Conclusion
We hope that while reading the chapters in this volume, you have had an opportunity to reflect on the federal role in municipalities in each of the policy fields and interventions. They cover a wide range of public policy, and each offers particular subject-specific knowledge and analytical insights. The reader will also have had an opportunity to reflect on the three themes that emerge from the case collection. As discussed in the introduction, we believe that these are the role of frames as markers of federal policy over time and as a way of understanding how federal policy has evolved; how the choice of policy instruments is crucial in shaping the kinds of policy actors from governments and civil society (as well as the private sector) that will be involved, the role they will play, and the modalities of policy implementation; and finally, the role of changing demographics as a driver of federal policy priorities, choices, and frames in the municipal arena.
This collection also raises other questions. Importantly, these are largely left unanswered. Perhaps this is a result of the diversity of the cases. Perhaps it is because of the breadth of the overarching research program of Public Policy and Municipalities of which these federally focused studies were just one (but a major) part. Regardless, we think it is important to raise and briefly explore these questions by way of conclusion. This is intended to spur further thought and further research, either on federal policy and municipalities in specific policy areas or comparatively across fields and interventions. Equally important, there is significant scope for comparative research that focuses on the federal role in Canada and in other federal states. This type of comparative research is particularly important in the context of international competiveness and the global challenge of creating and maintaining sustainable cities and communities in the broadest sense of the phrase.
By way of conclusion, we think it is important to raise one outstanding analytical question from the construct of this federal policy case set. The research began by distinguishing between “policy fields,” and “policy interventions.” Policy fields were conceived to be established domains in which the federal government has a constitutional responsibility or has exhibited a clear interest over time. These fields include Aboriginal policy, emergency planning, infrastructure, and federal property. Policy interventions, on the other hand, were intended to denote areas in which the federal government had begun interest and action on a more contingent basis in response to a “crisis” (homelessness), the need for federal political commitment to demonstrated localized needs (community economic development, the gas tax), or to relentless lobbying by a variety of social forces (child care). It is worth noting that the original research design for the Public Policy and Municipalities program intentionally did not specify the complete set of policy interventions to be studied. This was to allow flexibility to respond to changing political winds. Adams and Maslove’s study of the gas tax, for example, was added as the research program proceeded.
So it remains to consider if there is any difference between policy fields and interventions? At this point we conclude that the difference may be more one of degree than of kind. One reason is that federal interest and action in policy fields ebbs and flows. While there may be well-established federal machinery to deal with Aboriginal issues and issues related to federal property, for example, the priority attached to these and other policy fields varies over time. Abele and Graham’s chapter on urban Aboriginal policy demonstrates this quite clearly. This is reasonably consistent with the course of federal action in the policy interventions explored in this volume. In the case of child care, for example, the federal government has been drawn (generally reluctantly) into action by peaks in the noise made by social forces concerned with the issue. In the case of the gas tax, the federal government intervened, engaged in substantial policy innovation and then regularized the gas tax regime. Metaphorically, it seems to have said “job done.”
A further sign that the constructs of fields and interventions may be on a continuum is that the federal government has shown increasing willingness to adapt traditional machinery for policy fields to the perceived need to deal with diversity among municipalities in the country. The Urban Aboriginal Strategy provides a prime example of this. As federal action in a policy field, the federal machinery associated with the government’s response shares many characteristics with federal interventions in homelessness and community economic development. The focus in all three cases on place-based policy is a marker of this.
Looking to future research, it will be important to explore further the similarities and differences between federal action in municipalities in traditional policy fields and interventions. The overarching theme of path dependency explored in the introduction and evident in a number of the cases seems to be particularly important in this regard. Once the federal government engages in an issue that has a municipal dimension, is there a set of actors – municipalities themselves, social forces, provincial/territorial governments – that effectively lock the federal government into some level of engagement, however variable, for the long term? Tracking the nature of these engagements and federal adaptation and learning over time will constitute an important role for research to help us understand the adaptability of the federal government to changing realities at the municipal level.
