ABSTRACT
Despite the country’s vast territory, Canada’s population is concentrated in a relatively small number of urban areas not far from the border with the United States. The border is important because the Canadian approach to governing urban areas is quite different from the American one. Growth in Canada’s population is occurring almost exclusively in urban areas and in nearby towns and villages, and the challenges to the institutions of urban governments are therefore great. Like the United States, Canada is a federation. Each of its ten provinces has constitutional jurisdiction over “institutions of municipal government” and each makes use of such jurisdiction in different ways, making it almost impossible to generalize about the Canadian approach to city governance, other than that it is different from the American approach. The chief difference is that Canadian provinces are much more interventionist than American states; they are much more likely to adopt laws relating to local municipal structures that might not have the explicit approval of local councils and voters (Sancton, 2002).
