Differing Approaches to Municipal Restructuring in Montreal and Toronto: From the Pichette Report to the Greater Toronto Services Board‪.‬

During the 1990s the provincial governments of both Quebec and Ontario established task forces to recommend new arrangements for the governance of their largest metropolitan areas, Montreal and Toronto respectively. The task forces (Pichette and Golden) faced remarkably similar political environments and arrived at similar conclusions. Despite the fact that the Montreal task force was appointed earlier and reported earlier, its impact appears to have been minimal. Meanwhile, Toronto has experienced an explosive debate about the creation through amalgamation of the "megacity", in part because such a course of action was not contemplated by the Toronto task force. With much less publicity, the Ontario government has since proceeded to establish the Greater Toronto Services Board (GTSB), the first municipal institution in Canada that transcends and includes two-tier municipalities. Just as the GTSB is beginning to function, debates about metropolitan governance in Montreal have begun anew. This paper briefly describes the historical background to governance arrangements in the two urban regions, explores in some detail the similarities in the work of the two task forces, and attempts to explain why the outcomes appear to have been so different. Some scholars have already tried to show how theory relating to urban political economy applies to the organisational changes in Toronto (Keil 1998; Isin 1998; Todd 1998; Horak 1999), but they have not attempted to explain how it accounts for the lack of change in Montreal. One of the additional objectives of this paper is to evaluate the relevance of this theory in explaining recent developments in the two metropolitan areas.