Introduction

Small cities in Canada today confront serious social issues resulting from the neoliberal economic restructuring that began in the early 1980s. Drastic cutbacks in social programs, income supports, and the provision of affordable housing, combined with the offloading of social responsibilities onto the municipal level, have contributed to the generalization of social issues—most visibly, homelessness—once associated chiefly with our largest urban centres. Early acknowledgement of this trend came in 1999, with the introduction of the federal government’s National Homelessness Initiative, the largest component of which was a program known as the Supporting Communities Partnership Initiative. Although most of the $305 million originally invested in this program was intended for Canada’s ten largest urban centres, 20 percent was reserved for fifty-one smaller communities, all of which “had a demonstrable need to address homelessness” (Canada, HRDC 2003, 8).

The stubborn prevalence of both visible and hidden homelessness in all urban centres, irrespective of size, attests to the inadequacy of provincial and federal responses to issues such as drug and alcohol addiction, ineffective or absent mental health care, and the economic insecurity produced by precarious employment, all of which contribute to poverty and homelessness. Social and economic inequities are, moreover, exacerbated by the persistence of racist attitudes, directed not only against Indigenous peoples but also against racialized immigrants. In 2010, a federal report on immigration identified “a need for programming to address issues of racism and discrimination in Canada, given the increasing diversity of the population; the continued existence of racism and discrimination against newcomers and (visible) minorities; and the distribution of immigrants to rural areas and small cities, which have traditionally been comprised of fairly homogenous populations” (Canada, CIC 2010, ii).

In this collection, we reveal the broader forms of discrimination and social exclusion evident in local attitudes, policies, and actions directed towards individuals who are perceived as threats to mainstream values. We call into question the myth of Canada as a fair and just society, guided by principles of compassion, by exploring the social realities facing small cities in Canada. We aim to understand how citizens, community organizations, and local governments respond to the social challenges of urban life beyond the metropolis. We discuss community responses to social issues in small cities—whether they be exclusionary and reactionary or inclusionary and progressive and whether they take their shape from “big city” solutions or arise independently from local community action. We also uncover some of the distinctive attributes of the small city as it struggles to confront increasingly complex social issues arising from federal and provincial financial restraint and the effects of global economic restructuring.

Neoliberal Governance and the Small City

In Canada, as elsewhere, lower taxes, balanced budgets, an entrepreneurial environment, reduced government regulation, and the philosophy of small government have become the defining themes of governance. Following the federal lead, provincial governments have endorsed these themes and have oriented their policies towards increasing private sector investment and creating joint private-public sector initiatives. At its core, neoliberal policy aims to restore the profitability of the private sector—banks, corporations, local business initiatives—in response to the global economic problems that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s: high inflation and high unemployment, low or negative rates of growth, and rapidly accumulating government deficits. Neoliberalism seeks to address these problems by opening up new investment and consumption possibilities that are less constrained by government regulations and the limits of national markets (see Shutt 2005, 34–44).

Although the embrace of neoliberal policy has not necessarily reduced government spending, it has served to link the degree of government financial support for specific social initiatives to the fortunes of the broader economy. This has resulted in a “feast or famine” approach to government spending that entrenches a short horizon with respect to planning (Howlett, Netherton, and Ramesh 1999, 271, 289). Under this approach, few areas of government activity are exempt from continuous adjustments or spending cuts in a period of economic uncertainty or decline. Although a wide range of government services continue to exist, they are prioritized such that when shifting economic conditions lead to the reduction of resources or increased costs in areas deemed essential, the result is spending reductions in areas considered expendable. In such circumstances, funding horizons become short and unpredictable, rendering long-term planning impossible. This reactive approach to policy making has a significant impact on local governments, which are always subject to precarious revenue transfers from higher levels of government and are generally able to raise additional revenues only through property taxes and user fees (Tindal and Tindal 2009, 207–16).

