City-suburban differences in government responses to immigration in the greater Toronto area

Immigration is a national government responsibility in most countries, and for that reason its effects on the behaviour of municipal governments have received little attention. This paper focuses on immigration into the urban and suburban cities of the Greater Toronto Area, and examines how six cities in particular respond to their immigrant communities. The research found that, despite functioning within a common legislative and economic context, and having similarly large percentages of their population as immigrants, the responses of municipal governments to immigrant settlement vary not only in content and comprehensiveness, but also in the amount of initiative shown by municipal officials in putting the responses in place. These variations suggest that Canadian municipal governments have more flexibility to design their own policies than is implied by their constitutionally mandated subjection to provincial laws. This may be especially true for those circumstances, of which immigrant settlement is one, where the scope and intent of senior government policies are unclear or are undergoing frequent modifications