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Regional Governance Review

what? He's not looking at messing around with Hastings County or Rainy River District? They'll feel so left out.

Our municipality is open for business just fine thanks, so he can keep his farm field paving, groundwater destroying, developer satisfying grubby hands to himself.

Actually, there might be opportunity for a little tweaking here and there but this government doesn't do tweak.

One problem with enlarging or amalgamating lower density but geographically larger municipalities is you lose the desire or incentive for local volunteerism in areas such as fire departments and municipal community boards. People aren't going to be as willing to commit their time to something they don't feel is local. It becomes worse when they amalgamate an urban community with surrounding rural neighbours. Things like interest, money, etc. tend to flow inward.

Given this government's history of political math, an amalgamated single-tier Muskoka would have, what, one elected official?
 
Some of these potential amalgamations make prefedt sense but you can't help wondering that if in 60 years Sudbury, London, Toronto, and Ottawa are going to be the only ones left standing.
 
Amalgamating Brampton and Mississauga, to stick it to Patrick Brown.

Does anyone know what Brown did to make such an enemy of Ford? This vendetta seems frankly bizarre from where I'm standing. And to go to these extremes! If this is just a gleefully vicious side-benefit to something Thug was going to do anyway, all right, that's understandable (if contemptible), but if Ford really is doing this specifically to stick it to Brown, that's just insane. And we all know Thug's petty and nasty enough to be capable of such a thing.

...Of course, that also has implications for fundamental things like policing and transit and I'm wary that this particular government will do anything sensible. But, hey, it's possible.

Sigh. No, it isn't. We all know it. Don't pretend otherwise.

They weren't drawn sensibly partly because the Harris PCs got pushback in the 905 and ended the experiment early.

Might the same thing happen here? And shouldn't it?
 
I think it's unlikely this is ACTUALLY about getting at Patrick Brown but it would be kind of funny if they just kept erasing from existence every job he tried to get. Kind of.

I must confess to feeling a certain amount of schadenfreude here: The way Brown openly gloated about the Cons' big win in the election aftermath as though it presented some kind of personal validation really left a bad taste in my mouth. As if the dumb bastard had anything to do with it. And to cop such an attitude after his former 'comrades' had so spectacularly fucked him over. Whatever the truth of the matter here, I can't imagine he's happy about this. And it kind of serves him right.

And speaking of the Laws of Entirely Predictable Consequences, how many of the people who voted for Thug were naïve enough to think he wouldn't pull the same shit on them that he did to Toronto? Methinks there's a certain amount of Buyer's Remorse in the air this morning.
 
Removing the 'Regional' level of government is easy. I bet most people in GTA suburbs don't even know what they do.

I live in Vaughan. I have heard rumours that they want to combine Vaughan and King into 1 city. Think it might actually make more sense to combine Markham & Vaughan.
 
forcing an end to planning of the freight bypass,
In a way, this might actually be 'released' to be easier to institute by the Feds, as it really is a federal matter anyway (in both railway law and national as well as local interest). I believe the term applicable is 'paradoxical' by virtue of it floating to the top of a thickened provincial swamp creation.
Where that would leave Caledon, I don't know.
I've noted a few articles in the Orangeville Metroland spawn (can't remember the name) examining whether Caledon would be welcomed north. It's an interesting discussion, but Caledon's wish is not to be an orphan, but at the same time, to remain rural.
If I were in charge, I'd love to redraw some municipal boundaries.
A lot! Hamilton, for instance, couldn't be a collection of more disparate communities. It borders on being bizarre.
It's interesting that Simcoe County is part of the review, but not the two separated cities (Barrie and Orillia) within it.
One escaping most peoples gaze is Guelph. It purposely estranged itself from Wellington County, and yet chafes with the costs of efficient service delivery. Guelph Transit is an excellent example. It really should be fused into GRT. So should some other services, albeit Guelph is now re-establishing some shared services with Wellington (Health, for instance), but Guelphites themselves have a fierce sense of 'we can do it ourselves' which I found curious in my five years there...which caused me to delve deeper on how to enable closer service integration. The Police Services Act, for instance, allows "adjacent" (it doesn't define having to actually share a border) municipalities to merge the police services if so desired. The Muni Act also defines other services, like transit, roads, sewers, water, etc as being able to be addressed communally. Guelph could share far more with Waterloo Region than it could with Wellington.

This is an aspect that Ford hasn't been called on yet in the press, not that I've read anyway. *Complete Assimilation* is not only not necessary, it's often counter-productive, no matter what the attempt is to be achieved.

What really needs to be examined is *implementation and re-writing the present Muni Act(s)* (Toronto, Sudbury, Hamilton et al) to affect even greater mutual co-operation.

I suspect the two major Guelph publications (Mercury and Today) will have guest comment on this in the next while. K/W media also.

Scissors are excellent tools. But I wouldn't let Doug Ford run with a pair in his hand. Inevitably it's not him that gets hurt initially, it's the innocent that get stabbed.
 
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Removing the 'Regional' level of government is easy. I bet most people in GTA suburbs don't even know what they do.

