The Recruitment of Local Decision-Makers in Five Canadian Cities: Some Preliminary Findings

Abstract

In recent years a significant beginning has been made in the investigation into the processes of recruitment of authorities within the Canadian political system. The focus of these studies has been on elective offices at the federal and provincial levels and on party activists. Only limited research has been devoted to the processes by which local decision-makers are recruited. Other than the partial analysis of local leadership selection by Harold Kaplan in his study of Toronto politics and the cursory treatment of this subject by J.G. Joyce and H.A. Hosse in their general survey of city councillors throughout Canada, empirical data about the recruitment of Canadian local decision-makers is confined to the level of social back ground analysis. The remainder of our information about local leadership selection tends to be in the form of hypotheses derived from data generated by the more extensive research on the recruitment of city councilmen in American cities. Although these propositions are useful because of certain shared structural characteristics between Canadian urban political systems and their American counterparts, they remain largely untested in the Canadian urban context and we run the risk of ignoring possible differences in the recruitment processes caused by factors endemic to each system.