Further research should also improve our understanding of particular political dynamics at the federal level. As stated in the introduction, the analysis for all of the cases in this volume concludes before the election of the Harper majority government in 2011. The case studies presented here are intended to be models of analysis, not political commentary. But political commentary does lead to some fruitful understandings. These include the role of ideology in shaping the actions of federal governments and the influence of majority/minority status of the ruling party in shaping policy initiatives that affect municipalities. This speaks particularly to the themes of path dependency (the extent of movement from the already charted course) and demographics (federal policy to expand electoral support for the party in power) that emerge from this volume.
This leads to the question of policy learning. The phrase “the federal role in municipalities” implies a unity of purpose and action. In this context, unity does not imply uniformity. It should, however, suggest a collective memory and current consciousness within the federal government about the municipal sphere. Given our democratic political reality, the federal bureaucracy would seem to have a key role in nurturing both memory and current consciousness. What can we suggest in this vein?
Zachary Spicer examines directly the question of federal policy learning in terms of formal federal-urban engagement. His article compares the Ministry of State for Urban Affairs (MSUA) of the 1970s with the Ministry of State for Infrastructure and Communities (MSIC) from 2004 to 2006 from a policy-learning and lessondrawing framework. He thinks that “there is a convincing argument that the comparison between MSUA and MSIC reflects policy learning” (2010, 117) but concludes that it was both specific policy learning by the Privy Council Office but also thirty years of “general institutional experience with intergovernmental and interdepartmental interaction” (2010, 116).
The federal government has also experimented with a variety of internal approaches to building an understanding within the federal bureaucracy of potential appropriate federal policy approaches to multilevel governance. One such example was the “federal family” (an informal community of practice within the federal government that was active in reflecting on “place-based” policy and the role of the federal government between 2007 and 2009), and another can be seen in some of the work of the Policy Research Initiative, as illustrated by its publication on place-based sustainability initiatives. These internal federal activities are particularly interesting from the point of view of federal leaning. The document produced by the federal family, “This Much We Know” (Plan Canada 2009), clearly demonstrates a learning perspective.
Finally, in their overview of federal machinery related to urban affairs since the days of the Ministry of State for Urban Affairs, Graham and Stoney conclude that there has been a shift in the federal approach from a rather dirigist model (MSUA within the federal government and with provinces and municipalities) to a more collaborative strategy (Graham and Stoney 2009). Their review suggests federal learning from bitter experience.
Looking at our evidence, the urban Aboriginal and community economic development cases in this volume also suggest evidence of some appetite for federal learning and sustained experimentation with place-based approaches. The gas tax case also demonstrates a federal willingness for varied approaches to policy implementation across jurisdictions that appear to have yielded salutary political and practical results. On the other hand, Filion and Sanderson’s study of Toronto waterfront development over the past century (chapter 6) suggests the dominance of path dependency and inter-agency rivalries, rather than consideration of “good public policy” in the federal approach.
We can conclude, then, that the federal government has sometimes engaged in policy learning, both with respect to the machinery it deploys for engagement on municipal issues and with respect to instrument choice and the modalities of implementation. Interestingly, if we look at policies that were implemented by the Chretien and Martin governments (homelessness policies, infrastructure policies, urban Aboriginal policies) and continued by the Harper governments, there was considerable continuity in substance, albeit with changes in political frame. Nonetheless, intra-federal rivalries remain important, limiting collective learning and action. These rivalries may be institutional, shaped by department and agency perceptions about their particular role in the policy firmament and by their past practice. They may also have their roots in competition among ministers vying for political attention and power. More research needs to be done about the conditions for policy learning within the federal government on municipal affairs and the institutions and practices that can support it.
A discussion of federal policy learning would be incomplete without examining provincial and municipal policy learning. Provincial governments have been relatively small players in many of the chapters in this volume. The provincial role in public policy and municipalities is, however, the major focus of other volumes of the broad research program of which this book is a part. But looking at the evidence from the cases presented here, we suggest that provincial policy learning and, equally important, provincial policy capacity with regard to municipalities may be declining. We also observe signs that municipal governments may be becoming more aggressive policy learners and policy players. The same may be true for civil society organizations. These observations require scrutiny in future municipal policy research. They suggest a changing dynamic in the national policy process that may be more or less shaped by formal constitutional considerations.
