Introduction
This book discusses the ways in which the federal government and federal policy interrelate with local-level needs, practices, and policies. It is part of the collective project on Public Policy and Municipalities headed up by Professor Robert Young of the University of Western Ontario and funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada under their former program, the Major Collaborative Research Initiatives. For the past six years, a large team of scholars from Canadian universities and abroad has been undertaking a research program on public policy and municipalities. Our basic goal has been to develop better understanding of the role of governments and social forces in shaping public policy in Canadian municipalities.
A large number of studies of the federal government’s role in public policy and municipalities were undertaken as part of the research. They included a series of background overviews of the way the federal government has historically organized itself and accorded prominence to municipal issues as part of its overall responsibilities and policy agenda. These studies were published in the fall 2009 edition of Canadian Public Administration. But this book turns the perspective of the overall project upside down by starting with federal programs, not municipal ones, and seeing how these programs influenced local policies and worked with local authorities and local civil societies. We set out to understand how federal policies had evolved over time, through changes in who was in power in the federal government, in provincial governments, and at the municipal level. In addition, and casting the net still wider, we wanted to understand the role of changes in the issues of civil society and of Canadian society more largely, and we wanted to understand how these factors could be understood through our examination of federal policies.
The context of the study makes clear the period covered by this book. The chapters were written in the period of the Harper minority government and reach back to different periods, depending on their particular focus. But none extends into the period of the Harper majority government. For this reason we see the chapters less as descriptions of policy and more as models of analysis, with the objective of understanding the factors underlying policy development during a particular period and within a particular context.
Existence of a minority government at the federal level does indeed affect federal-local relations as federal programs are developed. In this situation, the federal government must simultaneously keep one eye on its status within Parliament while worrying about the way in which the program advances the federal interest and while being conscious at the same time of the need for local willingness to participate in the program. A recent book by Marc Gervais, Challenges of Minority Governments in Canada (2012), provides much more detail about the context of minority governments, whereas this volume is more concerned with explaining federal policy development within the context of multilevel governance. So given this concern, how can we understand the ways in which the federal government does policy development in a multilevel governance system?
In examining the rich case studies that our authors had produced, we realized that they had built a framework by which we could read the evolution of federal policies. Three interrelated themes build this framework: the role of frames, the instruments used by the federal government in these programs, and the underlying significance of demographic changes in Canadian society. The role of frames is central, both for governments and for other actors, including social forces. How programs have been framed has changed over time, often as the result of changes in political leadership at the federal level. These changes have occurred within the federal government, as new political leaders have sought to put their stamp on issues, and in the policy repertoire of other actors, as they have sought a more visible and prominent role in the marketplace of policy ideas. One simple illustration of the power of frames is the change, even within the period of the Liberal federal government, from the New Deal for Cities to the New Deal for Cities and Communities. The framing of the program may still sound sensitive to local needs, but in fact it leads to a very different system of the distribution of program funds and can be seen as a realpolitik reaction to provincial concerns. So the federal government can frame or reframe policies to either suggest continuity or radical change, and this gives it an important resource. It need not actually change the program, but it can reframe it in a way that links it to the government’s politics.
Three of our chapters, in particular, illustrate the importance of frames as a way of understanding federal policy evolution: those discussing place-based community development, emergency planning, and homelessness. Neil Bradford (chapter 2) examines place-based community development by focusing on four programs and illustrating that the programs that were or could most easily be framed within the Conservative government’s preoccupation with economic development were continued and that the programs that were more socially oriented and characterized by efforts to work through genuine multilevel partnerships, such as the Vancouver Agreement and Action for Neighbourhood Change, were terminated. In the same vein, the social economy initiative, which was already clearly framed as an initiative of Paul Martin and was difficult to frame as conventional economic development programming, was also terminated.
The chapter on emergency planning, by Luc Juillet and Junichiro Koji (chapter 3), explicitly uses the idea of frames to explain the outcome of the parliamentary debates on amending the legislation on emergency planning. The frames were simple – classic federalism and multilevel governance – and classic federalism won. Municipal actors, in particular, argued that effective and successful action in the area of emergency planning called for tri-level policy implementation and therefore a greater role for municipalities in the federal legislation on emergency planning. However, unlike what happened in some of the other program studies here, tri-level involvement was explicitly rejected, and the legislation continued to follow the pattern of classic federalism: the federal government dealt only with the provinces and left the provinces to deal with “their” municipalities. Had the framing of the debate been about effective action, the outcome might have been different, but explicitly framing the debate as between multilevel governance and classic federalism explains the outcome.
The third area in which framing is central is the chapter on homelessness (chapter 4), written by Fran Klodawsky and Leonore Evans. Indeed the whole issue of homelessness can be seen as a reframing of housing policy. The federal government at the time of the Chrétien government had helped to solve its fiscal problems by moving out of the social housing field, “remembering” that housing was a provincial policy. The authors take up the story of the origins of the federal homelessness policy, which was influenced by Toronto municipal politics (led by the role of the then Toronto alderman Jack Layton) and civil-society advocacy, the feeling of a homeless “crisis” strengthened by the impact of media attention, and the very clear influence of a federal political actor, Claudette Bradshaw. The chapter then goes on to address a number of implementation issues, influenced by place-based thinking and by the shift in framing from cities to cities and communities, which took the program from a focus on the ten largest cities to include sixty-one municipalities, again an example of the power of frames. The authors conclude in coming back to the broad context for understanding this policy area that successful action on homelessness can come only through a housing policy framed as such. The chapter also indicates the close relationship between framing, the first of our three themes, and the choice of policy instruments by the federal government, our second theme. The authors had argued that two frames, the influence of place-based thinking and the shift to cities and communities, had been influential in defining the policy instruments used in the program. Thus the choices made around policy instruments provide another way in which the federal government can target policy within a multilevel governance framework.
