🔧Instead of fighting each other at city hall over these policies, we should accept that amalgamation is not working and bring the fight to the province who arbitrarily imposed this upon us. Local decisions belong with local people!

🔒Such legislature, if passed, would bring local decision making back to local politicians and their constituents, allowing them to determine their own destiny, free from the Province’s micro-managing.
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🧭While it may not be “in vogue” to look southward in Canadian politics at the moment, some American state legislatures include “home rule” laws that grant cities political insulation from state government. A similar law could be introduced here.

📍I believe that Montreal’s borough system provides us a useful framework for reform, but, more radical reform could be to enshrine a “home rule” clause in our provincial law.

⚙️Though their budgets are delegated to them by the main Montreal city hall, they maintain the power to enact local policies like that which concerns urban planning, garbage collection, and recreation.

↪️After Quebec’s fierce public backlash to amalgamation, Montreal, in the “2006 municipal reorganization,” introduced the #borough: a smaller unit within the city with its own elected council, and mayor.
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⚠️Simply put, the political whims of suburbs dominate the will of old central cities, making it needlessly difficult to pass desperately needed social legislation that was formerly a given. Amalgamation is, and always was, a shameful example of democratic backsliding.
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🗳️This is gerrymandering the electorate. For the last 27 years, elections in cities like Toronto can be tracked almost perfectly upon pre-amalgamation lines.
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📑From here, we lead into the political side. Merging all regional municipalities into singular giant cities undermines local financial and political self-determination. Former cities, reduced to “wards,” now have to compete with the other suburban “wards” for resources, policy, and influence.

💰Cities like Toronto & Ottawa had the majority of their services handled by the region, so all merging did was download costs onto cities. These “efficiencies” do not stand up to scrutiny. In fact, they lopsided municipal budgetary priorities, eroding local financial autonomy.
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💸 Amalgamation’s stated goal was “cost efficiency.” By consolidating all services under one tax base, proponents argued that an economy of scale would reduce expenditures. These savings, however, never materialized.

❓So, let’s discuss. What is bad about this, what has happened since, and how can it be reformed?

#Toronto, #Montreal, #Ottawa, and countless others suddenly found themselves in some of the biggest municipalities in North America by land area.
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📈Amalgamation largely replaced this structure. Entire regions of independent municipalities were all annexed into single cities; despite referendums showing overwhelming public opposition.

🤝With the caveat that the province holds veto power, this system allows growing cities to collaborate with their regional neighbours on cross-border services like electricity, water, and mass transportation.

3️⃣See, Ontario and Quebec have two levels of municipal #government: the city, dealing with local matters, and the region, dealing with planning over the larger area. Each has a separate government, budget, and tax base which function independently of one another.
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📕In the 1990’s, Ontario Premier Mike Harris developed a so-called #amalgamation plan for many of the province’s biggest cities. This plan was pitched as a cost-efficiency, and democratic streamlining measure. Quebec followed suit a few years later.
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