Municipal Politics, Councils, and Elections PDF

# CHAPTER 9 ## Municipal Politics, Councils, and Elections Much of the material in previous chapters has been about the structures of local government: why they exist; what they do; how they have changed. Because Canada's Constitution places "municipal institutions" under provincial jurisdiction, a...

# CHAPTER 9 ## Municipal Politics, Councils, and Elections Much of the material in previous chapters has been about the structures of local government: why they exist; what they do; how they have changed. Because Canada's Constitution places "municipal institutions" under provincial jurisdiction, any student of the structures of Canadian local government has to know a great deal about decisions made by provincial legislatures. So far, we have paid more attention to what provinces have decided than to how municipal councils work. In this part of the book we change our focus and begin to look at what actually goes on within municipal politics. We shall not be able to ignore provinces altogether, however, because they are responsible not just for deciding about the functions and boundaries of municipal governments, but also for making the basic rules of the game for municipal politics. We need to know about these rules in order to understand Canadian municipal politics. But understanding politics at any level involves far more than understanding formal rules. We have to understand informal rules and conventions and, more important still, we have to understand how certain people acquire power to get things done or to prevent other people from doing what they want to do. This part of the book, therefore, is primarily about power in Canadian municipal government. Chapter 9 is introductory as it outlines some of the important factors involved in understanding Canadian municipal politics, councils, and elections. ## Municipal Politics and Political Parties The formal source of power in municipal government is the municipal council, the members of which are elected. Later in this chapter we shall be examining how these elections actually work in Canada. But before getting caught up in these important details, we need to know something about how Canadians (and people in other democratic countries) have conceptualized municipal politics over time. ## Municipal Politics as a Reflection of Social Elites Anyone who has ever lived in a small town knows that many community decisions are made not in open meetings of official organizations such as municipal councils but in private, informal get-togethers of a few local notables. To the extent that this really is the case in whatever size of town we might be studying, the formal rules of municipal government are of very little importance, because everyone understands that what happens in municipal councils is a mere rubber-stamping of decisions that have already been made elsewhere. Often, the really powerful people in small towns are elected to municipal councils. If they are, their power in the community does not derive from being a municipal councillor but from being part of the small informal group that decides things. If they do not run for local office, they are not any less powerful, because real decisions are not made in the municipal council anyway. This way of viewing power in local communities was given considerable credence in the mid-twentieth century by various American sociologists who studied community power. One of the most famous of these studies looked at how local decisions were made in Atlanta, Georgia. The author discovered a small and powerful elite that, indeed, effectively made most of the important local decisions, whether such decisions were formally within the purview of the municipal council or not. Community power studies generated significant controversies in American political science, some of which we shall address in Chapter 11. The most comprehensive study of power in a single Canadian small town was written by David M. Rayside in 1991. It focused on Alexandria, in eastern Ontario. This is what Rayside had to say about community power in Alexandria: Because Alexandria's town council is preoccupied with avoiding controversy, and because initiatives for change often come from outside municipal government circles, understanding power and influence over community affairs requires complex analysis. Earlier in the area's history, political, social, and economic hierarchies coincided more clearly, and locating a single set of notable figures with influence in a variety of domains would have been relatively straightforward. In late twentieth-century Alexandria, influence over community affairs in some ways still seems concentrated in a small and relatively cohesive circle of associates, in ways that parallel the findings of much of the community power literature. In other ways, though, influence seems dispersed, hardly located within the town at all, let alone within a small circle of notables. Much of Rayside's book is aimed at showing how governmental and corporate institutions outside Alexandria were increasingly making the most important decisions for the community. This is a theme largely neglected in the American literature, in part because it was written decades earlier before such