Moving to the theme of policy instruments, choices made about which instruments to use will also affect the actors that will be mobilized, the roles these actors will play, and whether or not responsibility for the key implementation decisions will be shared or centrally controlled. The gas tax program is described in chapter 5, by Erika Adams and Allan M. Maslove, as “the most significant federal fiscal intervention into urban affairs in more than a quarter of a century,” and their description of the initiation of this program underlines two factors: the broader context of building a federal policy on communities and the increasing strength of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) as a lobbyist for municipal governments. The authors outline some of the innovative features of the policy but also argue that it is important not to overemphasize the innovative nature of this policy or to assume that it will fundamentally alter federal-provincial-municipal relations in Canada. The conclusion is that it is more continuity than innovation, although one can point to some innovative implementation choices.
In chapter 6, on the redevelopment of the Toronto waterfront, Pierre Filion and Christopher Sanderson also deal with choices about policy instruments. The authors argue that it was not the failure of land-use planning but rather the failure of inter-agency coordination and collaboration that led to the less than successful outcome of this planning exercise. The authors apply an institutional theory perspective to the description of program implementation and argue that by keeping the idea of agency as part of the approach, it is possible to mitigate the tendency towards path dependency of an institutional approach. It was therefore not the instrument that led to the lack of success but rather the processes of implementing that instrument through collaboration that did not work.
Finally, chapter 7, on the infrastructure program, focuses on the question of whether federal political changes affect policies. In answering this question, Eric Champagne pays great attention to the issues of implementation of policies, to the specific tools used, and to the issues of accountability that have arisen. In answer to this central question, it is clear that the Conservative government has continued the policy tool of its predecessors in funding infrastructure expenditures at the local level. Indeed Champagne’s argument is basically that the continuation has more to do with the fact that municipalities are increasingly relevant policy actors and that this change is shifting traditional Canadian federalism towards a model of multilevel governance. The policy instruments were chosen to entice local participation and therefore to increase pressure from the local level on the provincial level. The federal government gets to be very visible in its policy implementation through choices of policy instruments. This has involved a stronger role as a lobbyist for the FCM and a willingness of the provinces, in difficult economic times, to tolerate federal activity.
Our third theme moves away from the active decisions of governments and/or of civil society actors and focuses on the importance of major underlying demographic shifts in Canadian society. They suggest that, irrespective of ideological predilections or changes in the framing of the policies, major changes in the organization and composition of Canadian society may explain public policy evolution and its continuation in spite of political changes. The chapter on child care policy, by Rianne Mahon (chapter 8), can be seen in this context. The evolution of child care policy obviously relates to the increase in the percentage of women with young children who are part of the paid labour force and particularly to the large numbers of such women who are working in the larger metropolitan centres. This policy issue is not always seen as having an urban or community lens, but as Mahon argues, “childcare forms an important part of local social infrastructure, and it is at the local level that the pieces can be brought together to form an integrated whole.” Her chapter describes the situations in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and Calgary and compares the places with a mandated municipal role (Toronto and Calgary), an unofficial but real role (Vancouver) and a neighbourhood-level integration within a strong upper-level role (Montreal). However, Canadian policy in this area is described by Mahon as having neither a coherent national framework nor a real local role through devolution. The area can be seen as one of continuing federal policy failure.
Another major demographic shift has been the rapidly changing nature of immigration to Canada, with increasing difficulties, over the past ten to twenty years, of recent immigrants integrating economically but also socially, culturally, and politically. Chapter 9, by Caroline Andrew and Rachida Abdourhamane Hima, examines the increasingly multilevel nature of immigration policy, and particularly two dimensions: the growing role of municipalities in immigrant settlement policies and the growing involvement of minority francophone communities and organizations in this policy area. Theses developments require both vertical and horizontal coordination of the major players. One of the interesting aspects of this policy field is that, despite Prime Minister Harper’s views about federalism, as stated by him following his electoral victory, the federal government funded an immigrant settlement community strategic planning and implementation program in Ontario (the Local Immigration Partnerships) that was subsequently rolled out across the country. This would seem to suggest the strength of these basic demographic shifts that argue for the continuity of programming, despite political and/or administrative changes. Not only did programming continue, but its form was far away from classic federalism; it was all about coordination, consultation, and participation across jurisdictions.
Finally, chapter 10, which deals with urban Aboriginal policy, is related to the increasing urban presence of the Aboriginal population in Canada. Frances Abele and Katherine Graham trace the initiation of the Urban Aboriginal Strategy by the Martin government and its continuation, with minor changes, by the Harper government. In examining the history of this policy field, the authors focus on the changing demographics and institutional organization and strategy of the urban Aboriginal population and on the changing understanding of Canadian cities of the importance of engagement with those populations. Federal policy in relation to Aboriginal populations in an urban context has been very slow in developing, but the alignment with the increase in Aboriginal organization and in municipal political will are seen by Abele and Graham as positive. So major demographic shifts can influence policy responses, but often the ways in which these demographic shifts are taken up, or not, by a variety of government and civil society actors also influence the relationship between demography and policy responses.
In introducing the case studies we have highlighted the importance of frames, of instruments, and of demographics as allowing us to better see the ways in which the federal government increasingly takes account of the multilevel framework to think through its policy changes and continuities. We see these as the basic architecture of the politics and policy of federal-local governance, but we invite you to enjoy seeing how the different policy areas add walls, doors, and furnishings to this basic architecture.
REFERENCE
Gervais, Marc. 2012. Challenges of Minority Governments in Canada. Ottawa: Invenire.