The North American Response to the Jitney Bus

THE NORTH AMERICAN RESPONSE TO THE JITNEY BUS Donald F. Davis How similar are the Canadian and American urban systems? Has the border made a difference? Pleading ignorance of the Canadian literature, American urban historians have generally dodged this question, and only a handful of Canadian historians have ventured an explicit opinion. 1 The latter have been of two minds as to the importance of the border: on the one hand, there have been the continentalists, who had their greatest int1uencc between 1970 and 1978, the years during which the field first became a distinct subdiscipline in Canada. 2 The leading scholars were those who applied the most up-to-date American models to Canadian cities, developing a "new orthodoxy," as Gil Stelter remarked in 1977, implicit in which was "the denial that the Canadian municipal scene differed significantly from that in the United States." 3 The continentalists included the foremost practitioner in Canada of the "new urban history," Michael Katz, whose work on Hamilton, Ontario, and Buffalo, New York, ignored the border; there were also "revisionists" (to use Gil Stelter's phrase) who first applied the ideas of Sam Bass Warner, Jr. and Samuel P. Hays to Canadian urban development; they included Alan Artibise, John Weaver and Michel Gauvin. Of these three, Gauvin took the most extreme continentalist position when he wrote that Montreal's experience with urban bossism and reform between 1880 and 1920 was a "virtual replica of the history of American cities as analyzed by their own historians." 4 The contincntalists' ascendancy was brief. The first notable attack came in 1976 when H.V. Nelles and Chris Armstrong denied that Samuel P. Hays's interpretation of American municipal reform titted Canada. They argued that if historians would "concentrate more upon what actually went on in the cities" thcv would discover that the "Canadian scene differed in important ways fr~m that in the United Slatcs. 5 This rebuke did not entirely chasten the continentalists; in 1984 Allan Artihisc was still of the opinion that "despite differences in scale in political systems, urban development in the American and Canadian wests followed a r~markably similar evolutionary framework," and in the mid-1980s, John Weaver and Michael Doucet were 334 Donald F. Davis well-launched upon a study of North American land development that essentially denied the significance of the border. "The ownership impulse and housing design," they wrote, "transcended the international boundary. Pattern books popularized identical plans at all points of the compass .... "6 Thus the continentalists--those who stress the similarity between the Canadian and American urban experience--have not retreated; but they no longer enjoy a vogue. By 1982 a new nationalist orthodoxy was emerging, as could be seen in the enthusiasm with which Canadian urban historians welcomed the research of l'vfichael Goldberg and John Mercer, two social scientists who stressed the differences between Canadian and American values, and hence between their city systems. After a well-received presentation at the Canadian-American Urban Development Conference in 1982, Goldberg and Mercer in 1986 published a book on the Myth of the North American City. Two years later, at the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, urban historians honoured the book with a round-table discussion. At the core of the book is a multivariate analysis of 277 American and 40 Canadian metropolitan areas, using comparative data of the past twenty years. They conclude that the border mattered, that Canadian cities, as a group, are not only quite different from American cities, but also distinctly superior to them. Canadians had built more viable cities, the authors asserted, because they had weaker ideological ties to free enterprise and to private property, and correspondingly less resistance to government intervention and public ownership. The more collectivist Canadian society had built the better communities. Americans, they argued, were too individualistic; they would have more liveable cities--as good as Toronto--only after they had transcended their fear of public enterprise. 7 The Goldberg-Mercer interpretation struck a responsive chord among urban historians. By 1982 it had already become commonplace to argue that Canada had resorted more to "public ownership" than had Americans, but less than the British, and...