centralizing forces gained so much strength, and perhaps because American state governments have been more careful about intruding on local decisions. In any event, Rayside gives us few reasons to study small-town politics in Canada: no one wants to launch local political conflict and important decisions for the town are made somewhere else besides. In the early days of major Canadian cities, provincial governments established municipalities and left them relatively free to decide local issues for themselves. But cursory glances into the backgrounds of the kinds of people who tended to get elected to municipal councils suggest that service on a municipal council for a community's elite was not unlike service today on the board of a local art gallery or symphony orchestra. Election to municipal councils was "arranged" for the right people; being a member was very much part-time and continuing with one's regular business activities was completely normal. For such people, making decisions about city business was in large measure simply an extension of their other business activities. In Canada's major cities today, membership on municipal councils is most assuredly not dominated by social and/or economic elites. The presidents of the big banks are unlikely to appear as participants in Toronto's municipal election campaigns; the same is true in Calgary of the big energy companies. Sociologists would say that this is a sign of functional specialization and role differentiation, a characteristic of all complex urban societies. But Marxist sociologists (and political scientists) would be quick to point out that such specialization and differentiation do not prevent the major economic forces in society from controlling decisions apparently made by democratically elected politicians. In the next chapter, we shall examine a variant of this general claim: that because the main economic role of Canadian urban municipal governments is to control urban development, these governments are really controlled by urban developers. But, whatever we might think of the general validity of Marxist analysis in the early twenty-first century, we must, in our analyses of municipal decision-making, keep in mind the possibility that governmental structures and elections might not be very important, because economic forces-some difficult to observe and to understand-might be the key determinants of local political outcomes. A related possibility, explicitly stated by Rayside, is that important decisions for most local communities are made somewhere else by big corporations or by central (provincial or federal) governments. ## Municipal Politics and National Parties By the mid- to late nineteenth century, a larger proportion of adult males had been granted the vote and political parties had become increasingly important in mobilizing voters. In Europe, working-class voters were mobilized primarily by parties on the left: Marxist or social democratic. In North American cities, where there were usually many recent immigrants, parties often mobilized votes through "urban political machines." The key characteristic of such machines was that their organizers (or "bosses") promised material rewards often, jobs-in return for votes. In the United States, a huge amount of literature is devoted to these urban political machines, much of it attempting to determine whether their levels of obvious corruption were justified by the great social gains experienced by the ethnic groups (especially the Irish) who benefited from their newly found political power. Bosses of American urban political machines were key figures in national political parties usually the Democrats, but not always. As recently as 1960, the boss of Chicago's Democratic machine played a key role in the election of John F. Kennedy to the presidency of the United States, perhaps by dumping a few crucial ballot boxes into Lake Michigan instead of having them tilt Illinois towards Kennedy's opponent, Richard Nixon. By promising electoral support for state and national political candidates, urban bosses could gain more resources (jobs, contracts, projects) for their own supporters. Regardless of their national importance, these bosses maintained considerable local autonomy. In Europe, however, socialist parties tended to run candidates at all levels of government, and candidates for local office often had little room to manoeuvre in addressing local issues. Some examples of urban political machines and of socialist parties in local politics crop up in Canada but, compared to elsewhere, they have been minimal. On the other hand, and more so than perhaps in any other democratic country, Canadian municipal politics is generally not influenced by national political parties. Again, unlike most federations, Canada has political parties at the federal and provincial levels that-except for the New Democratic Party (NDP)-are structurally separate from each other. Because municipalities are under provincial jurisdiction, we might at least expect provincial parties to be involved in municipal politics, but little evidence suggests that is the case. To understand why, we must know about the reform movement that transformed the politics of North American cities over a hundred years ago. ## The