Yes we can: De-Amalgamate

Since 1997 residents of the conglomerated mess now called Toronto have endured a dysfunctional government created by a band of hate-filled yokels who wanted to bring big urban areas to their knees. Using as their rationale an incorrect study by KPMG consultants citing $300 million annual cash savings by amalgamating metropolitan areas, the Mike Harris provincial government set about to punish Toronto.

Harris was reportedly mad because then-Mayor Barbara Hall led a march on Queen’s Park to protest the Harris Tories’ notorious war on the impoverished.

Lumped in together were six municipalities that were vastly different from each other. Aside from geography, in most respects they had nothing in common aside from proximity.

The KPMG prediction was wildly wrong and instead of saving money, Amalgamation, as it was called, has been an ongoing drain on the public purse and vastly more expensive than the old pre-Amalgamation Metro Toronto municipalities and especially the old City of Toronto.

The Toronto City Summit Alliance said in 2003: “The amalgamation of the City of Toronto has not produced the overall cost savings that were projected” and blamed “harmonization of wages and service levels,” adding that “we will all continue to feel higher costs in the future.”

That hasn’t changed. Torontonians are saddled with a costly, arrogant and intrusive municipal government that mugs us for fines at many turns and can’t even keep the streets clean as it once famously did. Downtown—seat of the real Toronto—suffered heavily. We lost the fee-free recreation centres we paid for with our taxes, among other things. There is still a mishmash of different bylaws among the former municipalities.

Amalgamations work only for the Tory (and right-wing Liberal) constituency of insiders and big corporations, which is to say against the interests of the public.

They don’t work anywhere for the benefit of the governed.

U.S. Census data cited by Prof. Wendell Cox, a public policy expert (demographia.com), shows that “higher expenditures per capita are generally associated with larger municipal units and that consolidated governments are more costly than governments typified by multiple government units. He notes that the Paris area has over 1,300 municipal governments and Tokyo more than 225.

Cox adds: “Moneyed interests find larger governments more accessible and thus more susceptible to their influence.”

So what Toronto and its merged satellites needs is a strong, concerted movement to de-amalgamate and get our cities back from this conglomerate mess. The current council won’t do it because things are sweet for them and they’re big fish in a big pond. The province won’t do it because their big-business pals like it as it is.

The movement to de-merger must start from the grassroots. It worked in Quebec in a 2004 referendum. Despite voting requirements aimed at stifling its success, 15 Montreal cities voted to leave the amalgamated municipality. Toronto can do likewise. We should.