Small Cities, Big Issues

Pulling together an immense amount of material about the governance of small towns, Walmsley and Kading observe the new reality of governing and living in a small city. What they offer is a larger and much longer picture of the effects of neoliberal policy on municipalities in Canada. Darlene Marzari, former Municipal Affairs Minister of British Columbia, 1993-96

If local governments accept a social agenda as part of their responsibilities, the contributors to Small Cities, Big Issues believe that small cities can succeed in reconceiving community based on the ideals of acceptance, accommodation, and inclusion.

Small Canadian cities confront serious social issues as a result of the neoliberal economic restructuring practiced by both federal and provincial governments since the 1980s. Drastic spending reductions and ongoing restraint in social assistance, income supports, and the provision of affordable housing, combined with the offloading of social responsibilities onto municipalities, has contributed to the generalization of social issues once chiefly associated with Canada’s largest urban centres. As the investigations in this volume illustrate, while some communities responded to these issues with inclusionary and progressive actions others were more exclusionary and reactive—revealing forms of discrimination, exclusion, and “othering” in the implementation of practices and policies. Importantly, however, their investigations reveal a broad range of responses to the social issues they face, and the distinctive attributes of the small city as it struggles to confront increasingly complex social issues.