A Fleeting Metropolitan Moment: Regional Governance and Municipal Collaboration in Greater Toronto during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the COVID-19 pandemic, mayors and chairs from 11 of the 30 municipal governments in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) met a total of 76 times to share information, coordinate emergency measures, and collectively advocate to provincial and federal governments, marking the most sustained and productive period of bottom-up, voluntary regional collaboration in the region’s history. This report documents the dawn and demise of the GTHA Mayors and Chairs group, as it was known, describing its functions and procedures, summarizing its achievements, tracking its genesis, evolution, and eventual dissolution, and offering lessons about what it takes to build effective metropolitan governance. Findings are based on interviews with nine of the participating mayors and regional chairs and five municipal chief administrative officers, numerous background interviews with the political staff and civil servants involved, and a review of primary meeting materials. During its three-year tenure, the GTHA Mayors and Chairs group – which we also refer to as the GTHA11 – secured a range of legislative, regulatory, and financial returns that benefited the region during the COVID-19 crisis and evolved into a constructive forum for regional dialogue on a range of regional issues exacerbated by the pandemic, such as housing, policing and community safety, and refugee settlement and integration. Today, though, the group no longer meets, undone by a cascade of events, including the surprise resignation of the group’s chair, Toronto Mayor John Tory, in February 2023. All told, the story of the GTHA Mayors and Chairs is a tale of missed opportunity. The group demonstrated that informal, bottom-up regionalism is both possible and worthwhile. Local leaders across the GTHA came together and collaborated in ways rarely seen before. Had it endured, the group may have evolved from a forum for discussion and coordination to a true collaborative regional decision-making body of some kind. Today, however, with the pandemic seemingly behind us, the prospect of effective regional governance in the GTHA once again looks bleak.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".