, the coordination of specific public policies between and among the metropolitan municipalities;
* Second, addressing questions of equity in the ability to generate revenues to pay for local services and to ensure rough equality in the levels provided all citizens of the city-region.
* Third, the matter of establishing clear lines of accountability to the public for the choices either made or not taken.
An additional set of policy pressures has emerged over the last political generation with globalization; city-regions have themselves had to become more institutionally centralized to remain competitive in the world economy and to survive well. Hence, the provincial policies of amalgamation during 1996-2001 in Ontario and Quebec were partly in response to these pressures since so-called informal “governance” activities proved too flimsy both on paper and in practice.
This is the public policy Trojan Horse for any imperial dreaming by Edmonton’s suburbs. World pressures on real city-regions will most probably be found in two areas for Edmonton:
(a) in coordination, as one voice for economic and social development (promotion and planning) is expected by potential investors; and
(b) in equity issues as newcomers to the region are forced by their needs for public policy to locate in core city (i.e. suburbs become free riders).
As with a pressure cooker, at some indeterminate stage these forces may present as sufficiently serious to provoke a formal reorganization of city-regional governing structures. But, also well recognized is the resistance of municipal councillors and their direct clienteles to any form of reorganization that might infringe upon established power bases and patronage relationships.
The generic set of metropolitan policy issues can always be more easily stipulated than resolved. Even some of the metropolitan reforms fifty years ago proved unsatisfactory: both the Winnipeg and Toronto experience in Canada suggests that these problems remained so unresolved, even under a well devised two tier format, as ultimately to require completed centripetal change (Lightbody, 1999: 178).
Again, in all of this, the basic difficulty in metropolitan governing relates to the development of problem-solving units of government that bear some rough congruence with the observed policy problems.
3. Pressure points in the Edmonton city-region
The fourth largest metropolitan region in Canada is the Edmonton – Calgary corridor which accounts for 72 per cent of Alberta’s population (7% of Canada’s). The total population in 2001 was 2,150,000 (up 12.3% from 1996), the largest growth rate of the four metro agglomerations.
I once wrote that “The sustaining argument of suburban councillors in any governmentally fragmented or polycentric metropolitan system is that there exists great divergence in the social composition of their metropolis which, when codified by the artifact of local boundary, justifies [their existence]” (1999: 176).
What, specifically, can be said for Edmonton?
In the decade 1991-2001, the population in the suburbs of the Edmonton CMA grew 21.2% while the core city increased by only 8.0%.
So, there was growth but it came with the concentration of selected groups from the overall population within the core city. To be precise, while 71.0% of this region’s population lives in the city of Edmonton, by choice and of necessity:
* 74.2% of all aboriginal persons live in the core city;
* 86.7% of all foreign-born persons live there;
* 90.0% of all rental dwellings are in the core city;
* 95.3% of all visible minorities live in Edmonton city. Or, in other words, St. Albert’s number of visible minorities is 4% less than a real, free-standing, city like Red Deer, 15% less than that of Calgary; 19% less than in Edmonton. The average family income in St. Albert was $55,000; in Edmonton it was $41,000. Home ownership is 19% higher in St. Albert than in Edmonton.
Edmonton, as a central city, has become different from its CMA (but it would not be if its boundaries coincided with the urban region – like Calgary):
(A) The census data (2001) reveal that Edmonton city’s population is 5% more visible minorities (19.4%) than the CMA average, a minimum of 17 percentage points more than any of its suburbs except St. Albert (only 15% points higher). The city has 4% more foreign-born residents than the CMA (21 vs. 17 per cent) and 12% higher than any suburb. Overall, the city’s suburbs are akin, in these two measures, to more distant, free-standing, cities like Red Deer and Lethbridge.
(B) The city has the lowest percentage of home ownership (59%); the mean is 27% points lower than its suburban fringe. All Edmonton suburbs have at least 20% higher rate of home owners than free-standing cities like Red Deer. Every suburb has higher average family incomes than Edmonton except the 3 villages and Leduc County. St. Albert and Strathcona are fully a third higher. [In my study, a control city like Red Deer had same income levels as the core city, while Lethbridge, on average income, was similar to Edmonton’s villages].
The 2001 census reveals that 9.7 per cent of recent immigrants (and 11.7 per cent of Aboriginals) lived in low-income city neighbourhoods, a rate twice again higher than Canada’s CMA average of 4.4 per cent for all residents. Low-income neighbourhoods in 1980 had recent immigrants as 9.9 per cent of their population; twenty years later the number had doubled to 19.8 per cent.
Here, as across Canada, as the policy picture is evolving, it appears that front-line service delivery municipal staffs in core cities like Edmonton, often out on the streets in response to demands from new communities and identities, will lead in adapting traditional practices to this new environment – an environment from which the city’s suburbs have insulated themselves. Resulting council initiatives in the central city will in turn test new practices and carve new possibilities for citizen-centered public policy.
4. Out of all of this, Several points I’ve been pondering
Any assessment of the present severity of the standing issues is always a question of relative degree. So …
In 1978, I wrote that “metropolitan re-organization [in Canada] is at least as much about political power and political ideology as it is about efficiency or the preservation of community lifestyles.” To the degree that this may be demonstrably true, as is normally the case in the United States, arguments in favour of consolidating governments based on administrative efficiencies have fallen upon the deaf ears of a populace ingrained with the familiar routines of their own local communities.
