ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the situation in Montreal and Toronto in the second half of the nineteenth century, a time when municipal government was characterised by the practice of regulation. It presents the principal causes which led the two municipalities to conceive of their role and their place in the city differently, and which led to the adoption of interventionist policies. In order to grasp the conditions which limited public action in the nineteenth century, as well as those favoured its development at the turn of the twentieth. The chapter considers changes in the local political scene and those which arose within municipal governments. The characteristics of urban governance in Canada were intimately linked to the conditions in which the municipal system was born in the middle of the nineteenth century. In Canada, this change was the result of the renewal of local élites, the democratisation of political life and the formation of a municipal bureaucracy.