Era of Municipal Reform By the second half of the nineteenth century, large cities in North America had become unhealthy, dirty, and corrupt. The urban reform (or Progressive) movement was about cleansing cities, in every sense of the word. The movement marked the beginning of professional social work, urban planning, public health, public libraries, and serious attempts to promote temperance and honest and efficient municipal government. This last concern is most relevant to our focus. With regard to municipal government, reformers wanted to rid the cities of political machines, most obviously by minimizing the role of political parties in municipal politics. They proposed various institutional reforms to achieve this objective, some of which will be examined later. For the current discussion, we need only consider their desire to have small city councils composed of members elected not for their party qualifications but for their potential to make policy decisions based on the overall best interests of the city. Reformers wanted the administrative apparatus of the city to be taken from party hacks and turned over to trained professionals headed by a city manager, someone with special skills in coordinating and controlling a wide range of city services in accordance with modern administrative practices. The North American reform movement had strong support in Canada, especially in the largest cities, Montreal and Toronto. As other cities grew larger, especially in Western Canada, reform influence spread there as well. For our purposes in this section, the most important effect of the reform movement was to convince most Canadian urban municipal voters that political parties served no purpose in municipal politics because they introduced political factors into decisions that should be based only on sound business-like and technical principles. One of the best-known reform maxims was that "There is no political way to pave a road." In pre-reform times, road-building was assumed to be the lucrative privilege of the supporters of whoever was in power. One of the great reform accomplishments was to convince most people that contracts for roadwork (and other municipal activities) should go only to those who can best balance quality and price. A hundred years ago, decisions to build particular roads were generally assumed to be good decisions; now decisions about building particular roads are almost always subject to genuine political debate. In short, it remains the case that there is no political way to pave a road; the only way to get approval to build a road is through a political process, usually in a municipality. Because of the ongoing influence of the reform movement, most candidates and voters in municipal politics seem to value the non-partisan approach. They do not want political parties of any kind to be overtly involved in municipal elections, even though parties often play important roles that are generally invisible, except to the most careful of observers. Especially in smaller cities, it is common for successful candidates to proclaim their independence from all parties and their attachment to making decisions in accordance with "sound business principles." Few of the candidates who make such declarations are aware that they are in fact parroting the talk of anti-party reformers from over a hundred years ago. ## Local Political Parties in Canada An important student of American urban politics, Paul Peterson, has suggested that political parties that exist solely at the municipal level cannot be sustained because the issues are not sufficiently important. In national politics, parties are formed and sustained around major political issues such as war and peace, free trade, and social class. The media pay close attention to what the parties do, and individual voters form relatively long-lasting party attachments of varying degrees of intensity. Such factors generally do not exist at the municipal level. The main political cleavage in municipal politics is often between pro-development and anti-development groups, but such a division seems incapable of generating ongoing party allegiances, perhaps because people's attitudes to development tend to be affected by where it is taking place (near or far from home) or the state of the local economy at any particular point in time. In any event, two major Canadian cities-Vancouver and Montreal-provide evidence to suggest that, in the Canadian context at least, Peterson might be wrong. ### Vancouver In the 1936 Vancouver municipal election, candidates from the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF, predecessor of the current NDP) won three of eight seats on the city council. As we have seen, the idea of socialists running for municipal office was not unusual, especially during the Depression. But their success caused local Liberals, Conservatives, and business people to come together in 1937 to form the Non-Partisan Association (NPA). By the end of the decade the CCF "was spent as a municipal force." The NPA-a political group that runs candidates in municipal elections and that is committed to keeping party politics out of municipal government has been a dominant force in Vancouver politics ever since. In the late 1960s, two other