I think it's interesting that KPMG was the same group hired by Mike Harris to look at Toronto, and KPMG recommended amalgamation:
"The Toronto megacity dates back to 1995, when Progressive Conservative Premier Mike Harris attempted to unshackle an economy crippled by unsustainable tax and spend policies and burdensome regulations. In his quest to find efficiencies, Harris commissioned a KPMG study to determine how to make the provinces most populous city run more efficiently. The answer was amalgamation. The study claimed that if the six cities in Metro Toronto were to merge, they could save between $300-$645 million dollars in operating costs per year. These savings could be purchased for a mere $220 million in transition costs—or so the report went. The actual cost ended up being $275 million. More importantly, the operating cost savings were far lower, at $135 million per year. If this were the whole story, the merger would likely be considered a success.
The theory of amalgamation revolves around saving money by reducing redundant bureaucracy."
-Steve LaFleur at New Geography
I think amalgamation was, essentially, a political strategy with rationalistic economic motive. Since the core could not be de-liberalized and captured by the conservatives, they decided to yoke it to the vastly more conservative suburbs to drown it by numbers. Since, for conservatives at their most didactic, government is waste, it's hard to tell either way.
Of course we know what has happened since: the lumpen results has been costing us ever since. I wonder what KPMG's mindset tends to?
There are a lot of recommendations out there - conservative and liberal - that recommend a return of a larger degree of autonomous and regional power to the former suburb cities. Apparently, it is the very inflexibility of the megacity that makes it inefficient emotionally for people to live in. Although many bumps have been smoothed out in procedure, people in one area literally do not understand people in another. A call to pedestrianize streets downtown, for example, would be suicidal in Upper Scarborough or Etobicoke. "Transit" not only sounds different from the core to the suburbs, it is a different thing.
I think this is a huge problem with Ford. None of his "efficiency" solutions deal with the complexity of organizing finely-tuned representation for disparate economic regions within Toronto itself. Just the opposite. By firing volunteer committees, looking to cut council members, chopping by volume and not streamlining by design - his anti-democratic methods only serve to make problems more intractable.
This is a problem that goes beyond left and right, though it might give the right immediate angry advantages. I don't think Ford even qualifies as a true populist. He is merely Self-ist. Blindly so. I don't think he could understand his own explanations, even if he had them.
