cover image: The false panacea of city charters?

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The false panacea of city charters?

29 Jan 2016

This paper describes the origins of the “charter movement” in Toronto, the political factors behind the passage of the City of Toronto Act 2006, and the subsequent impact of the act on the city’s governance. [...] The object of this review is to: • Make the City of Toronto more fiscally sustainable, autonomous and accountable • Give it the tools it needs to thrive in the global economy and • Reshape the relationship between the province and its capital city.”19 It is significant that McGuinty referred to a “review of the City of Toronto Act.” He did so because such an act already existed: it was the act tha [...] Staff arrived at two main conclusions: 1. The modernized City of Toronto Act should effectively function as the city’s “charter by replacing the Municipal Act, 2001, the City of Toronto Act, 1997 … and most (if not all) of the 350+ private acts that currently apply to the city.” 2. The modernized City of Toronto Act should fundamentally change the way Ontario empowers Toronto. [...] Toronto’s former chief planner did raise the issue in a 2005 collection of essays sponsored by the Jacobs-Broadbent group: “ While an appeal body to a council decision may be justified, I believe the powers of the OMB need to be confined to the actual merits of the appeal, not the entire application. [...] In any event, there does not appear to have been any radical change in how politicians and administrators in Toronto think about the city’s new legal capacity.34 Since the passage of the City of Toronto Act, the court challenge to the city’s authority that has received the most attention is the one that contested the authority of city council to prohibit the sale, possession, or consumption of sha
municipal government municipal home rule

Authors

Sancton, Andrew

Pages
18
Published in
Ottawa, Ontario

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