Bringing Cities to the Table: Child Care and Intergovernmental Relations

Foreword The growing interest and concern about Canada's urban areas has provoked a recent wave of research papers and policy conferences in and about our cities. CPRN has chosen to contribute to this lively discourse by playing an integrative role – linking research and policy communities across Canada, across jurisdictions, and across disciplines. The first paper in the CPRN series by Neil Bradford (Why Cities Matter: Policy Research Perspectives for Canada, June 2002) reviewed a wide range of literatures to conclude that policy and government challenges are both vertical and horizontal. They are vertical because city-regions are strongly influenced by municipal, provincial, and federal governments, as well as international institutions. They are horizontal because it is important to link city-region networks from inner city to suburbs to rural hinterland. This paper continues the series, providing an applied perspective. By examining the experience with the design and delivery of child care services, the paper draws on both the Canadian situation and findings from other countries. The policy puzzle is how to ensure a measure of equity in access and quality of service across the broad population, while ensuring that services are responsive to local needs and preferences. In more abstract terms, this presents classic challenges to democratic accountability and intergovernmental governance practices. The core of this challenge is the trade-off between equity across space and local knowledge of needs and preferences. The diverse jurisdictions examined in this paper have grappled with this trade-off in different ways. Taken together, they demonstrate that a variety of instruments can be used to balance these two conflicting goals. A major lesson from these experiences is that trust among governments is key. " In multilevel governance situations, whether in countries with federal or unitary systems of governance, elected officials 'share' voters. A real democracy therefore demands that each level of government take into account the democratic commitments of the others, as well as the fact that commitments made by smaller communities might weigh on larger ones, and the 'majority' does not always hold truth in its hand. " To achieve this mutual respect, Canada and the provinces must bring cities into policy making, hence the title of the paper: " Bringing Cities to the Table. " I wish to thank Jane Jenson and Rianne Mahon for the way in which they have explored the experiences of other jurisdictions as well as providing an overview of the …