Municipalities are responsible for many essential services and have become vital agents for implementing provincial policies, including those dealing with the environment, emergency planning, economic development, and land use. In Foundations of Governance, experts from each of Canada's provinces come together to assess the extent to which municipal governments have the capacity to act autonomously, purposefully, and collaboratively in the intergovernmental arena. Each chapter follows a common template in order to facilitate comparison and covers essential features such as institutional structures, municipal functions, demography, and municipal finances. Canada's municipalities function in diverse ways but have similar problems and, in this way, are illustrative of the importance of local democracy. Foundations of Governance shows that municipal governments require the legitimacy granted by a vibrant democracy in order to successfully negotiate and implement important collective choices about the futures of communities.

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. No matter the process and results of the proposed solutions, what the contributors uncovered were distinctive attributes of the small city as it struggles to confront increasingly complex social issues. If local governments accept a social agenda as part of its 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. With contributions by Lorry-Ann Austin, Jacques Caillouette, Graham Day, Robert Harding, Wendy Hulko, Paul Jenkinson, Kathie McKinnon, Sharlene Matthew, Jennifer Murphy, Diane Purvey, Mónica J. Sánchez-Flores, and Sydney Weaver

Introduction : the evolution of government information services and stewardship in Canada / Amanda Wakaruk and Sam-chin Li -- Government publication deposit programs : the Canadian federal, provincial, and territorial landscapes / Graeme Campbell, Michelle Lake, and Catherine McGoveran -- Library and archives Canada : official publications and select digital library collections, 1923-2017 / Tom J. Smyth -- Parliamentary information in Canada : form and function / Talia Chung and Maureen Martyn -- Commissions and tribunals / Caron Rollins -- Alberta government publishing / Dani J. Pahulje -- Saskatchewan government publications deposit in the Legislative Library / Gregory Salmers -- Inside track : challenges of collecting, accessing, and preserving Ontario government publications / Sandra Craig and Martha Murphy -- Digitization of government publications : a review of the Ontario Digitization Initiative / Carol Perry, Brian Tobin, and Sam-chin Li -- GALLOP Portal : making government publications in legislative libraries findable / Peter Ellinger -- The Canadian Government Information Digital Preservation Network : a collective response to a national crisis / Amanda Wakaruk and Steve Marks -- Web harvesting and reporting fugitive government materials : collaborative stewardship of at-risk documents / Susan Paterson, Nicholas Worby, and Darlene Fichter.

This work considers how and why cities change their governing arrangements - and the implications for cities of the future. It provides case studies that show how actual cities have changed and adapted their structure to fit changing times and citizen demands.