Imagine having a city councillor who actually represents your views. On all the important questions of urban life—housing, public space, transit, bikes, cars, pedestrians, schools, addiction care, you name it—you align.

Others in your ward clearly feel the same, because together you reelected the councillor with nearly three-quarters of the ballot. The mayor you voted for is also rather like-minded. Even city council as a whole seems more in tune these days. For the first time in a long time, it feels like your city government gets you, respects you, acts for you.

Then comes the awful truth: your municipality doesn’t in fact have the authority to do these things all of you want. Or rather, a higher power has the authority to undo them. Any of them. Not only did you not vote for the politician now meddling in city decisions, but he didn’t run to be your councillor. He didn’t run for any city position at all. Nevertheless, he threatens to dismantle much of what your elected officials did—and were elected to do—and it’s all perfectly legal.

You didn’t know. You feel like an idiot. You believed all this time that your municipal vote mattered.

Here’s the reality: Canadian cities are powerless. The only powers they have are the ones the province gives them. And as we’ve seen in Ontario over and over these past few years, just as the province can giveth, the province can taketh away.

Take protected bike lanes. The City decided to create some. But in October 2024, the Ontario government passed the Reducing Gridlock, Saving You Time Act, which decreed that cities could not build bike lanes that reduced lanes of motor vehicle traffic unless the Minister of Transportation said it was okay. And it wasn’t just future lanes that would be a no-no—the premier said he wanted to tear out 19 kilometres of existing Toronto bike lanes, city infrastructure that had been debated and approved by the city’s elected city council, and paid for and built by the city. (An Ontario court ruling has confirmed he has this right).

It was the same with safe injection sites. The City decided to create some. But in December 2024, the Ontario government passed the Community Care and Recovery Act, which directed Toronto Public Health to close all city-run facilities of this kind.

In November 2025, in a piece of legislation called Building a More Competitive Economy Act, the province took away a city’s right even to operate speed cameras.

We are the grown child helping to support the family, who is not allowed out past curfew or even to decorate their own room.

The province hasn’t just been reversing specific policy decisions, either—it has been altering how decisions will be made. In June 2025, for instance, the Ford government placed Toronto’s English-language school boards under provincial supervision, meaning that the school board trustees, who we had gone to the polls to democratically elect, suddenly no longer had the power we had given them. Ford followed up in May this year with the Putting Student Achievement First Act. That gave even more power to the province—over budgets, communications, property and collective bargaining, and, just for good measure, reduced the number of English Toronto trustees.

In retrospect, we should not have been surprised by any of this. The school board coup brought back dark memories of the early months of the Ford government. In the midst of the 2018 municipal election—in the midst!—the province slashed the number of municipal councillors that would represent the city of Toronto.

It wasn’t an across-the-province cut either, it was a bespoke reduction in representation, just for us. The province was allowed to do that. It was not lost on me that the man orchestrating this was Steve Clark, MPP for Brockville, my own hometown (and erstwhile head boy at my high school.) Brockville is a city about a fifth the size of my Toronto ward. And with its population of just 24,000, it has no fewer than eight city councillors—one for every 3,000 constituents. In Toronto, we get about one per 134,400.

If there was ever any doubt about what the Supreme Court meant when it wrote in 1993 that “municipalities are entirely creatures of provincial statutes,” we now understand. If the province doesn’t like what a city is doing, it just drafts a law to make it go away. Cities are truly at the whim of the province. We are its playthings.

It doesn’t feel right.