ABSTRACT

The federal government has been very reluctant to explicitly argue a federal policy role in urban development, although clearly federal policies, economic, social, cultural and environmental, have major impacts in Canadian urban development. Urban policy in Canada has therefore been dominated by provincial-municipal relations. Provincial governments play a very important role, both in establishing legislative frameworks for municipal governments and in financing certain areas of municipal policy. One of the major characteristics of the federalism literature is to paint the Canadian federal system as fixed, or fossilised, despite the clear evidence of considerable change over time. Multilevel governance (MLG) is an improvement over what the author's have described as the conventional Canadian federalism literature and this for two reasons; the reference to multilevel and that to governance. A concrete example of a Canadian organisation active in the area of women's urban safety help to illustrate the author's argument about the impact of currently existing Canadian federalism on women's urban safety.