Christina Bouchard (University of Ottawa)
Starting in 1994, Ontario’s Environmental Registry (ERO) was one of the first digital public consultation platforms used at a large scale (Daniels, 2018; Richardson & Razzaque 2011). The provincially administered platform receives feedback from citizens and municipalities and has come to play a unique role in municipal-provincial relations (Hersey, 2009; Lindgren & Dunn, 2010; Spicer 2016). To explore how Ontario’s front-line governments use the ERO, interviews were undertaken with 25 municipal planners. From their respective jurisdictions, these administrators have been responding to sweeping deregulatory reforms enacted by the Province of Ontario.
In contrast to studies of multilevel governance which have emphasized the coordination of actors within a policy process (Good, 2009; Horak 2024; Young, 2006), this research focuses on the significance of municipal practices (Lucas & Smith, 2019 p.274). Between 2018-2025, provincial ERO postings corresponding to deregulatory legislation have been frequent, rapid, complex, and sometimes compounding. Despite these challenging circumstances, municipalities continued to engage the ERO, developing a variety of strategies to respond.
The findings from the interviews are discussed in two parts 1) how the scale of municipalities elicited different adaptations to the province’s consultation instrument (Lascomes & Galès, 2005) and 2) the significance of municipal pragmatism in the enactment of democratic values (Good 2009, 2019; Magnusson, 2015). The routines and small, everyday discretionary actions (Lipskey, 2018; Biggar & Siemiatycki 2023) of those interviewed provide a micro-analysis of how municipal planners and their councils together seek to enact democratic and multi-level governance.