A Fleeting Metropolitan Moment: Regional Governance and Municipal Collaboration in Greater Toronto during the COVID-19 Pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic, mayors and chairs from 11 of the 30 municipal governments in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) met a total of 76 times to share information, coordinate emergency measures, and collectively advocate to provincial and federal governments, marking the most sustained and productive period of bottom-up, voluntary regional collaboration in the region’s history. This report documents the dawn and demise of the GTHA Mayors and Chairs group, as it was known, describing its functions and procedures, summarizing its achievements, tracking its genesis, evolution, and eventual dissolution, and offering lessons about what it takes to build effective metropolitan governance. Findings are based on interviews with nine of the participating mayors and regional chairs and five municipal chief administrative officers, numerous background interviews with the political staff and civil servants involved, and a review of primary meeting materials. During its three-year tenure, the GTHA Mayors and Chairs group – which we also refer to as the GTHA11 – secured a range of legislative, regulatory, and financial returns that benefited the region during the COVID-19 crisis and evolved into a constructive forum for regional dialogue on a range of regional issues exacerbated by the pandemic, such as housing, policing and community safety, and refugee settlement and integration. Today, though, the group no longer meets, undone by a cascade of events, including the surprise resignation of the group’s chair, Toronto Mayor John Tory, in February 2023. All told, the story of the GTHA Mayors and Chairs is a tale of missed opportunity. The group demonstrated that informal, bottom-up regionalism is both possible and worthwhile. Local leaders across the GTHA came together and collaborated in ways rarely seen before. Had it endured, the group may have evolved from a forum for discussion and coordination to a true collaborative regional decision-making body of some kind. Today, however, with the pandemic seemingly behind us, the prospect of effective regional governance in the GTHA once again looks bleak.