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57 U.B.C. L. Rev. 723 (2024)
Municipal Constitutionalism and Its Origins

handle is hein.journals/ubclr57 and id is 751 raw text is: MUNICIPAL CONSTITUTIONALISM AND ITS ORIGINS JAMES COLLIEt From the viewpoint of the Municipalities this meant that, as Canada was progressively transformed, over the years since 1867, from a predominantly agrarian-rural to a post-industrial, urban-based society, the questfor a sphere of legislative autonomy and fiscal autonomy appropriate to the vast new responsibilities of Municipal Government and free from the possibility of arbitrary alteration or recall so as to allow rational and orderly community planning and development on some continuing, long-range basis, must be pursued through the Provincial Governments ... [we] recommended that the present twilight constitutional position of the Municipalities be ended, and that the constitutional role of the Municipalities be clarified and defined for the future by being expressly entrenched in any new or renewed Canadian federal constitution.' t James Collie is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science and a JD student in the Faculty of Law, both at the University of Western Ontario. I would like to first acknowledge the time and efforts of Zachary Taylor. I drafted this paper in his graduate seminar Urban Political Economy during my PhD studies, and Taylor's suggestions helped guide the development of this paper. It was also made better by a careful and challenging review by Martin Horak. Above all, I would like to thank the archival staff at the Toronto Archives, funded by the City of Toronto; the remarkable preservation of municipal history by the Toronto Archives made this research possible. Anonymous reviewers helped push this paper forward, but all mistakes are, of course, mine alone. 1 Edward McWhinney, The Constitution Act, 1980, and a New Constitutional Status for Municipalities (Ottawa: Federation of Canadian Municipalities, 1980), Toronto, City of Toronto Archives (C Dennis Flynn, fonds 10, series 113, file 44, Constitutional Reform) at 13-14 [emphasis in original].