De-amalgamation?
It’s no secret that Toronto’s amalgamation met with some fairly abject hostility and, in the decade since it was implemented, an avalanche of Toronto’s problems have been blamed on amalgamation. So perhaps it’s surprising that at no time during the past decade has the thought of de-amalgamation crossed anyone’s mind — or at least their public lips.
Ten years in, it would seem nearly impossible to untangle the financial mess of who would be responsible for what and which fraction of what new tax would go where without enduring an even more endless debate at City Hall. As tenuous as Toronto’s programs may be, the fact that they are all bound up together is essential to the city’s framework. Which is why it’s no surprise that the Toronto Star’s recent amalgamation retrospective yielded little more than dismissals from the former cities’ former mayors at the mere mention of de-amalgamation.
But it is possible. Only four years after Montreal’s 2002 merger, 15 of its municipalities jumped ship in a legal de-merger that saw their respective powers restored and left that megacity with just over half of its boroughs. According to Andrew Sancton, director of Western University’s local government program, the Montreal merger was already far more complicated than Toronto’s amalgamation, involving four times as many municipalities and even the creation of boroughs that never existed before. But Quebec Premier Jean Charest acknowledged the public opinion and made de-mergers possible by way of a referendum.
While this scenario is unlikely in Toronto, a different kind of de-amalgamation may be brewing. Over the holiday break, the Toronto District School Board, which was created right along with the megacity out of the six former boards, began to ponder the possibility of its own split in order to — get this — improve efficiency and cut back on bureaucracy. Ironically, the very person who may be able to help this happen, provincial education minister Kathleen Wynne, launched her career in politics by fighting vehemently against amalgamation as a leader of Citizens for Local Democracy. And yet she seems reluctant to encourage dismantling the school board, displaying the same centralizing mindset that created this mess in the first place.
A decade after the civic battles that resulted in amalgamation, Toronto is still feeling the growing pains
Once upon a time, Toronto was merely a glimmer of the world-class megalopolis that stands today. Only 10 short years ago, it was a cozy town of just over half a million residents that relied on such novelty attractions as a tall but useless tower and a retractable sports dome to draw visitors to its clean and crime-free locale.
So where did all the people come from? Is Lake Ontario so contaminated as to produce a feverishly mutated population explosion? Is Broken Social Scene more expansively inbred than previously imagined? Do census takers now count squirrels and pigeons?
No, silly. Back then, Toronto was but a few stops on the transit route rather than the entirety of the TTC system map (and then some). The “City of Toronto” we now know comprised a vast urban countryside dotted with five more little kingdoms. The kingdom of Toronto proper actually had a castle, which most of its citizens huddled beneath in the gradual slope of the former Iroquois Shoreline. The three outermost kingdoms — Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough — spread across great, underused expanses of asphalt-encased land. Nestled in the middle were two sibling kingdoms, called York and East York respectively, which, if you live in them now, are almost indistinguishable as such.
They existed for many years, engaging in healthy regional competition, pitting cultural excellence against convenient parking, and local eccentricities against the promise of dependable conformity. They formed a network of suburbs and cities sharing a few essential services like a transit system and a police department but electing their own rulers, however cartoonish they may have been.
But then a dark cloud called the Harris Conservatives descended over the countryside, and threatened to flood the entire place with a great downpour of “common sense.” This flood would render the six cities unrecognizable from one another, creating one massive, gloriously “world-class” super-kingdom of cost-saving efficiency. And a single mayor-king would rule over the whole thing so that Premier Harris could boast that his province would now have a city of 2.5 million. This kingdom would be known as Amalgamation: The Megacity.
The plan, according to Harris and his principal architect Al Leach, was to abolish the governing bodies within the six kingdoms, along with the Metro council responsible for a number of their shared responsibilities, and replace them all with a small, centralized body of all-powerful officials who would take care of everything that went on in every corner of the megacity.
Almost as quickly as Harris’ plan was announced, and even during the rumours of its inception, the war sirens sounded — quietly at first, and by no more than a concerned few. Folks like former Toronto mayor John Sewell and eventual provincial education minister Kathleen Wynne headed up the Citizens for Local Democracy (C4LD), meeting in downtown churches to express steadfast opposition to having their city hastily grafted together like some kind of Frankenstein’s monster.
Facing the powerful majority rule of Harris’ provincial Conservatives, and without the support of the major media, C4LD and their supporters were at a great disadvantage. Despite Leach’s claims that Toronto would be given a “clean slate” to create a better city government and that going from seven councils to one would produce abundant savings (at no cost to taxpayers), the public became increasingly disenchanted. No one liked the idea of having the nature of their city dictated to them.
Local councillors and mayors of the six threatened kingdoms scrambled to maintain their powers and their connection to the community they served. None of them wanted to go from mayor to megacity commuter! At the same time, people from the inner city and the suburbs alike balked at the prospect of deciding what’s what in each other’s neighbourhoods. When it came down to popular opinion, the citizens themselves took the opportunity to denounce the proposition, voting overwhelmingly in all cities against amalgamation in a referendum.
Alas, their struggle would be in vain. For nothing, not even democracy, is a match for such a destructive force of nature as a Conservative majority. Toronto’s only remaining battle would be to choose the leader of this new super-kingdom. But the dark cloud had one last trick up its sleeve; by promising no tax increases at the local level it was able to secure the endorsement of one of the former mayors, the tragically outspoken discount-dealing Mel Lastman. He would trumpet the greatness of megacity-ness in exchange for support from the Conservative juggernaut, and he would win.
But his victory would be bittersweet. Just as the city geared up to become mega, Premier Harris activated phase two of his amalgamation plan and dumped an insurmountable number of social programs and financial responsibilities on the new kingdom. Even before being sworn in as mega-mayor, Lastman panicked under the new financial burden, proclaiming the promised tax freeze to be replaced by a huge tax increase, just to keep the city from going bankrupt.
Thus, on Jan. 1, 1998, the six kingdoms were renamed the City of Toronto. And for a collection of disparate councillors coming together to run a brand new city five times larger than anything they’d experienced, making the megacity work would prove to be the biggest battle of them all. With the additional social service responsibilities, not to mention sorting out some 160,000 often overlapping bylaws, relocating to a single city hall, settling all the layoffs resulting from amalgamation’s downsizing, and standardizing existing services, the city seemed doomed before it even began. Money was borrowed from the province, essential restructuring and maintenance were put on hold, projects were cancelled and investments were rendered impossible as the city tried to simply keep functioning.
What’s amazing is that the battle of the megacity was fought and lost in less than nine months, yet 10 years later the city that came to be is still sorting through the political casualties and infrastructure rubble.
MORE ON THE MEGACITY:
Still Mike's megacity: How the Harris Tories still haunt us today
Where are they now: an update on amalgamation's key players
The future of the megacity: where do we go from here?