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Amalgamation

JWBF

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Ok, this is simple, lets here everone's opinions on the Amalgamation, for good, for bad, for ever etched in the annals of UT for everyone to see.
 
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Thank you JWBF.
This could be a useful forum.
I am opposed to de-amalgamation just because the original premise was not carried out as it should have been. Instead of fewer employees and departments we have more of both, the fault of the mechanics, not the design. I feel that we are too far down the road for a U-turn and should make a greater effort to make it work.
 
Thank you JWBF.
This could be a useful forum.
I am opposed to de-amalgamation just because the original premise was not carried out as it should have been. Instead of fewer employees and departments we have more of both, the fault of the mechanics, not the design. I feel that we are too far down the road for a U-turn and should make a greater effort to make it work.
The issue is the dynamics of the suburban vs. Urban politics. Until they can be worked out, this marriage will never work out. And I'm not entirely convinced that they can be worked out.
 
Thank you JWBF.
This could be a useful forum.
I am opposed to de-amalgamation just because the original premise was not carried out as it should have been. Instead of fewer employees and departments we have more of both, the fault of the mechanics, not the design. I feel that we are too far down the road for a U-turn and should make a greater effort to make it work.
Agreed. Though I can't imagine why one would expect a smaller bureaucracy ... your well past the change in workforce where economy of scale would apply. Whoever thought that must have been smoking crack. Was Doug Ford Senior part of that decision? He was one of the few PC (Progressive Cracksmoker) MPPs in Toronto back then.
 
Metropolitan Toronto was created in 1954 using London, England as its model. London was, and is still, a two-tier government, made up of 32 boroughs and city.

What should have happened in 1998, should have been the addition of Peel, York, and Durham regions into Metropolitan Toronto, but leaving the existing cities, towns, boroughs, etc. to handle local matters. If there had to be some amalgamation, then the inner suburbs of the former City of York and the Borough of East York into the former City of Toronto, but no more than that.
 
Was Doug Ford Senior part of that decision? He was one of the few PC (Progressive Cracksmoker) MPPs in Toronto back then.

There weren't just "a few"--the PCs won 16 out of 30 seats in the 416 in '95 (a situation not unlike the HarperCons in 2011). And they swept Etobicrack; go figure...
 
At this point, it makes no sense to undo what has been done. At a time there were clearer divides between the pockets of the old cities and downtown, now, I'm not so sure. The ties that bind are stronger now than the ones that keep us a part.

Going west, we have Queen street, melding with Ronci, flowing into the High Park and Bloor West. Going north, you can almost argue that the connective tissue is there pulling Yonge, Bayview, Don Mills together with Leaside and down to center core. The Beaches, Queen East, Kingston road while not fully blending, is certainly there.

I believe you really have to push out to the outskirts of Markham and Vaughan to begin to get the true suburban, sub-division, big box mall lay of the land that makes it so different.

Now, do we have the best governing structure, who knows. What is clear that the forces moving towards urbanization are as present at Islington and Bloor as they are at Spadina and Front. The divide between suburban/urban will fade and there is more that keep us together than pull us apart.

The Fords speak to ginned up populism rather than a true divide. As much as I don't care for all of Holyday's reactionary responses (I still have images of him red faced and yelling at a Pan Am community meeting), the truth is if he had been Mayor (or Tory or Stintz etc), honestly we'd be having fairly reasonable debates about managing the city. It's the false options put forward by Ford and his crowd that has coloured the debate and is so unwelcome in the city discourse.

Making amalgamation is fully doable.
 
Metropolitan Toronto was created in 1954 using London, England as its model. London was, and is still, a two-tier government, made up of 32 boroughs and city.

What should have happened in 1998, should have been the addition of Peel, York, and Durham regions into Metropolitan Toronto, but leaving the existing cities, towns, boroughs, etc. to handle local matters. If there had to be some amalgamation, then the inner suburbs of the former City of York and the Borough of East York into the former City of Toronto, but no more than that.

I agree.. and this was what i was articulating in the Rob Ford threat. Amalgamation wasn't necessarily a mistake; the devil was in the failure to expand some sort of quasi regional Metro level government that encapsulated Peel, York, Durham etc... The creation of the Greater Toronto Services Board was meant to be that level of government, however, without any taxation powers it was basically still born and hence died a miserable death.

Unfortunately the creation of such a quasi regional government would dwarf the provincial government and sadly, while it may be the right thing, I don't see it ever happening.

No premier would have the appetite for it, as it would be incredibly unpopular in the 905 area code.
 
I hate amalgamation as much as anyone else does. This is not to say that "Old Toronto" didn't elect any moronic mayors - far from it. Amalgamation, however, allowed the possibility of having a mayor who hates the central city and this is what happened, precisely.

Now, Kathleen Wynne hated amalgamation too, and was activistic about that. Given the nature of politics, even Wynne is unlikely to revisit the issue. De-amalgamation would be costly. We're stuck with our forced marriage to the suburbs.
 
I support de-amalgamation but not because of politics or any sort of values-based judgement. I'm sure that in pre-amalgamation Toronto there was still plenty of "urban" versus "suburban" battles. It's not a stretch to see the former City of Toronto councillor for Queen West complaining about the "suburban" mentalities of the councillor for Yonge and Lawrence. Or the "urban" councillor for Mimico disagreeing with the "suburban" councillor for Edenbridge Dr. In the end, such perspectives are relative.

There has been research done into the subject of a "optimal" city size for efficient delivery of services. At some point efficiencies of scale become inefficiencies of scale, which is what we saw with the amalgamated city.

It's long been a subject of study, and UofT has done some research into the subject. I don't recall the exact number, but it has been determined that generally local services (not including things like police and transit) are best delivered in cities with populations in the hundreds of thousands, not in the millions. As others have suggested, smaller "cities" or "boroughs" with regional coordination would be more sensible and likely more efficient.

My only request is that if we were to de-amalgamate, we didn't just return to the previous borders. The borders between Toronto, East York, York, and North York were extremely arbitrary in many cases and would merit a reconsideration.
 
I agree.. and this was what i was articulating in the Rob Ford threat. Amalgamation wasn't necessarily a mistake; the devil was in the failure to expand some sort of quasi regional Metro level government that encapsulated Peel, York, Durham etc... The creation of the Greater Toronto Services Board was meant to be that level of government, however, without any taxation powers it was basically still born and hence died a miserable death.

Unfortunately the creation of such a quasi regional government would dwarf the provincial government and sadly, while it may be the right thing, I don't see it ever happening.

No premier would have the appetite for it, as it would be incredibly unpopular in the 905 area code.

This is a crazy idea but why not the province of "Southern Ontario" or just province of "Toronto", we as Torontotonians like to hold our own reigns.

The Ford's like to campaign for 22 councilors (down from 44), this is still following the lines of the Harris government wanting the cities to pay the province's bills by shuffling responsibilities. Looks good if you reduce representative government, and push responsibilities onto someone else's budget to give the illusion of balancing the budget or debt.
 
It's done and dusted ... give it up.

If that's really what people want, let's make Toronto (416) it's own province. Then divide the province into cities.
 
What would the capital of Ontario be?
Where ever Ontario wants it.

It could still be Toronto if Ontario wants.

There's been a trend lately in Ontario of putting county "capitals" outside the county. There's quite a few examples. For example, when Kingston was amalgamated, the new Frontenac County (which amalgamated the old County outside of Kingston plus the remaining townships) didn't include Kingston. However the county offices are all still in Kingston nearly 2 decades later.
 

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