The rural municipality in Canada: A critical overview of recent research and some perspectives on the development agenda

a l C a n a d aThe rural municipality in Canada: A critical overview of recent research and some perspectives on the development agendaThis paper provides a brief critical backdrop to the four timely research papers presented in this Special Section for The Canadian Geographer.This will be done by a summary and selective situating of Canadian local government in comparative international contexts, and then attaching some of the more common themes elicited from the research papers here to cognate issues evident in the highly contested discourse on local government in Canada.This will be followed by inverting the perspective somewhat, and re-casting the question of local government by starting with some foundational principles of rural development itself.All of this prompts a modestly radical re-invention of local government for rural Canada, that would, in the view of the author, better address the systemic challenges facing rural communities in a strategic and sustainable manner.Finally, some tentative theoretical and conceptual connections are suggested, with associated priorities for future research, all prompted by these current investigations. SITUATINGLocal government in Canada has a long, contextually diverse, and complicated history of evolution across the country's ten provinces and three territories (Tindal & Nobes Tindal, 2009).This trajectory has taken us from a thoroughgoing colonial enterprise facilitating the agendas of European geopolitical and mercantile interests relating to resources exploitation, settlement, and the secure reproduction of power structures, via a colonial government, and then the Federal and Provincial governments, through to the post-war maturation of a more independent welfare state and the rapid urbanization of Canadian society, on to today's conditions in a highly globalized, technologically driven world.We have gone from the foundation of the former Dominion of Canada (1867), through periods of significant societal diversification and change (e.g., immigration profiles), through periods of systemic economic transformation (e.g., from the extractive resources-based economy, through the industrial economy, into the services and knowledge-based economy) and its diverse regional manifestations, and through substantial swings in the balance of Federal-Provincial power relations.The regional manifestation of these interrelated developments exhibited significant variations and contrasts, thus creating very different conditions for the evolution of local government.Amid this flux, from the mid-19 th century, the subsidiary-administrative foundations of local government were set and secured.The "creatures of the province" were established as constitutionally dependent, administrative and services delivery extensions of each provincial, and eventually territorial government.This system of local government, in all its variety across the shifting Canadian canvas, variously consists of an elected municipal government, by whatever name (e.g., County, Municipal District), with its array of special purpose bodies such as library boards and others.Besides these formal local governments there are large territories and districts, covering vast swaths of the country as unincorporated service areas attending to water service, conservation, road maintenance, and a variety of other services.Our focus here is on the incorporated municipalities, where most rural Canadians live.The founding role of these municipalities, as a provincially sanctioned agency to provide services to property, such as roads maintenance and water and sewage services has, for most municipalities, been transformed to a locally responsible government that is now expected to deliver a diverse range of services to people, community organizations, local businesses, international industrial corporations, and others.These services range from health care, housing, some judicial services, protection, education, welfare, and more (Caldwell, 2010;Tindal & Nobes Tindal, 2009).And this evolution has been characterized by periodic waves of "reform" through highly contentious reorganizations, amalgamations, annexations, regional and two-tiered governing structures, and a variety of other restructurings generally predicated on claims of new efficiencies, cost reductions, administrative streamlining, and other putative benefits, very few of which have been convincingly confirmed (Douglas, 2005;Kushner & Siegel, 2005;Slack & Bird, 2012;Tindal, 1996).Canada's local government system is highly centralized, one of the most highly centralized and under-resourced in the entire Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) framework (Douglas, 2016a;Wollman, 2012).Local government shares no more than 12% of the Canadian tax base, and sometimes as low as 8% (Canadian Union of Public Employees, 2019), yet is responsible for some 60% of the country's public infrastructure investments.Not surprisingly the reliance on the local property tax base in Canadian local governments is some two times that of the OECD average.

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