Walking in Waterloo Region

[danbrotherston]

Honestly, I don't really understand how our annexations work. I know London ON annexed many of it's neighbours (you'll still find people who declare they live in "Byron"...and that is fully enclosed in the city now). Where as in other countries (maybe other provinces) you have cities which basically starve because people live around the perifery, benefit from the services of the city, but don't pay towards those services. But I cannot imagine it is ever popular.

I don’t either, but I think it has changed.

In the past I think cities could annex adjacent or nearby areas of townships on their own initiative; I’ve heard of townships fighting this, although I know even less about the rules for this. I don’t know what would happen if two nearby cities each tried to annex the same land simultaneously; or whether a city could annex another city or part thereof. My understanding is that now the words “city”, “town”, etc. don’t have any actual meaning — any municipality can be named using any of those words but maybe at one time they really were different.

I get the impression that any changes now have to go through the provincial government, and that in practice most changes are imposed by the provincial government on the various municipalities.

I have seen maps of some US cities where little bits of land are annexed, or not, one at a time as they are developed, so that the city border consists of dozens of little bits, with dozens of enclaves and exclaves. I don’t know if they’re still like that or how common it is/was — the one I’m thinking of is a map from the 1950s.

You don't even have to go to the US to see it. Montreal has a number of enclaves...apparently there is one in Victoria BC as well.

Ultimately, it seems like our cities in Ontario are fairly free from this type of thing, but they more have the opposite problem, where a municipality includes an enormous land area that is mostly unrelated (looking at you Ottawa and Hamilton), and where culturally distinct areas with different needs are amalgamated together (looking at you, almost every other city).

Local government is a complex beast.

In some ways this conversation is a wide diversion now. But in others, it's extremely on point, these different jurisdictions cause breaks in transportation networks. Sure, we have a regional municpality here, but a lot of places don't. Hell, London UK deals with this, where different boroughs (I think they're called boroughs) will refuse to implement say bike lanes...so there are breaks. Ultimately, there's always a trade off between local context and unified vision. What is a shame is that safe roads for everyone is not unversal. Frankly, the fact that it isn't, kind of makes me feel that "local context" is 90% bullshit, but again, this is why I am not a politician.