This chapter relates two scales of governance and political representation that are inextricable, but which are rarely considered together: the metropolitan and the municipal. The contemporary effectiveness and legitimacy of local governance, and the capacity of local institutions to articulate conflict, depends in large part on how these inherited institutions are “wired up”, and how contemporary actors use them. This chapter provides a window on the wide variation in institutional arrangements found in Canada, which has been enabled by federalism (provincial jurisdiction over local government), fiscal decentralization, and the non-integration of local politics with provincial and federal party systems. Canada’s decentralized federalism and dispersed urban system have enabled considerable institutional experimentation since World War II, especially over the past 25 years. The result is a differentiated patchwork of institutional structures and models. This variation is illustrated first through descriptive analyses of the relative institutional consolidation of local governance and intensity of political representation in Canada’s 41 metropolitan areas, and then through a comparison of Toronto and Montréal’s very different coordinating and representational structures. Convergence on a single model is unlikely to occur; rather, experimentation will continue in ways that defy easy generalization.