In this neoliberal environment, federal and provincial contributions as a percentage of municipal government revenues have drastically declined since the 1980s. As of 1990, federal and provincial funding accounted for 45.7 percent of local government revenues in Canada; by 1994, the figure had dropped to 25.4 percent, and by 2000, it stood at only 17.9 percent—a decline of over 60 percent in the space of a single decade (Tindal and Tindal 2009, 215). Referring to cities and communities as “collateral damage in the deficit war,” the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) noted in 2013 that “like many successful campaigns, the 1990s’ victory over the federal deficit came at a cost, and much of that cost was borne by Canada’s cities and communities. By 2000 and the dawn of a new millennium, years of deficit fighting and downloading had left them weakened and struggling to meet their responsibilities” (FCM 2013, 8).

More than a decade into the new century, the FCM could identify only marginal improvements in government efforts to address the needs of cities and communities. It pointed instead to a “broken system” comprising “unfunded mandates” in the area of public safety, “inefficient policy and program design” in relation to investments in infrastructure, and “systemic ad-hockery” in the area of housing policy, with the last resulting in “growing cracks in Canada’s housing market” that were “hurting communities, taxpayers, and the national economy” (FCM 2013, 24–25). As Robert Duffy, Gaetan Royer, and Charley Beresford (2014, 21–22) point out, the National Housing Act of 1944 stipulated that “the costs of land acquisition, public housing construction, operating costs and rental subsidies were to be shared on a 75 per cent federal / 25 per cent provincial basis.” Today, not only do the federal and provincial governments fund fewer housing initiatives, but “projects that do get some support tend to require matching funds with each level of government contributing one third of the funding” (22). They go on to observe that “by itself, the transition from 75/25/0 per cent to 33/33/33 per cent would be a significant downloading if the same amount of money was being spent by the federal and provincial governments. But their funding cutbacks have left a gaping hole in our communities” (22–23).

Duffy, Royer, and Beresford (2014, 4) also note the steady decline in the federal government’s share in capital investment, down from 34 percent in 1955 to only 13 percent in 2003, and the concomitant rise in the municipal share, from 27 percent to 48 percent. As they argue,

Since the 1950s, Canada’s infrastructure responsibilities have shifted from the level of government with the largest and most growth-responsive revenue base—the federal government—to the level of government with the smallest and least growth-responsive revenue base—local government. . . . Local governments are finding themselves picking up the slack on housing, mental health, addiction, social services, wastewater treatment, diking and flood management, drinking water and recreation infrastructure. (4)

The withdrawal of federal investment places an unfair burden on local governments, which must now rely on property taxes as their main source of income (McAllister 2004, 121, 126; Tindal and Tindal 2009, 215–16). Property taxes, by their nature, are highly visible and highly regressive in application, in contrast to tax rates based on income level. Moreover, the uses made of this income are subject to close critical examination by local taxpayers, and a broad local consensus is required if these taxes are to be committed to large and costly ventures. In order to be entertained, proposals for major projects presuppose a strong local confidence in the continued growth of both the population and the economic prosperity of the community. When such confidence exists, local governments may enjoy greater discretion in determining priorities and directing revenues towards a more aggressive social agenda. However, the caveat is that municipal governments must continue to rely heavily on property taxes to finance an increasingly broad social agenda.

At the same time, local governments are now compelled to play a much greater role in addressing their own infrastructure needs and fostering their own economic development by attracting investors, new residents, and tourists. Pressures for healthier and more sustainable environmental practices in planning infrastructure, as well as the need to contend with diverse social issues in the wake of federal and provincial offloading, add to the complexity of the municipal agenda. Whereas the residents of Canada’s largest urban centres have long accepted that municipal governments have a responsibility to respond to local social issues, such as poverty, residents of small cities have looked to local government primarily to regulate land use, promote growth and development through bylaws, and provide a core set of services such as roads, sewage, snow removal, recreation, and so on. Small cities have only recently recognized the reality of local social needs, and this recognition has often arrived only because higher levels of government have provided some limited funding (through, for example, the National Homelessness Initiative or the Homelessness Partnering Strategy) as an incentive to address these needs. The extent to which small-city governments should be expected to fulfill social responsibilities is unclear and contested, particularly in the areas of health, social services, and housing. The reluctance to assume such responsibilities can be traced to the cost of developing and implementing social programs, to inadequate local capacities, and to the strongly held view that social programs are more properly the responsibility of the provincial government.