Over time, the repetition of assertions of differentiated lifestyle claims builds urban myths around purported better levels and responsiveness of suburban services and cultivates notions that an authentic, autonomous, community which is distinct within the city-region, and most likely of better quality, is actually alive and kicking. Suburbs are, indeed, by their own policies, different, but not so distinct from the outer neighbourhoods of the central city just across the street which is the boundary line.
Arguments against the amalgamation of the various municipalities in city-regions have historically been entrenched in the idea that political boundaries generally encompass communities that are different from the whole in their social and economic status. The arguments are supported by concepts drawn from economic theory that municipalities exist to provide discrete services that can be confined by geography. In short, ideas of autonomy feed on a nostalgic notion that smaller is better and that a central city life-style is a rather pathological existence.
So, the question: Is there reasonable evidence that the generic city-regional governing issues currently exist as policy shortcomings for the metropolitan Edmonton region?
In order from least obvious to most serious, these appear to be, and permit me to use the practical language of an ancient document – the Manitoba provincial white paper in 1970 that preceded the unification of Winnipeg (to help define the policy issues in practical terms). Selected articles from recent pages of the Edmonton SUN and JOURNAL illustrate the issues’ currency.
a. Accountability: “Many citizens in Greater Winnipeg, faced with the complexities and confused authority of a two-tier system of local government, now find themselves unable to focus clearly on the responsible authority. The citizen often knows neither whom to blame for a given situation, to whom to turn for remedy, nor to whom to tender advice if he feels he has a worthwhile idea to offer.”
In Edmonton? [Well, for example, because of intense inter-municipal competition for new development, there is a tendency for each to cut front end fees and various service charges to enhance attractiveness. This is ultimately more costly for the city-region, as an entity, in servicing, and in the wisest use of the entire land base. This elephant always lurks. Recently, (Edmonton Journal, 5 April, 2006) during debate as to whether Edmonton city should set a levy on new homes to pay for later suburban arterial roadways, administration noted that “commercial buildings would have their rate capped … to keep Edmonton competitive with surrounding municipalities such as Strathcona County.” Of the levy itself, councillor Nickel observed “that people will choose to set up outside the jurisdiction and drive to work, thereby adding to urban sprawl.”
The essential point is that no one speaks for the region at any bargaining or policy-making table.
b. Coordination: “With control of services divided, and the power to make decisions and carry them out fragmented, the community’s human resources are dissipated, and its economic capabilities to a considerable extent squandered.”
In Edmonton? [For example, Edmonton Sun, 24 November, 2005: Edmonton’s ‘City administration is recommending a one-year study to look at ways of phasing out the business tax, a levy charged to businesses on top of their property taxes … Corinne Pohlmann, provincial spokesperson for the Canadian Federation of Independent Business … said the high tax rate is sending business out of Edmonton and into surrounding municipalities like Leduc, which don’t charge a business tax.” She added that “Edmonton spends the most per capita among cities in western Canada and has the largest number of civic employees.”]
The essential point is that the City’s budget is driven by regional municipal multiplicity; it must spend more to provide service for the region.
c. Equity: “Social ills, and hence social costs, tend to concentrate in the core area. These costs have to be borne almost entirely by taxpayers in the central area, despite the fact that many of the people requiring social services and creating social costs have migrated to the central area from outlying communities.”
In Edmonton? [For example, Edmonton Sun, 6 January, 2006: speaking for the Alberta Council of Women’s Shelters, former Edmonton Mayor Jan Reimer observed that a “Lack of emergency shelters means battered women in Edmonton’s bedroom communities – like Spruce Grove, Stony Plain, or St. Albert -- often have to go as far as Whitecourt or St. Paul to find safety.”]
The essential point? People in specific need, need to live in the City.
Last, and most importantly, are the standing policy issues sufficiently disruptive as to warrant the serious reconfiguration of long-standing local institutions?
In considering American deliberations over consolidation of city-region political institutions, Michael Keating once wrote of “the consensual and technocratic tone of the official debate” (1995: 120) which tended to skirt politically touchy issues concerning taxation equity, social mobility and greater equality in service provision. Official statements instead focused, more obliquely, on service efficiencies and, occasionally, democratic accountability. Along the public policy route, specific problems concerning roadway commuting and differential quality in recreation or social service programs – matters of immediate importance to individual citizens -- quickly vanished into the arcane argot of equalized assessments, variable tax rates and bilaterally negotiated contract service arrangements.
So, let me add this final point about that … and here’s the kicker!
[Not yet published findings] In 1998, I reported that the Edmonton CMA was $5.01 per capita more expensive for municipalities to govern than the Calgary city-region. By 2004, that expenditure had become $139.85 per capita.
Importantly, for the core cities, Edmonton reported expenditures, per capita, in 1998 that were $182.63 higher than did Calgary! Six years later, in 2004, this number was $278.90 higher per person.
Over past these 6 years, then, the Edmonton region had become $135.00 per capita more costly to govern than the Calgary city-region, and the burden on central city taxpayers had grown to be $96.00 per capita greater in Edmonton than in Calgary city.
If this constitutes a direction, then the existence of multiple municipal governments will continue to constitute a genuine impediment to the economic administration of the greater Edmonton city-region -- and an obstacle to international competitiveness.
Municipal overlay – in very real terms -- stands as a barrier to realization Edmonton’s greater recognition in the ranks of world cities.
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