Rearranging the Deck Chairs

This book irritated me from the first page to the last, which is a curious achievement, given that it is everything that its distinguished advocates announce it to be on the back of the jacket cover. It is a comprehensive, thorough, balanced tour across the Canadian municipal landscape from Prince George, BC, to Saint John, NB. Mary Louise McAllister has created a book that guides the reader in a concise and appropriately footnoted way from history lessons starting with the Baldwin Act to the most recent attempts at reforming and restructuring local government. I even found references to reports by my first boss in government, Ron Farrow, quoted from his days with the province of Ontario when he led the charge to amalgamate local governments into regional jurisdictions under Premier Bill Davis’s mandates in the 1970s, back when the Conservatives still used the Progressive part of their nomen.

So why did Governing Ourselves? The Politics of Canadian...