What Is a “Small” City?

Like all human communities, small cities are neither static nor uniform, a fact that complicates efforts at definition. Small cities are therefore often defined, at least initially, by population size. “Small” is, however, a relative term, and, with respect to cities, its meaning can vary depending on the size and distribution of the population in the country or region under study. For example, in a study of demographic change in small cities in the United States (Brennan, Hackler, and Hoene 2005), a “small” city is defined as one with a population of under 50,000; at the other end of the spectrum, a study titled “Creative Small Cities” (Waitt and Gibson 2009) focuses on the Australian city of Wollongong, which has a population of about 280,000. In short, no consensus exists as to the size of “small.”

In the present work, we define a small city as an urban centre with a population in the range of 10,000 to 100,000—although we view these figures, particularly the upper one, with some degree of elasticity. This definition reflects categories originally adopted by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. Historically, the FCM’s Rural Forum was composed of communities with fewer than 10,000 residents, while the FCM’s Big Cities Mayors’ Caucus represented urban areas with at least 100,000 residents, which were subdivided into medium-sized cities (those with a population of 100,000 to 450,000) and large cities (those with a population over 450,000) (Viaud 2008, 7–8). By default, then, communities of between 10,000 and 100,000 residents must be small cities.1 And yet the upper limit is necessarily fluid. As the 2016 census revealed, not only is Canada’s population growing, but it is also becoming more urban (Press 2017). Given that “small” is defined in relation to “large,” as cities as a whole grow larger, what qualifies as “small” will likewise grow larger. Thus, a city whose population exceeds 100,000 may nonetheless remain a (relatively) small city. With a population (in 2016) of 127,380, for example, Kelowna is small in relation to metropolitan Victoria (population 367,770), which is itself small in relation to metropolitan Vancouver (2,463,461) (see figure i.1).2

The drawback of defining a small city by population alone is, of course, that such an approach misses important qualitative dimensions. As David Bell and Mark Jayne (2006a, 4–5) point out, “smallness is as much about reach and influence as it is about population size.” Smallness, they argue, can also be understood as “a state of mind, an attitude, a disposition” (3): it is about “ways of acting, self-image, the sedimented structures of feeling, sense of place and aspiration” (5). A small city thus possesses a habitus distinct from that of a large city, one that may reflect an element of defensiveness, given the common conviction that “cities should be big things, either amazing or terrifying in their bigness, but big nonetheless” (5). Small cities thus constitute “a strange in-between category, neither one thing (rural) nor the other (properly urban)” (5). Similarly, W. F. Garrett-Petts and Lon Dubinsky (2005, 2) see small cities as occupying a third space “in the shadow of large cosmopolitan cities but still bound by rural history and traditions.” As they point out, with respect to culture, the small city tends to lose out in this comparison: “Big cities are commonly equated with ‘big culture’; small cities with something less” (1). Whereas concert halls, museums, and major art galleries are standard features of a big city, in a small city the main cultural venue might be a local church, a high school auditorium, a university classroom, a main street pub, or donated space in a warehouse.

Figure i.1. Small cities in British Columbia

Descriptive comparisons of large and small cities have also been undertaken in an effort to capture the distinctive qualities of the small city. For example, Kent Robertson (2001, 11–12) suggests that, in comparison to the downtown core of large cities, small-city downtowns

• are more human scale, less busy, more walkable
• do not exhibit the problems of big cities—congestion, crime, etc.
• aren’t dominated by corporate presence
• lack large-scale flagship or signature projects
• have retailing distinguished by independents
• aren’t subdivided into monofunctional districts
• are closely linked to nearby residential neighbourhoods
• possess higher numbers of intact historic buildings. (Summarized in Bell and Jayne 2006a, 8)

Such a list clearly aims to paint an appealing portrait of the small city. It is useful, however, because it suggests some of the sources of small-city problems. No doubt small-city downtowns are less congested, more compact, and thus relatively easy to navigate on foot. At the same time, public transportation options may be limited, which significantly reduces the mobility of poorer residents as well as many senior citizens. In addition, while commercial areas and residential neighbourhoods are indeed often contiguous, this proximity can generate intense competition for control over physical space, pitting local business interests and homeowners against homeless people, panhandlers, addicts, or those involved in the sex trade. Such conflicts over space aggravate the NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) reaction and thus intensify resistance to efforts to establish local support services and low-income housing. The lack of buffer zones is a distinguishing feature of small cities, and their spatial configuration not only exacerbates underlying social tensions but also affects how local government, community groups, and marginalized residents respond to these tensions.