local parties formed: the Committee of Progressive Electors (COPE) and The Electors Action Movement (TEAM). COPE was clearly on the left of the political spectrum; TEAM was in the centre. In 1972, TEAM's candidate for mayor, Art Phillips, won the election. When Mike Harcourt was mayor as an independent between 1980 and 1986, he was generally supported on council by TEAM. Harcourt later became leader of the provincial NDP and premier of British Columbia, but TEAM faded away. Gordon Campbell was the NPA mayor of Vancouver from 1986 to 1993 and the province's Liberal premier from 2001 until 2011. COPE controlled the Vancouver city council from 2002 to 2005, with its leader, Larry Campbell (whose previous work as city coroner inspired a TV show, Da Vinci's Inquest), as mayor. But COPE could not survive the stresses of governing. Larry Campbell decided not to run again and was appointed to the Senate in Ottawa as a Liberal. Politically moderate members of COPE split away to form Vision Vancouver, which took control of the Vancouver city council in 2008 when its leader, Gregor Robertson, became mayor. The most recent NPA mayor of Vancouver was Sam Sullivan, who governed the city from 2005 to 2008. ### Montreal In 1954, the Civic Action League, a citizens' group committed to cleaning up corruption in Montreal, decided to run candidates for municipal office. Its mayoral candidate was Jean Drapeau. To everyone's surprise, Drapeau won his election, but the League did not win control of the council. In 1957, Drapeau was defeated by Sarto Fournier, a Liberal senator who also had the support of Premier Maurice Duplessis. When Drapeau ran again in 1960, he created his own Civic Party, which was totally under his personal control. With Drapeau as mayor, it controlled Montreal city council for 26 years, thereby becoming the most successful municipal political party in Canadian history. During that time Montreal built its subway system (the Métro) and hosted Expo 67 and the 1976 Olympic Games. The Civic Party effectively ceased to exist when Drapeau decided not to seek re-election in 1986. Since that time, three separate municipal parties have held majorities on the Montreal city council: the Montreal Citizens' Movement (MCM) led by Mayor Jean Doré (1986-93); Vision Montreal, with Mayor Pierre Bourque (1994-2001); and the Montreal Island Citizens' Union, which became Union Montreal in 2007, with Mayor Gérald Tremblay (2002-13). The MCM was a left-leaning party that had opposed Mayor Drapeau for many years. After losing the 1993 municipal election, it went into a period of decline before merging with Tremblay's party in 2001. Mayors Drapeau, Bourque, and Tremblay constructed their own parties in order to win the mayor's office and a majority on city council. In 2009, Vision Montreal chose a new leader and candidate for mayor, Louise Harel, the former Parti Québécois Minister of Municipal Affairs who had sponsored the legislation for amalgamation in Montreal. Although she failed to defeat Mayor Tremblay, she certainly perpetuated Vision Montreal as a strong opposition party and as a defender of a strong and centralized city of Montreal. Union Montreal, on the other hand, supported the decentralized borough system that Mayor Tremblay implemented in a fruitless attempt to prevent de-amalgamation in 2004. Union Montreal collapsed in 2013 when it became apparent that some of its members were involved in widespread corruption involving construction contracts in Montreal. Vision Montreal changed its name in 2013, and in the elections of that year, Louise Harel lost her seat, and her candidate for mayor finished fourth. The victor was former federal Liberal cabinet minister Denis Coderre, but he obtained only 32 per cent of the mayoral vote and his "party," Team Denis Coderre for Montreal, won only 27 of 65 council seats. The main opposition party, Projet Montréal, which is primarily interested in environmental issues, won 20. All these developments suggest that Montreal's municipal party system could well be in the process of breaking down. ## Provincial Support for Municipal Parties Quebec and British Columbia are the only provinces in which municipal election laws provide for the existence of municipal parties, although in the latter they are referred to as "elector organizations" or "slates." The BC law even governs contests to seek nominations from elector organizations or slates, and the Quebec law provides that party candidates rely exclusively on party fundraising and expenditures, half of which is refunded by the municipality for all candidates (including independents) who receive more than 15 per cent of the total vote. Quebec law also provides that both government and opposition parties in municipal councils of cities with populations over 50,000 receive municipal funding for staff and research. But as we have seen, even such provincial support does not guarantee the stability of municipal political parties. If anything, all it guarantees is that different municipal politicians at different elections will try to create their own temporary parties in order to benefit from various provisions of the law, such as getting the party name on the ballot or (in Quebec) receiving public subsidies for election campaigns. The