Canada’s largest cities have faced exponential growth, with the trajectory rising further still. Due to their high density, cities are the primary sites for opportunities in economic prosperity, green innovation, and cultural activity, and also for critical challenges in homelessness and extreme poverty, air pollution, Indigenous-municipal relationship-building, racial injustice, and transportation gridlock. While city governments are at the forefront of mitigating the challenges of urban life, they are given insufficient power to effectively attend to public needs.

Cities and the Constitution confronts the misalignment between the importance of municipalities and their constitutional status. While our constitution is often considered a living document, Canada has one of the most complicated amending formulas in the world, making change very difficult. Cities are thus constitutionally vulnerable to unilateral provincial action and reliant on other levels of government for funding. Could municipal power be reimagined without disrupting the existing constitutional structure, or could the Constitution be reformed to designate cities a distinct tier of government? Among other novel proposals, this groundbreaking volume explores the idea of recognizing municipalities in provincial constitutions.

The first volume of a complementary pair, authored by renowned Canadian legal and urban studies scholars, Cities and the Constitution suggests contemporary solutions to one of our most pressing policy dilemmas.

Alexandra Flynn is an Assistant Professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law at The University of British Columbia, where she specializes in municipal law and governance. She teaches interactive, practice-based courses in legal research, municipal and planning law, and administrative law. Prior to joining UBC, Alex was an Assistant Professor in the City Studies program at the University of Toronto (Scarborough), where she taught and researched in the areas of urban governance, property, and local government law. Her previous project, “Reimagining Local Governance: The Landscape of “Local” in Toronto” (2017), examined Toronto's complex local governance model along with its motley of institutions — some granted delegated authority and some not. Her current project focuses on Indigenous-municipal relationships in the land use planning process. In 2017, she received a SSHRC Insight Development Grant to investigate the notion of a “municipal duty to consult” and its potential for reciprocal, respectful relationships between Indigenous and municipal governments.

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Richard Albert is Professor of Law at The University of Texas at Austin and, in 2017-18, Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto.

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Nathalie Des Rosiers is president of the Law Commission of Canada and a professor of law at the University of Ottawa. Professor Des Rosiers is a former president of the Association des juristes d'expression francaise de l'Ontario and of the Canadian Association of Law Teachers. She was a member of the Environmental Appeal Board from 1998–2000 and a member of the Ontario Law Reform Commission from 1993–1996.

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Alan Broadbent is the chair and CEO of the Avana Capital Corporation and the chair of Maytree. He also serves as the chair of the Tides Canada Foundation and Happy Planet Foods and is a member of the Governors’ Council of the Toronto Public Library, a senior fellow at Massey College, a member of the Order of Canada and a recipient of the Queen’s Jubilee Medal. Alan is the author of the book Urban Nation.

Ratna Omidvar is the president of Maytree. She also serves as a director of the Toronto City Summit Alliance and is the chair of the board of the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council. Ratna was appointed to the Order of Ontario in 2006, and in 2010 was named the Globe and Mail’s Nation Builder of the Decade for Citizenship.

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“Written by a diverse group of acknowledged, experienced experts, Cities and the Constitution advances the emerging Canadian and international literature on the constitutional (in the legal and political senses of that term) status of cities.” Peter Oliver, co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the Canadian Constitution

“The question of constitutional status for Canadian cities is not new – but it is salient as never before. This timely volume explores the options for addressing this gap in cities’ power. Contributors provide a diverse and useful overview of some traditional arguments, as well as a range of creative and novel ones.” Cherie Metcalf, Queen’s Law