6 million people and no regional government: Keenan
By
EDWARD KEENAN Columnist
Fri., Feb. 13, 2015
Note: This article has been edited from a previously published version.
The Big Smoke is a big city, getting bigger all the time. That’s not exactly a revelation, but you can mark another milestone on the growth chart with the news this week that the
Census Metropolitan Area of Toronto has surpassed 6 million population (reaching 6,055,724, to be exact) for the first time.
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Highways, transit, housing, immigration settlement, social services, economic development and jobs — these are among the truly regional concerns that would best be made (and paid for) by an administration whose mandate is the health of the region as a whole. Instead, our local municipal governments compete with each other — for provincial and federal dollars, for businesses and jobs, for residents — instead of allowing us to compete together against different cities.
Greater Toronto government is not a new idea. As far back as the 1990s, the GTA Task Force headed by Anne Golden suggested the need for a metropolitan regional government. In a 2012 speech to the Toronto Board of Trade, Golden stressed that
the need for such an entity had only grown. “While our city-region has many advantages, they are being undermined by our failure to think and act like a region,” she said.
The idea of more government administration bodies is never one that sets the heart aflame — understanding city decisions is already complicated and frustrating enough. But there are a lot of reasons to wish Toronto’s metropolis was served by a metropolitan government. A growing number of reasons. More than 6 million of them now.