Mayor Jim Watson participating in the 2019 Ottawa Pride parade with Premier Kathleen Wynne and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau/Jim Watson Instagram

By Jim Watson

January 31, 2024

I was listening to a talk-radio show a few months ago when listeners were asked to call in their answers to the question, “What’s your earliest childhood memory?”

It didn’t take me long to remember mine.

My cousin Blair and I were both 4 or 5 at the time, and we lived in Lachute, a small town in the Laurentians, northwest of Montreal.

Our parents were out somewhere, and we were at home with a babysitter, playing in the front yard by ourselves.

Suddenly, we saw a city truck pull up in front of our home and start shovelling hot, smelly asphalt into a good-sized pothole right in front of us. We watched this process carefully while our sitter was inside the house, probably getting lunch ready.

It took the crew a few minutes to complete their task and I remember them stomping the tar down before continuing down the street.

We were so impressed by what we had just seen, we grabbed our little plastic shovels and my bright yellow Tonka dump truck, went out to the curb, loaded some of that fresh asphalt into our pint-sized equipment and started paving our walkway.

A few minutes later, the sitter ushered us back into the house, our hands and shirts covered in oily, black asphalt stains. When my parents arrived home, they were not amused and it was quite a challenge to remove the mess from both our skin and front walk.

I tell this story because it was my first contact with a municipal government. Little did I know that it would foreshadow my future career as a municipal politician.

Before the turn of this century, municipal government had the reputation of being the get-no-respect Rodney Dangerfield of politics — low on glamour and famously thankless; garbage collection, snow plowing and the upholding of the medieval practice of bestowing keys to the city.

For decades in Canadian politics, civic government was seen as a stepping stone to a career at the provincial level or, more desirably, federal politics — the big show on Parliament Hill. But times have changed, and we are now seeing a reversal in that old springboard-to-greater-things approach.

Canadians are witnessing what might be seen as the emergence of modern, de facto city-states. The city of Toronto has a bigger capital and operating budget than many provinces.

From the 2010 piece in Nature magazine that dubbed this The Century of the City, to the OECD asking in 2016, “Are Cities the New Countries?” to Paul Krugman’s New York Times column last September, Superstar Cities in the Age of Zoom, to the 2023 economics book Age of the City by Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin, cities have been the hot political, economic and social studies story for years.

With the advent of social media, cities began branding themselves directly to the world, over, above and beyond other levels of government, by capitalizing on their global reputations to draw attention, investment and tourism, making some big-city mayors political stars beyond not just their own cities but beyond their national borders. Very few people reading this could name Nickie Aiken as the UK MP for the City of London, but you quite likely know that Sadiq Khan is the mayor.

Canadians are witnessing what might be seen as the emergence of modern, de facto city-states. The city of Toronto has a bigger capital and operating budget than many provinces.

At the level of political talent migration, the lure of municipal government has evolved in part due to the greater potential for impact. As cities have spent the past two decades not just developing but implementing their own agendas in areas ranging from climate change policy to security policy to foreign policy, political professionals who value the potential for politics to affect change have gravitated to a level where ideas can become policy in much shorter timelines, with far less partisan conflict and obstruction.

There is also more freedom for those at the municipal level as you don’t have party bosses, leaders or whips telling you how to vote (the exceptions being British Columbia and Quebec, which allow political parties at the municipal level).

Just in the last decade, we have seen more and more women and men leave federal and provincial orders of government either by choice or through defeat, and go on to seek elected office at the municipal level as a councillor or mayor of their respective cities or towns.

Even a partial list of politicians who’ve realized that municipal government isn’t the way-station it used to be is impressive.

It includes Gregor Robertson, who left the B.C. legislature to become mayor of Vancouver and his successor, Kennedy Stewart, left his seat in the House of Commons and was also elected mayor.

In Alberta, Amarjeet Sohi went from being a federal cabinet minister to becoming the 36th mayor of Edmonton. In Quebec, former federal minister Dennis Coderre left the Hill to be elected mayor of Montreal. In Ontario, after their respective losses at the polls, NDP leader Andrea Horwath stepped down to successfully run for mayor of Hamilton and Liberal leader Steven Del Duca won the mayor’s race in Vaughan. John Tory left provincial politics to become mayor of Canada’s largest city, Toronto. Olivia Chow went from municipal Toronto politics to the House of Commons and is now back in Toronto as mayor. Patrick Brown started as a city councillor in Barrie, then became a federal MP, then provincial Tory leader, and is now mayor of Brampton. The affable Mayor of Halifax, Mike Savage, was a federal MP for several years before being elected locally in 2012.

Those of us who’ve had the privilege to serve provincially or federally as well as at the municipal level often talk about how much more nimble and quick-to-respond cities and towns are. From dealing with floods, fires and tornados to actually building affordable homes as opposed to talking about it ad nauseum during debates and question periods — the real pragmatic order of government is at the grassroots.

So, from my early interest in service provision and implementation via pothole filling to the honour I felt serving my fellow Ottawans as mayor, I can honestly tell those who ask that the most challenging but rewarding order of government is the one closest to the people — down the street at your city hall.

Jim Watson was the longest serving Mayor of Ottawa (1997-2000 and 2010-2022) and was Minister and MPP for the Government of Ontario from 2003-2010, including serving several years as Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing.