The rise of party politics in Canadian local elections

The rise of party politics in Canadian local elections JAMES LIGHTBODY Recent changes in the political face of Metropolitan Toronto have become apparent with the open involvement of the Liberal and New Democratic party machines in the pursuit of municipal office. This intervention into the nominally nonpartisan elections of one of Canada's larger urban centres apparently has provoked considerable anguish for some knowledgeable students of Canadian politics, suggesting that we are due an appraisal of the role of these national parties in the evolving Canadian urban context. Part of the problem in coming to grips with this open party involvement stems from the conscious desire to view municipal government as existing apart from the political competition at senior levels of government. This attitude is reminiscent of the variety o-f municipal reform movements, clean government and nonpartisanship leagues so active in American local politics during the early part of this century. In the United States these associations found their genesis as a logical response to the patronage-dependent, boss-dominated pattern of their contemporary local institutions. A generation of American social leadership was obsessed with the morality plays which legitimated the insulation of local governing bodies from the less than fanciful whims of the bosses. That the myth of nonpartisanship and the reality of urban political organization were to become incongruent (as witness the nonpartisan city regime of Mayor Richard Daley in Chicago) demonstrates clearly the continuing need for informal mechanisms beyond the larger urban governmental structures which are able to translate the expectations, wants and demands of citizens into official policy decisions. The most effective and responsive of these mechanisms can be established political parties. Despite the fact that embryo Canadian municipal reform movements have both employed the rhetoric of their American cousins and embraced institutional reforms developed to meet American political circumstances (for one example, in the introduction to Canada of the city manager style of administration ), this response to the Canadian local Journal of Canadian Studies political environment may not be appropriate. Perhaps a more reliable model on which to pattern our behaviour is to be found in British political experience. As our urbanizing system evolves toward the complex relationships of urban metropolitan organization, it will become increasingly necessary to develop more open and responsive instrumentalities to secure coherent civic administration . The traditionally elite-dominated, nonpartisan, clean government movements have not proven able to adapt quickly enough. The rapid urbanization of the Canadian political system since the second world war has produced significant changes in popular expectations of the greater role which local government is to assume in its traditional functions of social development, the provision of primary services and, most recently, environmental control. If this tier of Canadian government is not expected to develop as the mere administrative agency for provincial , and in some instances, federal officials in the implementation of policy derived through their own political channels, then its claims to an independent realm of political authority must quickly be proven viable and legitimate. A good part of the current difficulty in the appreciation of partisanship as a convenient mechanism for organization in the conduct of municipal affairs results from uncritical acceptance of American experience and rationalization of our activities in these terms. The preoccupation of American social science until recently with quantifiable knowledge of consensus politics, the dilution of socio-political conflict and the academic construction of models of stable democratic systems led to analyses ot urban political communities which emphasized the distribution of power among elite and nonelite societal groups. For Canadian purposes this suggested at best the reform of existing mechanisms to facilitate the integration of less powerful groups into the decisionmaking process. This orientation could not kindly countenance an approach to urban politics contradictory to American experience , emphasizing political conflict through partisan alignment as a means of influencing and gaining power over profoundly political decisions. It is not surprising that the primary corrective of current abuses in the American circumstance, prescribed by their contempo39 rary social engineers, asserts a return to issue-oriented social action groups as the basic mechanism for political action. This trend, as noted below, has also found its way to Canada. It may, indeed, be possible...