[CodeMonkey]

The recent Gardiner Expressway fiasco is good example why suburbs should not have any say in Toronto matters. Regional government just leads to stupidity. I think Toronto should be demalgamated and into single tier municipalities. Same with the rest of 905.

Think of how much better TTC service would be if it didn't have to go out the suburbs. If it was just old Toronto the TTC would be much better, much more efficient. TTC would stop losing money and be profitable again liek it used to be. Toronto would also save a lot of money on other social programs, especially policing and social housing, since most of the poverty and crime is in the suburbs. Money would stop flowing out of the city and stay in the city where it belongs.

The problem is that amalgamation was going to happen no matter what, the old municipalities where going sooner or later annex each other as they grew. The problem was Mike Harris jumped the gun on that plan, force amalgamation, put this city together in the worse possible way and downloaded responsibilities onto the megacity it had no way to afford just so a bunch of corrupted, shortsighted, ill-educated group of people could claim that they solved Ontario's budget woes without the need of using that single brain cell it their head.

 

[doady]

Amalgamation was not "going to happen no matter what". Peel, York, Halton, and Durham were all initially planned to be amalgamated like Toronto too. But obviously that never happened because they didn't want to lose votes in the 905. And it still hasn't happened.

You can see in Montreal they deamalgamated. Amalgamation is not an inevitable thing.

Mike Harris was being a typical conservative when downloading everything onto municipalities to solve their budget problems. Put all the burden and responsibility on the little guy. That is THE conservative way.

 

[CodeMonkey]

Mike Harris was being a typical conservative when downloading everything onto municipalities to solve their budget problems. Put all the burden and responsibility on the little guy. That is THE conservative way.

Once upon a time they where a party that was truly Progressive in Progressive Conservative, now their just Regressive Conservative, trying to emulate the american republican party's every move.

 

[Johnny Au]

Let paraphrase Voltaire with much liberties:

The Progressive Conservatives are neither progressive, conservative, nor politically correct.

They are not progressive, since they are interested in cutting much needed social services.

They are not conservative, since they are spendthrifts when it come to constructing self-serving megaprojects that go nowhere, except to gain votes.

They are not politically correct, since they hold some traditional views of society.

 

[TheTigerMaster]

Maybe we're thinking about this all wrong way. A regional layer government will only add to the bureaucracy and in-fighting between the cities and the province. Maybe we should go one step further, maybe we should become an city-state? A quasi-province if you will, finish what Mike Harris started years ago and download everything; health care, education, taxation, transit,etc. I mean everything, make the GTHA have a parliamentary democracy with the responsibilities of a city and a province. Have the power of one government to carry out regional planning and transit, instead of having this back and forth between the city, province and another regional government that will only create more problems. We need a system that will allow a region like the GTHA to have the power to make self-sustaining decisions that doesn't require if it's popular or not in the rest of the province.


We need to rebuild this wheel!

It's my hope that this proposal will be put to a plebiscite sometime within the next few decades.

 

[CodeMonkey]

It's my hope that this proposal will be put to a plebiscite sometime within the next few decades.

I doubt it, when was the last time that Ontario has taken any plebiscite or referendum seriously? It's always non-binding, and always ignored by the governing party.

 

[TheTigerMaster]

Is it time to create a super-Metro?: https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/05/17/is-it-time-to-create-a-super-metro.html

 

[DonValleyRainbow]

Is it time to create a super-Metro?: https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/05/17/is-it-time-to-create-a-super-metro.html

Glad someone put it out there. But I have already heard reaction to this article with the misconception that this creates an additional level of government. While true for Toronto, it would be a restoration to pre-amalgamation, and it would not hold true if a 'super-Metro' replaced the upper-tier regional municipalities.

I do concur with already-elected officials sitting on a super-Metro body; they should not be directly elected. In Alan Redway's book Governing Toronto, he argues that the change to directly electing Metro councillors marked a shift to divisiveness and a nail in Metro's coffin.