Today’s small city is often emerging from a history as a small town or village, a transition characterized by a growing population, an increase in the pace of development, and the gradual diversification of the local economy. With the construction of new neighbourhoods and suburbs and the addition of a larger range of retail, education, health, and social services, what was formerly a small town is transformed into a small city. It now boasts a level of occupational diversity and social stratification that clearly distinguishes it from a town, and yet it retains a “small town” feel and a sense of community that is often missing in large urban centres. Although it is far from being a metropolis, it finds itself faced with urban challenges not uncommon to big cities.

At this point in its history, the small city can be viewed as having many, although not necessarily all, of the following characteristics:

• It relies on a mixed economy (rather than on a single industry).
• Its retail sector includes “big box” and chain stores that serve a surrounding region of small towns, villages, and rural areas.
• It functions as a regional centre for health, education, social, cultural, and entertainment services.
• It provides provincial and federal government services to the surrounding area.
• It is home to a university or college.
• It has a public transit system.
• Its city council, community organizations, and local media recognize that there are social problems such as homelessness, street addictions, and visible poverty and that these require a civic response.

Owing in part to the impact of neoliberal policies, many small cities are presently in the throes of both demographic change and economic transition, shifts that have contributed to a sense of social disruption, as new forces impinge on familiar patterns of interaction. And yet research exploring the quality of life in small cities has been slow to emerge. Through its Quality of Life Reporting System, the FCM collects data regarding a series of variables, but its member communities, which currently number twenty-four, generally have populations of at least 200,000.3 Data are therefore not collected concerning the quality of life in smaller cities. Although Gilles Viaud, of Thompson Rivers University, has developed a “quality of place” reporting system for small cities (Viaud 2011), detailed analyses are not yet available.

Indeed, a comment made more than three decades ago by Jorge Hardoy and David Satterthwaite—namely, that small cities are among “the least studied and perhaps the least understood elements within national and regional urban systems” (1986, 6)—remains largely true today. Relatively recent research on small cities (see, for example, Bell and Jayne 2006b; Bonifacio and Drolet 2016; Garrett-Petts 2005; Knox and Mayer 2009; Ofori-Amoah 2007) has examined a wide array of issues, including community identity, lifestyle, cultural development, cultural symbols, urban geography, immigration and demographic change, the political and cultural economy, downtown revitalization, and sustainability. Although this research has, to some extent, recognized a specifically social dimension to small-city life, discussions of social issues still tend to take place in the context of a primary focus on the economic, environmental, and cultural dimensions of small cities. A comprehensive consideration of the variety of social issues that beset small cities has been lacking, particularly with respect to homelessness, poverty, racism, and social exclusion.

Interrogating Community

Historically, life in smaller urban centres has been approached from the vantage point of community rather than of local government, marginalized groups, or social issues. Between the late 1930s and the early 1970s, social surveyors, social anthropologists, social geographers, sociologists, and political scientists, chiefly in Britain and United States, produced scores of studies that explored community as a central concept (Day 2006, 26). Building upon the foundational work of Ferdinand Tönnies, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl Marx, this research was set against the backdrop of a rapidly disappearing European rural peasantry and its replacement by an urban industrial workforce. Within the framework of this transformation, rural and urban, traditional and modern, interdependent and individualistic became dichotomous categories within which to understand and evaluate social life. Rural, traditional, and interdependent were clearly regarded as positive—the hallmarks of genuine community (or what Tönnies and Weber called Gemeinschaft)—whereas urban, modern, and individualistic were seen as negative and associated with emerging forms of social life characterized by instrumentality, alienation, and anomie.

