Institut C.D. HOWE Institute commentary NO. 458 Thinking Regionally: How to Improve Service Delivery in Canada’s Cities Canada’s growing city-regions are missing opportunities to address regional service problems in new and innovative ways through intermunicipal cooperation. Zachary Spicer and Adam Found The Institute’s Commitment to Quality About The C.D. Howe Institute publications undergo rigorous external review Authors by academics and independent experts drawn from the public and private sectors. The Institute’s peer review ensures the quality, integrity Zachary Spicer and objectivity of its policy research. The Institute will not publish any specializes in municipal study that, in its view, fails to meet these standards. finance and governance as an Assistant Professor in the The Institute requires that its authors publicly disclose any actual or Department of Political potential conflicts of interest of which they are aware. Science at Brock University. In its mission to educate and foster debate on essential public policy Adam Found issues, the C.D. Howe Institute provides nonpartisan policy advice is Metropolitan Policy Fellow, to interested parties on a non-exclusive basis. The Institute will not C.D. Howe Institute, Course endorse any political party, elected official, candidate for elected office, Instructor, Trent University, or interest group. and Manager of Corporate Assets at the City of Kawartha Lakes. As a registered Canadian charity, the C.D. Howe Institute as a matter of course accepts donations from individuals, private and public organizations, charitable foundations and others, by way of general and project support. The Institute will not accept any donation that stipulates a predetermined result or policy stance or otherwise inhibits its independence, or that of its staff and authors, in pursuing scholarly activities or disseminating research results. HOW .D E I Commentary No. 458 C N T S U T I T October 2016 T I U T S Public Investments and T E N I Infrastructure E s e s s u e q n i t t Urban Issues i i l a o l p Daniel Schwanen P s ol le i r cy u I s n es Vice President, Research tel bl lig nsa ence spe | Conseils indi $12.00 isbn 978-1-987983-03-6 issn 0824-8001 (print); issn 1703-0765 (online) The Study In Brief As city-regions across Canada continue to grow, the need for some municipal services, such as mass transit, is shifting from a local to a regional basis. This transformation is giving rise to regional servicing challenges, placing greater pressure on city-regions and their municipalities to provide services across municipal boundaries in a coordinated and streamlined fashion. For instance, cross-boundary commuters in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area face an array of unintegrated local transit systems and fare structures that are apart from the regional transit authority, Metrolinx. While mass transit in the Vancouver metropolitan area has been integrated under the regional transit authority, TransLink, local and provincial officials are looking for ways to improve the governance of TransLink. The antiquated solutions of forced amalgamation and provincial mandates on service sharing have produced few economies of scale and have greatly undermined local autonomy. Provinces need to shift their focus from imposing centralized local government to creating frameworks that promote cooperative and flexible local governance. By working together in such a framework, municipalities can identify and resolve regional servicing challenges effectively, all while keeping amalgamation at bay and their local autonomy intact. City-regions across Canada should be looking to the regional district governance model in British Columbia, where regional districts are “regional coordinators,” rather than “regional authorities” with top- down powers. The distinction matters greatly for regional governance. Along these lines, TransLink in British Columbia and Metrolinx in Ontario should include local policymakers and stakeholders on their boards more than they do today. This would result in transit services being better tailored to the municipalities served and would improve accountability and transparency. The Alberta government has been engaged in a series of changes to the Municipal Government Act, with a particular focus on mandating how municipalities are to work together. Instead of this authoritative approach, which has failed in Ontario, Alberta should create the kind of regional governance framework in which municipalities will want to work and cooperate. Intermunicipal cooperation offers municipalities an effective means to strike an efficient balance between the need to meet regional interests on the one hand and to maintain local autonomy on the other. C.D. Howe Institute Commentary© is a periodic analysis of, and commentary on, current public policy issues. Barry Norris and James Fleming edited the manuscript; Yang Zhao prepared it for publication. As with all Institute publications, the views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Institute’s members or Board of Directors. Quotation with appropriate credit is permissible. To order this publication please contact: the C.D. Howe Institute, 67 Yonge St., Suite 300, Toronto, Ontario M5E 1J8. The full text of this publication is also available on the Institute’s website at www.cdhowe.org. 2 The growth of Canada’s city-regions has created a host of policy changes as local, regional and provincial actors consider who is best placed to manage the challenges associated with rapid population expansion, sprawl and intensification. All too often, however, municipal amalgamation, costs generally increase after amalgamation, centralized regional authority and service despite repeated assertions that larger units of consolidation are seen as solutions to such problems local government will result in cost savings (Blom- of overlapping jurisdiction. Almost all provincial Hansen 2010; Dahlberg 2010; Bird 1995; Flyvbjerg governments have adopted programs of municipal 2008; Vojnovic 1998).1 Aside from an increase in amalgamation, resulting in the consolidation of costs, research has also found that amalgamation hundreds of local governments. Bigger municipal has not led to municipal service efficiencies government, Canadians are often assured by (Kushner and Siegel 2005; Found 2012; Moisio, provinces and others favouring imposed authority, Loikkanen and Oulasvirta 2010). Since municipal is better (Found 2012). Canadians are likewise consolidation rarely results in boundaries that often told that central authority is superior to encompass entire metropolitan regions – one of the decentralized coordination for addressing regional major reasons advocates often pursue amalgamation servicing challenges (Rusk 1999, 2003). Like – the costs and benefits that spill across borders many researchers, such as Bish (2001), we do not may still exist post-consolidation in areas such as subscribe to these views. Rather, we believe that transportation and land-use planning (Bahl 2010; municipalities can work together effectively to Slack and Chattopadhyay 2009). identify and solve regional servicing problems, all In this Commentary, we examine the state of while keeping amalgamation at bay and their local intermunicipal cooperation in metropolitan Canada, autonomy intact. and discuss the efficiencies that municipalities Municipal amalgamation, in fact, produces few could realize through greater cooperation. We find economies of scale, as many studies have shown that Canadian municipalities use intermunicipal (see, for example, Byrnes and Dollery 2002; Hirsch contracting only sparingly, especially compared to 1959; Bird and Slack 1993; Found 2012). Rather, their US counterparts. The authors thank Benjamin Dachis, Robert Bish, Marcel Boyer, Enid Slack and several anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts. The authors retain responsibility for any errors and for the views expressed. 1 Missing from such analysis is measurement of the quality of services delivered. Although this type of analysis would be helpful, since many of the arguments for amalgamation have focused on cost savings, it is natural to expect the debate would centre on such arguments. The research, however, is quite clear that local consolidation leads to increased servicing costs. 3 Commentary 458 We argue that: of service costs or benefits over municipal borders). • The overnanceg structures of regional transit In the past few years, many metropolitan areas authorities, such as TransLink in British have sought to confront such challenges. One is Columbia and Metrolinx in Ontario, should the Greater Toronto-Hamilton Area, in which include municipal stakeholders to promote the dozens of municipalities of different structures, tailoring of services to municipal needs as well sizes and citizenries grapple with congestion and as service accountability and transparency; and transportation planning challenges. A similar • British Columbia’s regional district system situation is present in the lower mainland of British offers a valuable example for city-regions, such as Edmonton, hoping to balance the Columbia, where Vancouver-area municipalities need for cooperative service sharing and the are looking to improve governance of their regional maintenance of local autonomy. transit body, Translink. Municipalities in and around Victoria, Overall, we find that Canadian municipalities use Edmonton and other growing metropolitan areas intermunicipal cooperation sparsely