most stable municipal political parties in Canada have been the NPA in Vancouver, which is committed to keeping political parties out of municipal politics, and the Civic Party in Montreal, which lasted no longer than its founder's career as mayor. Arguably the NPA is stable because its members share ideological interests in defeating attempts by NDP supporters to control the Vancouver city council. Perhaps Vision Vancouver will be more successful in unifying such people into a cohesive local party on the left of the political spectrum. Whether or not there are political parties in municipal councils is a key question in the governance of our major cities. Many (including, no doubt, those in the NPA in Vancouver) will agree with the reformers of more than a hundred years ago that parties have no place in municipal government and that municipal councils should be more like boards of directors of large businesses than like provincial or federal legislatures. Others look enviously at the political coherence and predictability provided by a prime minister or premier backed by a disciplined majority party, and wish that such a state of affairs could be replicated in municipal government, as it has been for much of Montreal's recent history. But the problem here, of course, is that many citizens do not want city governments that seem as remote and centralized as a majority government in a parliamentary system. How could ordinary citizens mobilize to convince such a government to change its mind on important issues about local development, for example? Some would point to Mayor Drapeau's Montreal as the horrible example of how strong local parties eliminate meaningful local participation. Others will point to Drapeau's accomplishments and conclude that we need parties such as his to enable municipal leaders to achieve ambitious goals. As we confront various issues in this and later chapters relating to city governance, the desirability or undesirability of municipal political parties will never be far from the surface. ## Size and Structure of Municipal Councils Councils are the formal decision-making mechanisms for municipalities. How they are structured is important both for municipal elections and for the process of decision-making. Provincial legislation ultimately determines how municipal councils are structured, but this same legislation often allows municipal councils to make some structural decisions themselves. In this section we shall be less concerned with the sources of legal authority for structural decisions and more concerned with the nature and implications of the various structural alternatives. There are three main variables in studying council structures: * size * representation by wards or at-large, or some combination of both * committee system. It is important to realize that these three variables are connected with each other and, to a lesser extent, with the existence or not of municipal political parties. In the parliamentary model of municipal councils, which has historically been present in Britain and other European countries, we expect to find political parties in large councils where members are elected by wards (i.e., electoral districts) and in which much important business is carried out by council committees. In the reformed or council-manager model found in many American smaller towns and suburbs and in some Canadian ones, we find the absence of political parties, small councils elected at-large (i.e., all members elected from the entire municipal territory), and no committees. As we shall see, however, municipal councils in most major Canadian cities do not fit neatly into one model or the other. ### Council Size When we consider the universe of municipal councils in Canada, we must not forget that there are not only single-tier municipalities but also the 2 supra-regional authorities and 86 regional or upper-tier municipalities in Quebec, 30 in Ontario, 27 in British Columbia, and 12 in New Brunswick. Listed in Table 9.1 are the populations and sizes of the councils for the 2 supra-regional authorities, the 2 largest regional ones, and the 10 largest single- or lower-tier ones (all numbers include the mayor and/or presiding officer). There are two ways to assess council size. The first has to do with the number of residents per councillor. By this measure, the supra-regional and regional authorities listed here are irrelevant, because all of their members are elected to serve also at the lower tier. In other words, the existence of these authorities adds nothing to the total number of councillors in the area. For those concerned only with the costs of having councillors, it would seem that, in theory at least, it would be better to have more people per councillor than fewer. In this regard, Calgary is the most efficient council in the country, with each member serving an average of about 73,000 people. Although Ontario's Progressive Conservative government in the 1990s led by Mike Harris took great pride in reducing the total number of municipal politicians in the province, there is no inherent virtue in having fewer elected municipal politicians rather than more. Even if cost is the only criterion - and it surely cannot be in a democratic society - it is likely that individual councillors serving large numbers of residents (as in Calgary) will require more support staff to do their job, thereby limiting the savings associated with having fewer councillors. The exact cost of councils in various municipalities can be empirically investigated, but obtaining comparable data across municipalities is difficult. 