These studies generally focused on rural or village communities, small towns, or working-class communities embedded in large industrial cities (although not on these cities as a whole). As Day (2006, 26) points out, these studies were “a holistic enterprise,” one that “aimed at a total understanding of a community’s nature” and provided “standards of desirable social relations.” Implied in these studies was the idea of a “good life” that was in danger of vanishing and thus needed to be preserved. Robert Lynd and Helen Lynd’s classic study of Muncie, Indiana, published as Middletown (1929), was the first to turn an anthropological lens on life in a “typical” American town. In a similar study (Warner and Lunt 1941), Newburyport, Massachusetts, was rechristened “Yankee City” and was presented as a microcosm of American community life. In both cases, however, researchers chose to study homogeneous communities, ones that lacked racial and ethnic divisions (Day 2006, 34). In Canada, research was conducted during the early 1950s in an affluent suburban Toronto community (given the pseudonym “Crestwood Heights”), whose 17,000 residents were partly Christian (60%) and partly Jewish (40%). The suburb was deemed to be a community on the strength of local relationships forged within schools, churches, community centres, clubs, and associations (Seeley, Sim, and Loosly 1956).4

Among these early community studies, two were particularly significant. One was Floyd Hunter’s Community Power Structure: A Study of Decision Makers (1953), which was based on research conducted in “Regional City” (that is, Atlanta, Georgia). Hunter found that those who exercised power over community policy were for the most part not the formal leaders of local institutions and organizations; rather, control lay in the hands of a small, closely knit group, consisting primarily of businessmen, whose decision making was dominated by economic interests. A decade later, Roland Warren’s The Community in America (first published in 1963) recognized the power of external influences—not only economic but political or cultural as well—on local communities. Warren (1978, 52) observed an “increasing orientation of local community units towards extracommunity systems of which they are a part, with a corresponding decline in community cohesion and autonomy.”

In short, as Graham Day (2006, 33) notes, the village, town, or small city was no longer “a self-sufficient, inward-looking milieu, capable of commanding the commitment and loyalty of its inhabitants and meeting the majority of their needs,” which is how small towns often present themselves. It was now a unit enmeshed within the social structures and systems of the larger society, in which a sense of community was in steady decline. The loss of the option to remain “self-sufficient” and “inward-looking” suggests one of the challenges confronting small cities today: their circumstances are increasingly influenced by external forces—the powers of other levels of government, trends within larger cities, and the global economy—all of which not only exacerbate local social problems but also limit the autonomy that small cities can exercise in addressing these problems.

Starting in the 1970s, intellectual interest in community went into a period of relative dormancy, but, by the 1990s, social and political developments—including the collapse of the welfare state, globalization, and the growth of an ethic of competition and self-interest—had brought it back into prominence (Luloff and Krannich 2002, 1–2). In The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (1998), Anthony Giddens urges a stronger focus on personal responsibility and active citizenship, with communities as the cornerstone of a new progressivism. Writing in a somewhat more conservative vein, the Israeli-American sociologist Amitai Etzioni continues to expound a communitarian philosophy that seeks to reconcile liberal individualism with a commitment to community and emphasizes the link between rights and responsibilities and the need to revitalize traditional values (see, for example, Etzioni 2014). It is the work of Lena Dominelli, however, that holds particular relevance for our understanding of community responses to today’s social challenges.

As Dominelli (2007, 7) observes, communities form around a shared interest or objective, a particular identity, a shared physical space, or some combination of these, and they are defined by including those who possess the shared trait and excluding those who do not, thereby creating insiders and outsiders. This leads to the exclusionary process of othering, which Dominelli defines as “an active process of interaction that relies on the (re)creation of dyadic social relations where one group is socially dominant and the others subordinate” (8). In the process of othering, “physical, social and cultural attributes are treated as signifiers of inferiority in social relations where social encounters perpetuate the domination of one group by another. During this interaction, the dominant group is constructed as ‘subject,’ the oppressed group as ‘object’” (8–9). Stated otherwise, implicit in the division between insiders and outsiders on which communities depend for meaning is a hierarchy, in which the dominance of one community rests on its ability to consign nonmembers (the Other) to a position of inferiority. The mechanism of othering is particularly useful in understanding the lines of fracture in small cities.

