ABSTRACT
Towards the end of the 1990s, a perplexing situation occurred in three of the largest North American cities.1 In Toronto and Los Angeles conservative political forces restructured the system of urban governance. In Montreal, the centre-left provincial government equally undertook metropolitan restructuring projects modelled partly on Toronto, but legitimised by a different ideological discourse. In Toronto an aggressively neo-liberal provincial Ontario government amalgamated six individual municipal governments and one regional administration. Simultaneously, a powerful secessionist movement began to threaten to split the San Fernando Valley, and perhaps other districts, from the City of Los Angeles. In Montreal, the provincial government merged the twenty-eight municipalities on the Island of Montreal into a single city, combined with the creation of a larger metropolitan body. In all three cases, questions of boundaries, efficiency, scale and democracy were central to the efforts to alter the form and substance of urban government (Keil 2000).
