The province hailed the amalgamation of the City of Toronto’s municipal structure as a means to save taxpayer’s money by reducing the duplication of services at the local level. This appeared, on the surface, a prudent measure to trim fiscal excess at city hall. However, Barbara Hall, who served as the old City of Toronto’s mayor at the time, claims local politics doesn’t work that way:
“It was unlikely to save money, because you get into the whole span of control,” she said.
Hall uses the example where, prior to amalgamation, there were six different fire departments with six different fire chiefs; one for each former municipality. Advocates of amalgamation argued merging the six departments could only save money though eliminating redundancy. Hall counters this with a ‘highest common denominator’ argument:
“In reality you end up with one super fire chief, and then you have deputy chiefs that are at a higher level than before,” she said. “Then all the salaries come up to the high level. Nothing ever goes down, it always goes up.”
According to former elementary school teacher and long-time Ward 16 Toronto District School Board trustee Sheila Cary-Meagher, amalgamation limited the city’s flexibility to lessen any inequities among schools:
“Before it was fine, and would have grown equitably,” she said. “The funding formula changed, so the rich and poor schools get the same money (regardless of their individual needs).” Cary-Meagher refers current the per capita system for allocating funds to individual schools.
Hall, now commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, does however believe having a strong, central voice for the whole city led to “improvements in the suburban areas (inside the city), in priority neighbourhoods, particularly for low income families.”
As with local schools, amalgamations effect on the funding of large scale programs such as public transit and education across the province became subject to a harmonization scheme which funded different cities with unique needs equally.
“It was about reducing administration staff, the process was utter chaos,” Jack Horsley, Metro senior solicitor at the time said, explaining the dichotomy: “It was supposed to be revenue neutral, but education funding became the same (per capita) in North Bay as in Toronto.”
While the process may have reduced overall, long term costs for the province, the effect on a city the size of Toronto remains in question. The costs associated with administering public education to a socially and economically diverse population unique to such a large metropolis cannot be measured on an equal ratio to that of a smaller, more homogeneous population. This represents the type of consequence Cary-Meagher and Horsley believe amalgamation’s architects failed to recognise back in the late 1990s.
In 1954, Leslie Frost’s provincial Conservative government followed an Ontario Municipal Board recommendation to create the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto (Metro). This created a two-tier municipal structure, with Metro overseeing large regional functions such as public transit, arterial roads and regional planning, while the local constituent municipalities remained to serve local interests.
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| TORONTO CITY HALL: The amalgamated city now operates entirely from City Hall | (Sean Sillers) |
Over time, the local governments grew to include the cities of Toronto, York, North York, Etobicoke, Scarborough and the borough of East York; which collectively constituted the geographical area of Metro. This bi-lateral municipal structure existed until 1998 when the five cities and East York amalgamated under the provincial City of Toronto Act to form the current megacity of some 2.6 million people.
It’s been 12 years now since the provincial government altered the structure of Toronto’s municipal government. Mike Harris’ Progressive Conservative government sought to eliminate the duplication of services believed to exist under the two-tier structure of Toronto’s municipal government by amalgamating services under one large city.
The jury remains out on the benefits brought by amalgamation. Yet at the time of its inception, few, including Hall, denied the winds of change in the air at city hall. Perhaps the horizons were set too low:
“At the time amalgamation was proposed, everyone was talking about the need for a change in municipal government,” Hall said. “I think what people were talking about was the extension of regional government; Metro becoming GTA wide, as a strong regional government.”
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