Pearson: Cities need power to govern themselves

Walk through the core of any Canadian city and you can see the quiet unraveling: Tents in parks; lineups outside food banks; the bankruptcies of small businesses; the silence of people who have given up expecting anything better. This is what decay looks like. It places the homeless on the fringe of a city and calls its progress.

We have built a system of governance that is morally neglectful because it is structurally blind. The places where most Canadians live – our cities – are treated as administrative conveniences. They bear the weight of our collective failures: homelessness, poor pay, high rents, hunger, isolation. But they have been stripped of the tools to heal themselves.

The architects of Confederation never imagined the modern metropolis. They built a political order for a ni