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Deamalgamation for Toronto and Hamilton?

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  • Total voters
    71
ssiguy2 said:
Th situation in Hamilton is completely different. The original city still has the bulk of the population unlike Toronto.
In Hamilton the city engulfed the suburbs while in Toronto it seems to be the other way around.
BTW...................Toronto bitched and moaned for decades about getting a new City of Toronto Act and now that it finally has it what have they done with it?
I haven't heard of any change in the bar hours or what about gas taxes or is this yet another example of City Hall inertia?
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this city is very loud and lazy sometimes.
 
CN Tower said:
I'm not scared. Not at all. Although I wouldn't vote for him today based on his policies I believe that Mayor Ford will be better for the City of Toronto than Mayor Miller has been. His accountability platform seems genuine to me and there's no denying the enormous fiscal waste coming from City Hall. Smitherman strikes me as more of the same and his ties to the provincial government leave me feeling quite uncomfortable with him.

I believe much of the negativity towards Rob Ford emanates from superficial judgment of his physical appearance (ie discrimination) and his unpolished delivery. If you dissect his words he actually makes a lot of sense to me though I would support Rocco Rossi over Rob Ford overall.
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I don't see any possiblity of Rob Ford doing a better job than David Miller. The enormous fiscal waste is entirely overblown. There isn't a single corporation with revenues of 7 billion annually that would meet the standards people expect from this government. Ford has also been disingenuous when it comes to his spending choosing to go out of his own pocket and gloating how he spent only a couple hundred of his budget a year. How much he actually spends is unknown. David Miller's handling of the public sector unions is really his only blemish. Aside from that, the city's shape and stance is light years ahead from the start of his term.
 
Doesn't the "megacity" of Ottawa somehow resemble the similarity with Halifax? The city proper and its outer communities (Peggy's cove, Prospect, Dartmouth, Chezzetcook)?
 
Lone Primate said:
How?

It's essentially exactly the same as Metro since 1967, only without the duplication of services and the two levels of government getting in each other's way. What, exactly, worked then that doesn't work now?
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You make it sound as if amalgamation somehow enhanced efficiency (i.e. , no more duplication of services). It actually cost more than it saved.
 
Lone Primate said:
Tell me, Enviro... do you feel at all "entitled" to use the airport you've chosen not to live near, which isn't even in the town you live in?
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After I have paid for my ticket I do feel entitled to use the airport that the airline flies from. This doesn't give me the right to decide how Mississauga operates, it simply means that it is reasonable to go to the airport. My needs to go to the airport should not outweigh the needs of Mississauga to live in the type of city they want to live in. Imagine Toronto residents wanted a diagonal freeway through Mississauga to make getting out of the city from the Gardiner to the 401 near Milton quicker... shouldn't the voices of the people who live in Mississauga have more value than those in Toronto?

Glen said:
You forgot to mention that they support higher taxes on other people, not themselves.
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Nobody voting for a party that has higher taxes actually thinks they are going to escape paying taxes. That is like saying that when voting Conservative the plan is to cut taxes for other people, while being completely generous with your own tax dollars.

GenerationW said:
If you can find someone to rally the troops behind a downtown de-amalgamation movement, knock yourself out. I just don't see it ever happening.
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I don't see it happening either but this is a poll.
 
I believe a strong deamalgamation movement will begin in Toronto this spring. Toronto and East York CC breaking away from the rest of Toronto would be the most logical iteration. It could begin as a grass roots movement or it's seeds could be planted in the TEYCC itself. It would involve a petition with the goal of getting somewhere between 300-400 thousand names. It probably wouldn't succeed but it would interesting to see the effort.
 
Unlike other provinces which have some form of a Recall Act, there is no legal way for citizens to bring forth such a idea of deamalgamation, the best way the pro-deamalgamation people can get any traction is to hope for some political party making it part of their platform.
 
^But that could only happen with bottom up civic activism and a petition would be the clearest indication of the people's will. Of course, a referendum would likely be the ultimate goal.
 
Irishmonk said:
^But that could only happen with bottom up civic activism and a petition would be the clearest indication of the people's will. Of course, a referendum would likely be the ultimate goal.
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It's a novel idea, but I doubt they'll listen. A better idea is to start a start a Toronto centric part to run in all of the MPP ridings in Toronto(seriously). If the three dominant parties get spooked that none of them will get a seat in Toronto or have the risk of losing a chance of a majority government, they'll then start listening to demands like this in order to get votes.
 
As tempting as de-amalgamation might seem at the moment, I really can't support it and I think it's a bit on the hypocritical side for those of us who extol leftist virtues to angrily abandon some of the most vulnerable Torontonians.

It's essentially political white flight. If there was ever a real opportunity to point a finger at Toronto's "elites," there it is.
 
That's only the case if everything is devolved to the de-amalgamated level, which will never happen. I could see de-amalgamation working only to a level where land-use planning (not regional planning), parks/recreation and local road maintenance and simple services are devolved. Public Housing, Transit, Police, likely Fire at this point, libraries, major roads, water and waste kept at a regional level.

It wouldn't be walking away from the suburbs, but now too much has happened since, the services are integrated and we've somehow made the mess work up to this point. I only support reorganization of places like Ottawa and Hamilton, where there's a really odd meld of rural, urban, suburban and exurban. And at this point, Ottawa would only work as two municipalities (City of Ottawa, including outer burbs; and rural Carleton County) and Hamilton as two or three.
 
The (presumably inverse) "white flight" suggestion is inappropriate because there is a lot of wealth and white people in the suburbs and there's isn't a white versus black dichotomy in the city. What do you make of all the succesful visible minorities? The homeless are typically white, too.
 
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