Bylaw City.

• Position: School's in

The majority of people in Canada live in some kind of municipality, whether it's a city, town, village, hamlet, or other type of municipality. For that reason, we are almost all affected by the laws, known generally as bylaws, made by those municipalities. This issue of LawNow has feature articles on municipal law, and this edition of School's In will deal with some of the complex issues that elected officials have to deal with to keep their municipalities running.

The objectives of this School's In are

* to acquire information about how municipalities are run and what they can do;

* to acquire information about how bylaws are enforced, and

* to develop some understanding of how elected officials must balance many interests when they pass bylaws.

These objectives will require some research and some role playing.

Research

The first important thing to know about municipalities is that they can only exist under laws made by the provinces and they can only do the things that provinces say they can do in the law. Each province and territory has its own legislation, creating and giving powers to municipalities. So there are three main research tasks to carry out.

First, find a print or online copy of the most recent version of the Act regarding municipalities for your province or territory. Then look for overall powers that the Act gives municipalities, and list them. If you are searching online, find your province's statutes, then search under 'L' for something like a Local Authorities Act or under 'M' for something like a Municipal Act, Municipal Government Act, etc. Another way is to go to a public library and check with the reference librarian.

List major powers of municipalities --

Second, find a website for your municipality that includes copies of its bylaws or telephone your local government office to find out where print copies of bylaws may be read. You will probably be looking for a particular bylaw when you are doing one of the role plays for this School's In. But you may also find other bylaws that are of interest to you or your family.

Website for your municipality --

Key bylaws for your role play --

Third, once you have been assigned to work on a particular role play, you may want to search the internet for bylaws of other Canadian municipalities to see how they have dealt with particular problems.

Similar bylaws --

Municipal law cases are often dealt with at the level of boards, tribunals, or lower courts, so they can be harder to find than the bylaws. You may want to search the LawNow archive for articles, using bylaws as a key word, at www.lawnow.org if your school has a subscription to the online version of LawNow.

It would also be helpful if your teachers or parents could arrange a trip for you to a municipal council meeting when public delegations are being presented, a traffic court, or a development appeal board hearing.

Role Play Scenarios

While all of the scenarios below are simplified and fictional, they all are based on bylaws, cases, and conflicts that have taken place in Canadian municipalities.

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