I live in Vaughan. I have heard rumours that they want to combine Vaughan and King into 1 city. Think it might actually make more sense to combine Markham & Vaughan.

Just because people don't know what they do doesnt mean they don't do anything.
Case in point: YR is now spending something like $200M on an expansion of its headquarters building. Might seem annoying to taxpayers if they don't need it in a year or two. (I mean, it's amalgamating courts and other stuff too but still - clearly it was operating on the assumption that the regional government is rather a going concern.)

You could do Vaughan-Markham-RH or you could do King-Vaughan and Markham-Stouffville and Newmarket-Aurora...I mean, you can do almost anything. What "makes sense" can be pretty subjective, depending what your goals are.

If you do (as might make sense) Vaughan-Markham-RH and then the rest of YR, and ditch the second tier entirely, now you need to reconfigure YRT/Viva and York Regional Police, for starters. Neither is the end of the world but both will require some thinking. And that doesn't include regional responsibility for pipes and roads and that kind of stuff. Oh, social housing - there's another one that maybe the lower tiers don't want dumped on them.

Does anyone know what Brown did to make such an enemy of Ford? This vendetta seems frankly bizarre from where I'm standing. And to go to these extremes!

I don't really get it either. You already staged a coup and took his job; isn't that revenge enough for whatever you imagine he did?
At this point I'm imagining we'll get to the point where Brown is forced to work as a night manager at McDonald's and Doug passes a law that hamburgers can't be sold in Ontario after 4 pm.
 
One of the things I'd like to see from this is the splitting of urban/suburban and rural regions into different counties/regions. Take for example Durham Region. You have the populous southern portion, and the rural northern portion. Would it not make sense to split it along the urban-rural divide, and amalgamate that northern portion with another region/county (or create a new one)?

Same thing goes for Flamborough in Hamilton. The rural portion should be part of Wellington County, and the Waterdown area should be part of Burlington. Ditto for Caledon becoming part of Dufferin County.
 
Removing the 'Regional' level of government is easy. I bet most people in GTA suburbs don't even know what they do.

I live in Vaughan. I have heard rumours that they want to combine Vaughan and King into 1 city. Think it might actually make more sense to combine Markham & Vaughan.
Montreal tried amalgamation shortly after Toronto.
The thing Toronto had going was that it was a merger of equals. Toronto, North York and Scarborough were almost the same, with the others following not that far behind.
In Montreal, they did not have Ontario's amalgamation from the 1950's. So Montreal was over half a million, and almost 30 other municipalities were maybe 50,000 average. They all felt swamped by Montreal.
King would feel the same about being merged with Vaughan.
 
There's a change.org petition that was started recently to have Flamborough "move in" with Burlington. https://www.change.org/p/mayor-burl...F3fhOUnxAuAoVZ2x865G9hct7HJNpxfat38Fl6rN_ZdAM

Just my opinion, but I don't think all of Flamborough should, just the suburban part (Waterdown).

If joining Wellington County isn't an option, joining with the northern area of Burlington, the rural areas of Milton, and Halton Hills may be an option. That would comprise Halton Region of only the urban areas of Burlington, Oakville, and Milton, along with the rural area between Oakville, Milton, and Mississauga.
 
There could be a new regional government of Toronto that combines Peel, York, and Durham with the current City of Toronto into a new Metropolitan Toronto. Or just annex Vaughan, Richmond Hill, and Markham, or any other city that will get a "subway, subway, subway" by Doug Ford's edict.
 
Certain cities/towns should certainly be amalgamated and these tiny boundaries seem like nothing more than political make-work projects. Few people understand, much less care, about what services are provided by the cities/towns and which by the counties. People also look to things like transit where the small city fiefdoms make the systems incompatible and more expensive. Certainly getting rid of some of these needless different cities make fare integration easier in the GTAH so they should be able to complete it by 2065.

BTW...…...what`s the story on Parry Sound? It has all kinds of different towns and districts of miniscule populations but isn`t on the list.
 
Certain cities/towns should certainly be amalgamated and these tiny boundaries seem like nothing more than political make-work projects. Few people understand, much less care, about what services are provided by the cities/towns and which by the counties. People also look to things like transit where the small city fiefdoms make the systems incompatible and more expensive. Certainly getting rid of some of these needless different cities make fare integration easier in the GTAH so they should be able to complete it by 2065.

BTW...…...what`s the story on Parry Sound? It has all kinds of different towns and districts of miniscule populations but isn`t on the list.

The District of Parry Sound isn’t a municipal government. The province only created two upper tier municipalities in the North: the former Sudbury Regional Municipality (now the City of Greater Sudbury) and the District Municipality of Muskoka. All other districts (Parry Sound, Sudbury, Manitoulin, Nipissing, Temiskaming, Cochrane, Algoma, Thunder Bay, Kenora, and Rainy River) are administrative only, for such things as judicial services and land registry purposes. If you’re not in an incorporated city, town, or township, you’re not in a municipality. That’s why there’s still MTO-maintained secondary highways up there - there was no county to download them to.
 

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