An Academic Friend Since 1968
Andrew Sancton (University of Western Ontario)
I first met Warren Magnusson at a social event for Canadians shortly after I had arrived at Oxford University in the autumn of 1968. He counselled me not to pursue a second undergraduate degree as I had originally planned, but rather to pursue a graduate degree, the BPhil in Politics, the same program in which he had enrolled in the previous academic year. Had I not followed his advice at that time, it is doubtful that I would ever have become an academic. Subsequently, we both went on for a DPhil, even sharing the same supervisor, L.J. (Jim) Sharpe, and graduating in the same year, 1978. However, given that we were at Oxford, where the idea of learning in structured group environments did not exist, it is perhaps not surprising that we had remarkably little contact with each other.
In the academic year 1978–79, Warren was at the University of Western Ontario on a one-year contract. I had been there on various contracts for four previous non-consecutive years. Given our common interests in Canadian local government, we dreamed up the idea of an edited volume of essays on politics in seven Canadian cities, with Warren writing an Introduction and an essay on Toronto, while I took on Montreal and the Conclusion. To our considerable surprise, we managed to round up contributors for the other five cities. The University of Toronto Press agreed to publish, and City Politics in Canada appeared in 1983, long after Warren had been hired at the University of Victoria.
I followed Warren’s career with great interest. It soon became apparent that our concerns were taking quite different directions. I became increasingly concerned with the “nuts and bolts” of Canadian local government while Warren began a lifetime project of questioning the dominance of the concept of state sovereignty as the basis of human governance. In his terms, I resolutely adopted what he would characterize as a “statist” approach in my work on local government. We remained friends, although we mostly moved in different academic circles.
Most of the readers of these essays will probably be more interested in Warren’s theoretical work. His international readers might not even know about City Politics in Canada. I don’t think Warren was embarrassed by the book, but I did hear him say to a colleague at one point that he considered it unduly “careerist,” presumably because it was not primarily devoted to the more theoretical concerns that he had first elaborated in his doctoral thesis entitled “Participation and Democratic Theory: The Role of Neighbourhood Government” (Magnusson 1978).
In my contribution here, I want to emphasize that, in addition to his main intellectual project, Warren was a keen observer and analyst of Canadian local government. Nowhere is this more obvious than in his two chapters in City Politics in Canada. His introductory chapter, complete with seventeen pages of endnotes, remains our most authoritative essay on the evolution of Canadian local government from colonial times until about 1980. And it was written by an assistant professor only about three years after having completed his doctorate.
In the early pages of his Introduction, Warren discusses the principles behind the Baldwin Act, the pre-Confederation municipal legislation for Upper Canada. Somewhat surprisingly (for a “statist” like me), he claims that its first principle was
…that the municipal councils were the creatures of the provincial legislature and were subject to its sovereign authority. This was in defiance of the idea, advanced by extreme proponents of local self-government, that the right of the community to govern itself arose directly from the people and could not be abridged or denied even by the ostensibly sovereign authority. The legislature asserted that the municipalities were its creation and could be altered or abolished at will: thus, a community that was recognized one day as a municipality one day could be denied that status the next. Local constitutions were to depend not on local decision, but on provincial legislation (pp. 6–7).
Decrying the “creatures of the province” doctrine and advocating for the primacy of local autonomy was to be a theme that constantly recurred in Warren’s subsequent scholarship.
Much of the rest of the introductory essay is aimed at showing how and why municipal politics in Canada became largely divorced from the party-political battles that eventually shaped the nature of federal and provincial politics. For many political scientists, this would be a sign of the trivialization of the local. Warren’s conclusion was the opposite:
The idea that municipal affairs are outside politics reflects the popular belief that politics is a matter of party activity. One of the advantages of approaching the study of Canadian politics from the municipal level – an advantage that has sadly yet to be fully exploited – is that it forces one’s attention away from the political parties and away from the legislatures they dominate to the rich field of political activity beyond. It is there that the realities of Canadian politics and government will be found. As students of urban affairs have long been aware, it is impossible to grasp those realities by a political science that sets itself apart from the study of history, geography, economics, or sociology. To understand the politics of cities is to understand those communities as wholes. (p. 37)
As with his earlier discussion of local autonomy, this passage, in many important ways, is an obvious bridge to what would follow, as Warren turned his attention to issues that went far beyond the scope of city politics in Canada.
References
Magnusson, Warren. 1978. "Participation and democratic theory: The role of neighbourhood government." D.Phil., Nuffield College, University of Oxford.
Sancton, Andrew and Warren Magnusson, eds. 1983. City Politics in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Andrew Sancton is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario.