Amalgamation

[ijmorlan]

Carl Zehr writes in favour of amalgamation in The Record:
https://www.therecord.com/opinion-story/...carl-zehr/

I am speaking as a citizen by drawing upon my 26 years of personal experience as a councillor and mayor. I believe now is the time to change our governance structure to equip this community for the future. There may never be a perfect moment to change. Let's embrace this as an opportunity, rather than a threat, an opportunity to reinvent our community, an opportunity to update and polish its brand and give everyone here the means to be part of something bigger, something important, fresh, new.

The truth is, amalgamated or not, we'll always be from the communities, villages and neighbourhoods we call home.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: by all means gradually move individual responsibilities to the Region. But don’t do an official amalgamation for the foreseeable future. It just doesn’t have that big a benefit, and the benefits that actually exist can be had by moving the specific areas of responsibility to the Region. For example, he says “We need one Emergency Plan instead of eight”. I’m at least sympathetic to this statement. But if so, why not just merge the City offices responsible for the emergency plan into the Region? I think fire services and the libraries are good candidates for making Regional responsibilities. I don’t know enough to say for sure; but I think those would be good ones to study.

And really his argument is circular: he gives a bunch of examples, but ones like “We need one local government with one set of bylaws” really just re-state what he’s trying to support.