14 In any event, contrary to common public perceptions, the costs attributed to councils are never more than 1 per cent of municipal operating budgets, and are usually considerably less, so whenever concerns about such costs are expressed, they are inevitably exaggerated. The issue of council size was debated in Halifax from 2009 to 2011. From its creation in 1996 (see Chapter 8), the Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM) was governed by a mayor and 23 councillors. The provincial law governing HRM (the Halifax Regional Municipality Charter) requires the HRM council to review the size of the council and the ward boundaries (called polling districts in Nova Scotia) every eight years. After a long and complex discussion in 2010, the council decided to maintain 23 councillors for the 2012 election. As required by the HRM Charter, this decision was reviewed by three members of the Nova Scotia Utility and Review Board. The issue was controversial because HRM council had rejected various pleas from citizens to reduce the size of the council. The board held hearings on the matter in 2011. Witnesses included HRM staff, interested citizens and, of special interest for our purposes, two political scientists with expertise on Canadian local government. Jack Novack of Dalhousie University was one of the witnesses "on behalf of the municipality," and Robert Williams, retired from the University of Waterloo, provided expert advice direct to the board. Novack cautioned board members against "changing the size of council under the guise of more efficient and effective decision making." He went on: Notwithstanding, over the past 16 years since amalgamation, HRM councillors have tried to make amalgamation work by making decisions that balanced the array of divergent interests that naturally reside within this political entity. This is a large and difficult challenge given the size and complexity of the HRM. Assuming that these difficulties can be addressed and overcome by an arbitrary reduction in the number of councillors is to unnecessarily simplify the nature of the debate. 15 The board noted in its decision, however, that Novack acknowledged "that he had not done any research to support any particular number"16 for the ideal size of a municipal council. Much of Williams' testimony was related to the inadequacies of the review process carried out by the HRM council. Like Novack, Williams acknowledged that there was no evidence to support a case that one size of council was better than another. He did, however, caution that cutting the council by one-third (to 16), as had been suggested by some, was "inviting consequences that really haven't been thought through."17 Despite Williams's warning, the board did exactly that: it decided that, starting with the 2012 municipal election, the HRM council would comprise a mayor and 16 councillors. It justified its position by stating that it was responding to the demonstrated preferences of the citizens who expressed their views at various stages in the process, and by stating that the reduction was needed to bring HRM closer to other Canadian municipalities of similar size in terms of the ratio of councillors to population. HRM is not included in Table 9.1 because it is only the fourteenth most populous municipality in Canada. With a 2011 population of 390,096 and with 17 members of council, its number of residents per councillor is 22,947. Most Canadian councils have memberships between about 7 and 25. Councillors sit around a table, often shaped like a horseshoe, with the mayor presiding. In this setting they interact directly with each other and occasionally convince their colleagues to change their minds on the basis of new information and new arguments. Although there might be factions on the council, voting alliances usually shift from issue to issue. Such meetings can be very messy, with much confusion about wording of motions and the implications of various courses of action. But decisions get made, and some get reported in the local media. More than any other venue in the Canadian governmental system, a relatively small non-partisan municipal council is a place to watch representative democracy in action. Much of what goes on in public in federal and provincial legislatures is political theatre and has little to do with decision-making. In these systems, real decisions get made in party caucuses and in cabinets, but such meetings are not open to the public or the media. Openness of municipal council meetings is an important issue and will be discussed below. ### Wards versus At-Large Elections It generally is agreed in democratic societies that elections should determine who holds public office, but much disagreement prevails about how the electoral systems should work. For example, in Canadian federal and provincial politics, numerous proposals are put forward to switch from a system in which legislatures