In our view, this conclusion and contemporary conditions suggest the need for ongoing research specifically on the federal government’s policy analysis capabilities related to changing conditions at the municipal level. If changing demographic patterns have been a significant driver of federal action, one needs to ask if the government will continue to have the core analytical resources and capabilities to undertake grounded policy analysis and action. This question is prompted by changes in the mandate and capacity of Statistics Canada, as well as by the continued erosion of internal policy capacity within the federal public service. We think of policy capacity as primarily residing in the national capital. Monitoring federal headquarters capacity will be important. Further, however, it will be important to monitor the impact of the shift to e-government in terms of having federal public servants in field offices, not only as eyes and ears but as potential policy implementation entrepreneurs, enabling further adaptation of federal initiatives to local conditions.
Moving from the sometimes intricate dance of policy learning over time, we think it is also important to conclude by asking whether the concept of “meta-governance” is useful in thinking about an appropriate federal approach to areas of concern to municipalities? What do we mean by this?
For us, the concept of meta-governance in the domain of federalmunicipal affairs implies two key elements. The first would be an overarching federal government strategy for action and for thinking about the impact of its policies and programs on municipalities. In a sense, this represents looking at federal action through a municipal lens.
The second element would be federal determination that it should focus thinking and action about policy issues in the paradigm of multi-scalar networked governance. This is the perspective that Bradford builds on in his study of the federal communities agenda. By this we mean that the federal government’s horizon consciously would extend to listening to the voices and thinking about the roles of many segments of society in dealing with policy issues related to municipalities. Certainly this would include municipal governments and the provinces and territories. But it also would include civil society organizations, the private sector, and social forces. In the metagovernance paradigm, these diverse actors make significant use of networks to achieve influence and agency. If nothing else, the selection of cases in this volume points to the diversity of actors involved in federal matters that affect municipalities as well as in local issues that may call for some federal policy action. As Bradford suggests in his discussion of meta-governance (chapter 2), the ability of the federal government to work with the diverse networks interested in municipal matters and the presence of some type of medium to hold the networks together are key requisites of this mode of governance.
In short, the concept of meta-governance in federal-municipal affairs suggests both a breadth of understanding and engagement and a grand design (which may change over time) as defining characteristics of the federal government.
There were two periods in post–World War II Canada when the federal government seemed to think about municipal issues from a meta-governance perspective. The first was in the mid- to late 1970s. It was characterized, however briefly, by institutional reform designed to foster an urban lens across the government through the coordinating mandate of the Ministry of State for Urban Affairs. The three Tri-level Conferences on Public Finance convened during the same period also suggested, at least to municipal governments, that the federal government was willing to consider changes in fiscal federalism that would yield strategic long-term benefits to municipalities.
The second was the Martin government’s 2004 “New Deal for Communities,” which Bradford ably describes. His conclusions about the traction of meta-governance precepts in the Martin Communities Agenda speak for themselves. There have been challenges in federal “learning, linking and leveraging.” Looking at the 1970s, there are somewhat different reasons why the federal government did not sustain a meta-governance approach. They include resistance within the federal government, both at the political and the bureaucratic levels to coordination by MSUA and the fear factor that emerged once the federal government (alerted by the Department of Finance) realized the potential impact of changes to the federal fiscal regime in response to the challenges of urbanization (Feldman and Graham 1979; Graham and Stoney 2009).
It seems reasonable to conclude, then, that the municipal metagovernance paradigm described above represents a concept that will never be fully realized. Nonetheless, it is in our view a valuable task for future research to explore the federal-municipal policy arena to determine to what extent different elements of the paradigm are being realized or not and what the implications are for good public policy. We suggest this as an important stream of policy-making research on municipal affairs. This volume has identified three important drivers affecting the federal government’s role and performance on matters of key interest to municipalities. Much more remains to be learned in support of good federal-municipal policy.
REFERENCES
Feldman, Lionel, and Katherine Graham. 1979. Bargaining for Cities: Municipalities and Intergovernmental Relations – An Assessment. Montreal: Institute for Research on Public Policy.
Graham, Katherine, and Christopher Stoney. 2009. “Federal Municipal Relations in Canada: The Changing Organizational Landscape.” Canadian Public Administration 52 (3).
Plan Canada, Special Edition. 2009. 19–22.
Spicer, Zachary. 2010. “Institutional Policy Learning and Formal Federal-Urban Engagement in Canada.” Commonwealth Journal of Local Governance (7): 99-119.