In the context of Canada, this more critical perspective on community was evident as early as 1991, in David Rayside’s study of Alexandria, a small industrial town of 3,500 at the far eastern tip of Ontario, not far from the Québec border. In A Small Town in Modern Times, Rayside set out to analyze social dynamics and power relationships, with a view to evaluating the town’s image of itself as a caring, mutually supportive community. While acknowledging that the town was “in many ways a warm and humane place to live and work,” Rayside found Alexandria to be a “highly fragmented society,” its population “generally passive in the face of inequality” and its municipal politics “particularly resistant to new ideas” (1991, 299). Status and influence in the community were shaped by one’s position in the world of production and tended to be hereditary, feminism had made little impact on traditional gender roles, and tensions existed between English- and French-speaking residents, who remained largely segregated. “Alexandria cannot become a fundamentally egalitarian society,” Rayside concluded, “when the structural patterns of the larger society in which it is lodged entrench inequality between classes, between men and women, and between regions” (299). The same might be said of contemporary small cities, many of which evolved from communities such as Alexandria.

Less insular than earlier studies, newer analyses of community have adopted a more critical stance and take into account the effects of globalization, as well as of national, provincial, and local politics. No longer is community regarded as a feature of the past that simply needs to be resurrected and recaptured; instead, it is understood as something that must be created anew, within the framework of contemporary conditions. Divisions, inequities, and discrimination are now well recognized as challenges that citizens and local governments have no choice but to confront if they hope to build a more inclusive, more fundamentally egalitarian social environment.

Assessing the Collateral Damage

The term community has become part of the standard rhetoric of contemporary governments. The word conveys positive feelings and images and suggests aspirations to inclusivity and the willingness to address the needs of the whole. At a more concrete level, however, the definition of community is highly contested. In the context of a small city, who constitutes “the community” at any given time is expressed both through the local government policies or initiatives already in place and through a corresponding silence (that is, the lack of policies or initiatives) regarding the needs of certain groups. Local government thus plays a critical role in inclusionary or exclusionary policies and practices implicit in which is a vision of who is genuinely part of the community. For example, the mandates of municipal committees or subcommittees send messages about which civic issues—and which groups of people—are deemed worthy of concern, as does the presence (or absence) of social development programs with staff already in place. Similarly, the annual allocation of resources to various local initiatives reveals much about a municipality’s priorities and guiding values. In addition, the visible engagement of the mayor and members of city council with the city’s social agenda speaks not merely to the relative strength of local advocacy but also to its potential for success in soliciting funding from higher levels of government.

As this collection reveals, through participation in nonprofit organizations and local government committees, many individuals and community groups have worked hard to resolve local social issues and advocate for more inclusive policies and programs. Their ongoing efforts open the door to new methods of community engagement and challenge local governments to acknowledge and respond to a broader set of voices. Despite significant efforts and planning, however, the broader fiscal environment within which small cities must operate places substantial constraints—both financial and jurisdictional—on success. Even though higher levels of government trumpet the virtues of community initiatives and local leadership, neither Ottawa nor the provinces have historically shown themselves willing to commit the necessary resources and thus to contribute to the creation of the healthy communities they extol.

The social realities now confronting small cities—homelessness, the impacts of deinstitutionalization, street addictions, the need for parolee integration, the sex trade, homophobia, systemic racism and discrimination, Indigenous–non-Indigenous relations, growing poverty—have received too little attention in the scholarly literature. In this collection, we highlight not merely the extent to which small cities have had to contend with these issues but, more importantly, how qualities peculiar to the small city influence the development of these social issues and alter or limit the possible solutions. We approach our examination of these issues from a number of scholarly perspectives—social work, political science, history, and sociology—to provide an integrated picture of the small-city experience in the twenty-first century. The chapters in the first part, “Displacement, Isolation, and the Other,” examine the social consequences of neoliberal restructuring. As the federal government has sought to cut costs by reducing or eliminating support for social programs, and as provincial governments have followed suit, social tensions and inequities have been heightened. In the context of small cities, the result has been a process of social fragmentation, which is visible in the emergence of displaced and isolated sectors of the community. Ironically, this process is often aggravated by municipal efforts to solve the problem, especially those that rest on criminalizing behaviour deemed to be disruptive. The chapters in the second part, “Building Community,” thus explore more constructive ways in which small cities might respond to growing social and economic disparities. In this respect, the very smallness of small cities is an advantage, since it opens the possibility of grassroots citizen participation of the sort associated with direct democracy. Policies that foster exclusion simply reinforce the lack of understanding on which xenophobia and othering thrive. Small-city governments are in a position to develop approaches to problem solving that would reduce fear and promote compassion.

