Probably more of a *shrug* what-can-you-do.
But really; the biggest victim of all of this is a kind of old-school "municipal identity"--that is, when townships and towns are reduced to wards within an amalgamated entity, it reduces said identity to something rather utilitarian: less about "place" than about "representation".
And I'm just reflecting on how utterly *extinct* this kind of once-drilled-into-our-heads lay-of-the-land is
The visualizing of Ontario in terms of county boundaries, or of places shown according to population size (or the charms of looking up the population figures in the map index)--who has that kind of "mental map" anymore?
Or even the more elaborate, back-roady 80s-style maps, with their more elaborate depictions of municipal boundaries.
People don't have such mental maps of Ontario anymore. Their Ontario might as well be boundary-free, population-size-free. Or even map-free, in a GPS age. So within that void of palpable *map* identity, the kind of municipal structure doesn't matter anymore except in the most utilitarian terms...