Its objective is to spark and inform public debate, and to engage the academic and policy communities around important issues of municipal finance and governance. [...] It links municipal success to factors underpinning low interest rates and stellar municipal creditworthiness, and attributes the superior conditions of federal and provincial borrowers to volatility in global financial markets and patterns of foreign investment in Canada’s government bond markets. [...] The analysis reveals the resilience of Canada’s municipal borrowers in the face of global credit shocks and the virtues of Canada’s tightly regulated system of municipal borrowing. [...] To date, studies of municipal borrowing have focused on normative arguments for or against debt financing (Kitchen 2006); descriptions of borrowing rules (Amborski and Nichols 2010); the origins of those rules (Tassonyi 1997); and the implications of fiscal rules for fiscal discipline and health (Bird and Tassonyi 2003). [...] These measures are (1) absolute borrowing costs; (2) demand for long-term debt; (3) the quality and size of the investor base; and (4) the relative borrowing costs of the municipal, provincial, and federal sectors.