In the end, what emerges from this overview is the degree to which government in Canada has, in recent decades, chosen to abandon the country’s traditional aspirations to compassion, fairness, and social justice and instead to emulate the policies of our neighbour to the south, thereby rendering our nation ever more indistinguishable from the United States. We have witnessed the offloading of social responsibilities onto the local level, with higher levels of government evincing little commitment to long-term solutions to the social problems now besetting our cities, small and large. Although government rhetoric constantly affirms the importance of “healthy communities” and “sustainable solutions,” the visible evidence points to the hollowness of such language. In the face of homelessness, growing poverty, and mounting social tensions, we are increasingly unable to deny the destructive consequences of several decades of neoliberal rule, as well as the limited capacity of local governments to solve these problems on their own.

In its second annual report on the state of our country’s cities and communities, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM 2013, 23) rightly concluded that “Canada can no longer afford to have its governments continue working at cross-purposes, or in isolation, or toward short-term political fixes.” The results had become all too obvious. “The time has come,” the report declared, “for new and innovative thinking and political courage. It’s no longer enough to say that the system is broken, the time has come to fix it” (23). Five years later, with the Liberals in power and a new National Housing Strategy officially released, there may be some cause for optimism—but it is too early to celebrate the demise of neoliberalism, a philosophy that has little use for empathy. We in Canada take considerable pride in our reputation as a country guided by compassion, a respect for difference, and a sense of fairness. We believe these qualities set us apart from other nations. Yet we face a widening gap between the convictions and the reality. As the future of the affluent continues to be secured at the expense of those less fortunate, perhaps we need to revisit our self-image and ask how far our present policies have undermined our ideals.

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1 This definition parallels Statistics Canada’s definition of a “census agglomeration,” which must have a core population of at least 10,000—while a community of 100,000 or more is deemed to be a “census metropolitan area.” Since a community clearly need not have a population as large as 100,000 in order to constitute a city, one could argue that what Statistics Canada calls a census agglomeration is, in fact, a small city.

2 Population figures are available at “Census Profile, 2016 Census,” Statistics Canada, http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/dp-pd/prof/index.cfm?Lang=E (last updated 30 November 2017).

3 “Member Communities,” Federation of Canadian Municipalities, 2017, https://fcm.ca/home/programs/quality-of-life-reporting-system/member-communities.htm. The variables are demographics, affordable and appropriate housing, civic engagement, community and social infrastructure, education, employment and local economy, natural environment, personal and community health, personal financial security, and personal safety. “FCM QOLRS Indicators,” Federation of Canadian Municipalities, 2017, https://fcm.ca/Documents/reports/FCM/QORLS_Indicators_EN.pdf.

4 Subsequent decades saw the appearance of few additional Canadian studies, among them Little Communities and Big Industries (Bowles 1982), a volume devoted to a familiar Canadian setting, the single-industry town. The essays in the collection explored the fabric of social life in communities—often located in northern or remote areas—that were economically dependent upon a single-resource extraction industry such as forestry, mining, or oil. In 2004, James Giffen’s research from the 1940s was published as Rural Life: Portraits of the Prairie Town, 1946 (Giffen 2004). Giffen studied three Manitoba communities, one primarily British, one primarily Ukrainian, and the third a mixture of citizens whose origins were British, Mennonite, French Métis, and Polish. Undertaken on behalf of the Manitoba Royal Commission on Adult Education, his research provided a perspective on how rural social structures affected literacy in the dominant culture.