Federalism, Subsidiarity and Toronto’s Ward Boundary Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2013, under threat of a resident petition and, at worst, an Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) order that would unilaterally impose new electoral districts, the City of Toronto embarked on its first ward boundary review (WBR) since the enactment of the City of Toronto Act, 2006 (COTA). The WBR highlighted the scattered application of subsidiarity within Canada’s federation. Under the notion of federalism enshrined in the Canadian constitution, municipalities are granted only those powers that derive from provincial legislation. However, the Supreme Court of Canada has invoked the European principle of “subsidiarity” to reframe municipal authority over local issues. The aim of this principle is to guarantee a degree of independence for a local authority in relation to a higher body or central government, in order to ensure that powers are exercised as close to the citizen as possible. These two seemingly competing notions of municipal authority – federalism and subsidiarity – can and ought to be reconciled in the context of Canadian local governments. This paper analyzes Toronto’s WBR in light of the subsidiarity debate. Drawing principally on the work of Yishai Blank and Hoi Kong, this paper asks how legal theory understands local decision-making, exploring in particular whether and how subsidiarity articulates federalism’s claims. Through a detailed review of its WBR, the paper suggests that Toronto’s decisions are a manifestation of the city’s view of its powers as operating within a federalist lens, leaving it reactionary to provincial and OMB decisions. At the same time, provincial laws that set municipal authority in ward boundary reviews are framed within a contradictory framework that undermine the accountability of Toronto’s WBR process. The paper argues in favour of a re-imagination of municipal authority under the notion of “operative subsidiarity” nesting within a federalist framework.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".