Policy in Place:Revisiting Canada’s Tri-Level Agreements

Cities are critical sites for policy-making in the 21st century. They are places of innovation for new strategies to tackle today’s most complex economic, social, environmental, and health problems. The COVID-19 pandemic has also revealed the importance of cities as partners in implementing and enforcing national and provincial policies, programs, and services. This raises an important public governance question: how can actors situated at multiple jurisdictional levels, with different yet complementary problem-solving assets, deliver locally appropriate solutions to issues of national and, increasingly, global consequence playing out in cities? This paper makes the case that Canada’s collaborative policy experience with tri-level urban development agreements offers instructive guidance and timely lessons. Distinguishing between “site-specific” and “sector-oriented” variants, the paper explores the workings and achievements of five tri-level agreements over the past four decades. Taking stock, the paper introduces “place-based federalism” as a bottom-up governance framework for renewing Canada’s collaborative approach, adapting it to the complex problems currently converging in cities and neighbourhoods. The paper identifies specific policy fields where new tri-level agreements could have a positive impact and closes with six principles to inform their design and implementation.