It's worth looking at the history of municipal governance in the Ottawa area because if you can think of a structure, we've had it at some point or it has been considered.
Until the 1970s, there was the City of Ottawa and it was surrounded by the County of Carleton. This is a bit of a digression, but in Ontario, counties are further divided into townships and towns, both of which elect councils. Towns and townships are effectively equal, though of course towns grow by annexing land from the surrounding township(s). Within the townships are villages, which are generally not self-governing but they are subject to special planning, and, as you might expect, once a village gets big enough it can become a town. The county council is made up of the reeves and deputy reeves of the townships and the mayors and deputy mayors of the towns. Cities are separate from a county and would nominally be considered to be "equal", though with far different responsibilities. As with towns, the cities grow by annexing township land (which also takes it away from the county).
So in the 1970s a couple of townships bordered the City of Ottawa - Nepean & Gloucester - with another two a little further out along the main highway, March in the west and Cumberland in the east. In the postwar environment these four townships grew as suburbs pretty much willy-nilly (Nepean being the worst since it had long been rendered much smaller and odd-shaped by earlier annexations). They were too big spatially to be towns and they had nothing like a "downtown" or town core anyway. Many of the planning powers were controlled by the county as well, which had more rural townships further out as well as the rural parts of the bordering townships. Meanwhile, the City of Ottawa was not too happy at all this suburban development and the use of its infrastructure, but annexations were unpopular amongst the suburbs.
That led to the Province creating the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton in the 1970s. What it did was it assigned higher-level planning powers and responsibilities to the "county" but made the City of Ottawa (and the smaller City of Vanier and the 'Village' of Rockcliffe - a village-sized city as far as governance was concerned - that were encircled by Ottawa) one of the constituent lower-tier municipalities along with the townships (there being no towns in the County of Carleton, though there were a pair of somewhat self-governing police villages that were dissolved into the surrounding township). The Regional Council was made to better reflect the populations of the municipalities. At this time, some of the townships became cities as well.
In time more powers were transferred to the Region, the councillors became directly elected, and then the Regional Chair. Of course suburban population growth continued to eat into the relative supremacy of Ottawa all the while that powers were being transferred, meaning that the importance of the Region in the overall governance of the region increased relative to that of all the lower tier municipalities, until, eventually, the entire thing and all the separate municipalities were dissolved and reconstituted/amalgamated as the current City of Ottawa, which now governs an area the size of a county. Effectively, we are now a city-region with direct planning control of our rural hinterland so we're finally able to put a lid on unplanned suburban and exurban development (other than what was already in the pipe at amalgamation, which was considerable - the townships went on a bit of a final-hour approval spree).
Since amalgamation, there has been talk of severing the rural areas, either into a reformed Carleton County or, more likely, annexing those lands to the next counties over (reconstituting an emaciated county from scratch that hasn't existed for 30 years with a major chip on its shoulder probably isn't a good idea). Simultaneously, there has also been talk of establishing boroughs within the city (either with or without the rural areas) for dealing with local concerns based on a sense that the City is too big and too unresponsive (and too distant in rural areas).
Given Calgary's size relative to its neighbours, any regional government would likely be dominated by Calgary for a good long time, but regional government also seems to be accompanied with an end to annexations since there is a bit of a quid pro quo that everyone cooperates within their existing boundaries. The RMOC experience also suggests that suburban arterial road construction and even rural road paving tends to get prioritized, claims otherwise notwithstanding. This is because the lower density areas tend to have a disproportionate share of the vote in regional governments and are able to overrule the votes of the inner city (which itself has suburban areas that think like places further out and vote accordingly). To this day, rural Ottawa is disproportionately represented on Council.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Calgarian
I doubt we will ever annex Airdrie, we might just have a permanent boundary.
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Can someone explain to me the difference in Alberta between towns and cities? Calgary now has a boundary with the Town of Chestermere. Is this substantially different from a future boundary with Airdrie? Is a town a "subordinate" level of government to the surrounding county/municipal district or is it wholly separate from it, like Calgary? I would think that for co-ordination - given the experience in Ottawa - that it's easier to deal with an "equal" like another city or a county than with a lower-tier municipality that has to answer to the county above it. If towns are wholly separate from the county, are there any powers or responsibilities that cities have that towns don't?
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