Comparing metropolitan governance: The cases of Montreal and Toronto

This paper compares how the globally influenced transformation of metropolitan institutions in two of Canada's most important city-regions (Toronto and Montreal) changes these regions' 'capacity to act'. Can we speak of the emergence of a collective actor at the city-regional scale? Is there a political, territorial, institutional frame at the metropolitan scale that enables states to coordinate between economic and social activities, actors and processes and to produce coherent public policies? We look specifically at the effectiveness of newly created governance structures in terms of their capacity to change the existing mediation channels between civil society and metropolitan institutions. The paper brings together two approaches to urban governance: (1) seeing city-regions as unified actors; (2) focusing on internal struggles and competition. These two approaches are linked to processes of globalization, new metropolitan institutionalization, and participation of civil society at the local and metropolitan scale. Looking specifically at policies designed to increase international competitiveness, transportation policies and environmental policies, we will study how different urban-regional cultures in Montreal and Toronto are reflected in public policy? While being a 'nationally' scaled comparison, this project must take into account the specific differences between Francophone and Anglophone Canada, between the different civic traditions in Montreal and Toronto and different traditional significance attributed to the scale and nature of metropolitan governance structures and variously scaled agency in both cities. We argue that this makes our comparison in many ways more like an international comparison.