are composed of individuals who obtain the most votes in particular electoral districts to one in which multiple members are elected from much larger districts in accordance with the relative strength of the various parties. The problem with the current system is that, if a Liberal wins each district with 51 per cent of the vote, Liberals will occupy all the seats in the legislature. The problems with the alternative system are that there are no longer distinct local members, and party organizations attain considerable power in determining who gets elected. In the general absence of parties in municipal politics in Canada, there is no way that the second system-proportional representation-could be implemented. But that has not stopped frequent searches for better systems. In Canadian municipal government, electoral districts are generally known as wards. Most large municipalities (except in BC) are divided into wards, and in most cases the one candidate at an election who gets the most votes is declared the councillor for that ward. But in some municipalities, more than one member is elected from each ward. In these cases, voters in each ward have as many votes as there are councillors to be elected. If two are to be elected, the top two vote-getters are the winners. * Should they be relatively equal in population? * Should they attempt to encompass particular “communities of interest” and, if so, which ones? * Who draws the boundaries and when? #### Population The idea that wards should have roughly equal population would appear to be self-evident in a democracy where the objective, presumably, is to make everyone's vote in a given municipality roughly equal in weight. There can be debates about whether the measure of ward size should be based on population or on the number of eligible voters. Some parts of particular municipalities might contain relatively higher numbers of people too young to vote, or recent immigrants who are non-citizens. 18 In most cases, population is the measure, justified on the grounds that the person who is elected has to represent all residents, not just those who are eligible to vote. In the last decade in Ontario, however, the effects of some municipal amalgamations have caused the issue of equal populations of wards to be revisited. The problem is that some amalgamated municipalities have large areas of rural land in which relatively few people live. Prior to amalgamation, such people were used to governing themselves in their own rural-based municipalities. After amalgamation, they found themselves swamped by urban voters with little interest in rural issues. The rural people felt the least that could be done for them was to establish rural wards with smaller populations. When Ottawa refused to do this in the early 2000s, rural residents appealed to the Ontario Municipal Board. In a 2003 decision, the OMB overturned a city bylaw establishing wards that generally mixed rural and suburban areas. In the decision, the OMB stated: The evidence supports the contention that the City of Ottawa does contain rural communities with historical economic and social differences. Rural concerns are not always understood in the context of urban policy and rural concerns often require a special understanding of rural issues. Members of council elected by urban voters may not always have the experience or the willingness to represent rural points of view. One-dimensional representation will eventually be harmful to the local economy. 19 The end result was the establishment of three rural wards whose average population was 34 per cent lower than the average for the city as a whole. 20 Such an arrangement would have been illegal in Quebec because legislation relating to municipal elections provides that “the number of electors in an electoral district must not deviate by more than 25 per cent from the average for municipalities with less than 20,000 inhabitants. This percentage is 15 per cent for municipalities with over 20,000 inhabitants.”21 In Halifax, following its decision to reduce the size of the HRM council to 16, the Nova Scotia Utilities and Review Board approved new ward boundaries in which the least populous of the wards was only 18.8 per cent lower than the average, 22 notwithstanding the fact that the territory of the HRM is about twice that of the City of Ottawa. #### Communities of Interest The OMB decision on the Ottawa wards recognized that rural areas comprise communities of interest that should have their own wards. But how are communities of interest determined in urban areas? First, it should be recognized that, however they are defined, urban communities of interest are unlikely to have populations of similar size, so it is unlikely that each could ever have its own ward. If different neighbourhoods have to be put together or split, how should it be done? One way is to build wards along major arteries leading into the core area, thereby creating "pie-shaped" wards. Another way is to unite areas of similar social class or ethnic backgrounds. The latter approach is more commonly accepted. In a 2003 decision about wards in London, Ontario, the OMB stated: It seems obvious to the Board that a pie-shaped Ward system could be inequitable based upon "communities of