This book will be an essential reference for students of local government in Canada. It deals with the most recent period of municipal reform, from 1990 onwards. There are chapters on each of the ten provinces, plus a combined chapter on the northern territories. The editors establish an analytical framework for the book in their introduction, and then try to bring things together in a long concluding chapter. The individual chapters differ somewhat in approach, but the editors were fairly successful in getting the contributors to keep to a common analytical framework. Reading the whole book straight through is a bit of a slog, because there is so much detail; on the other hand, it is handy to have all this material collected together. It will stimulate useful reflection, as much about what is not here as what is.

The book focuses on the structural, functional, financial and jurisdictional aspects of reform. Matters related to the “internal organizational, administrative, and managerial apparatus” (6) of the municipalities are left to one side. This leaves enough to cover: for instance, the structural changes that have led to major amalgamations in Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia (and some subsequent de-amalgamations in Quebec); the functional changes associated with the “who does what” exercise in Ontario and other efforts at “rebalancing”; the financial changes associated with rebalancing and the various municipal efforts to secure better funding; the jurisdictional changes marked by Alberta's move to give “natural person” powers to the municipalities, Toronto's campaign for its own charter, and the much ballyhooed Community Charter in British Columbia. Garcea and LeSage carefully review the arguments about the effects of the reforms in their concluding chapter. As they freely admit, the evidence necessary for definitive judgements is difficult to come by. On the other hand, “the reality is that the structural, functional, financial, and jurisdictional configurations of municipal governments have not been changed in a fundamental manner,” so one could hardly have expected a “transformational effect” (320).

This conclusion might be read in relation to the sometimes hysterical debates over amalgamation in Toronto and Montreal. Nevertheless, Garcea and LeSage seem to have missed much of what is interesting about the recent reform era, because they have abstracted so much from broader political trends. The drive to balance budgets and reduce the size and scope of the public sector, the pressure to be more business-like and compete for private investment, and the demand for government “partnerships” with private businesses and NGOs are all aspects of the new model of governance that came to predominate in the 1990s. The recent reforms were adumbrated in the context of political struggles around this new model. How are we to understand those struggles? Who was seeking reforms and why? How was municipal reform related to broader political agendas? If relatively little was achieved, why was that? What symbolic value did the reforms have in relation to various political agendas? Were controversies such as the ones in Montreal or Toronto (or indeed in rural areas) surrogates for something else?

It took half a century before urban historians were able to assess the municipal reform movement of the Progressive Era (1890s-1920s) realistically. What became clear is that the reforms were bound up with a particular kind of class struggle, and that the implicit objectives of reform were rather different from the ones publicly acknowledged. Is this also true now? An overly tight focus on official exchanges is an obstacle to answering such a question. One must also get away from an approach that treats Toronto and Moncton or Ontario and PEI as analytical equals. This book gives four times as much consideration to the Atlantic provinces as it does to Ontario, even though the latter is almost six times as big. The demographic realities of the country, the basic economic trends within and outside it, the pattern of demand for public services and much else has to be considered in a comprehensive analysis. It is difficult to do any of that if municipalities and provinces are considered as abstract entities. Whoever follows up on the analysis in this book needs to open it up, take better account of broader trends, and situate the analysis in relation to the political economy of Canada in the world. One would hardly know from this book that Canada is an urban country with a very peculiar configuration, and that debates about urban reform here echo ones in the US and Europe. Municipal reform is too interesting a subject to be approached within the sort of narrow frame that early students of local government adopted.