interest" because in each Ward there are more votes in the outer suburban areas. A possible result could be that suburban "communities of interest" are overprotected by City Council to the detriment of other "communities of interest."23 ### Who Decides and When? Municipal councils generally are responsible for drawing ward boundaries, but, as we have seen above with respect to Ontario, some form of appeal from council decisions usually exists-which is entirely appropriate because incumbent councillors do have a special interest in how the boundaries are drawn. In Quebec, municipal councils are required to review the boundaries every four years prior to a municipal election. In other provinces, including Ontario, councils are not required to regularly review boundaries. As a result, wards can become quite unequal in population over time without the council taking any action at all. 24 Ontario citizens can appeal to the OMB to take action, but such appeals are rare. ### At-Large Elections-Vancouver Reformers a hundred years ago wanted to get rid of wards. They thought that ward councillors were largely incapable of looking at the interests of the city as a whole and meddled too much in administrative matters affecting their wards. Similar criticisms are made today, 25 which explains why some continue to extol the virtues of at-large municipal elections in which all councillors are elected by all voters in the entire municipality. There is no reason why ward and at-large elections cannot coexist. Indeed, this is exactly what happens in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where five councillors (and the mayor) are elected at-large and seven more are elected from each of seven wards. A strong case can be made against at-large elections. Indeed, the United States Supreme Court has struck down local at-large electoral systems on the grounds that they can submerge the electoral strength of racial minorities. If a racial minority made up 40 per cent of the population of a city and if they were concentrated in a particular area (which is usually the case), they could easily end up with no council representatives if the majority voted as a bloc against minority candidates. But such a possibility has not prevented British Columbia from legislating a municipal electoral system in which at-large elections are the default option for all municipalities. No municipality has opted for wards. 26 The issue has been particularly controversial in Vancouver, and it merits our attention. Vancouver's history with at-large elections is a fascinating story, told well by Thomas R. Berger in the opening pages of his 2004 report on electoral reform in Vancouver. The following account closely follows Berger's. 27 After incorporation in 1886, Vancouver voters elected a mayor and 10 councillors, all at-large. But the third bylaw passed by the council established a five-ward system for the next election in which two councillors were elected from each ward. Except for a brief "interregnum" from 1920 to 1923 when the city experimented with a form of proportional representation, Vancouver operated with a ward system until 1936, although the number of wards was occasionally increased. Starting in 1916, only one member was elected from each ward. In 1935 both business groups and the CCF (not an unusual alliance among reformers) convinced the provincial government to hold a referendum on an at-large system for Vancouver. With only a 19 per cent turnout, 69 per cent of voters supported the change and the city has had an at-large system ever since. After World War II, the at-large system became deeply unpopular with left-leaning citizens who watched the NPA dominate elections and saw few residents of the poorer east side of the city get elected to city council. In a referendum in 1973, 58.9 per cent of voters rejected a return to a ward system. In 1978, 51.7 per cent approved such a change but the commission charged with implementation designed such a complex new system that the council refused to approve it. Not surprisingly, the city held another referendum in 1983, and a ward system was approved by 57 per cent of the voters. By this time, the issue had become extremely polarized between left and right, with conservatives seeming to believe that wards were a kind of Communist plot. In any event, the (conservative) Social Credit premier, Bill Bennett, decided that he would only approve of a ward system if 60 per cent voted in favour, and this requirement was written into law. In a referendum in 1988, 56 per cent voted in favour of wards but, in accordance with the law, nothing happened. By 1996, the 60 per cent rule had been repealed, but Vancouver city council drafted “a confusing multi-question referendum that produced a 59 per cent majority in favour of retaining the at-large system, with a 54 per cent margin favouring wards if the existing system were to be changed."28 Once again, nothing happened. In his 2004 report (p. 40), Berger recommended a 14-ward system with one councillor from each ward. He pointed out that west-side residents were much more likely to vote than east-side residents (39.2 per cent and 31.5 per cent respectively in 2002). With a ward system, a lower turnout rate would not affect the ability of east-