On the eve of the election, a Hamilton flashback via Pittsburgh…
Five suburbs melted into Ontario’s ‘Steeltown’
(Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Jeffrey Cohan, Sept 21 2004)
Excerpt:
Hamilton has much in common with Pittsburgh.
The fire-breathing mills of Dofasco and Stelco dominate the western entrance to the city, giving Hamilton its “Steeltown” nickname.
A few short miles away, Hamilton’s downtown does a pretty fair impersonation of Pittsburgh’s Fifth-and-Forbes corridor, replete with boarded-up buildings, check-cashing outlets and even a wig shop. Hamiltonians variously describe their downtown as “neglected,” “crumbling” and “bombed-out.”
Just south of downtown, the Niagara Escarpment rises above the city, somewhat as Mount Washington rises above Pittsburgh.
And the storied Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the Canadian Football League wear black and gold.
“Hamilton and Pittsburgh are a fascinating comparison,” said [former Regional Chair Terry] Cooke, who has run road races with Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy.
Hamilton used to have a modicum of government fragmentation, even if its map never looked as shattered as Allegheny County’s.
Government consolidation — or what Canadians call “amalgamation” — took place here in two stages spaced nearly 30 years apart.
In 1974, the province of Ontario eliminated through mergers five of the 11 municipalities in the Hamilton area. Simultaneously, the province superimposed a new county-like government, called the Hamilton-Wentworth Regional Council.
While Hamilton and the five remaining suburbs were still intact, the new regional council wielded enormous power, providing complete police protection, coordinating economic development and running the bus system, among other functions.
But the members of the Hamilton-Wentworth Regional Council were anything but regional in their outlook.
While the council chairman was directly elected by voters regionwide, the rest of the council’s members were mayors and council people from Hamilton and the five suburbs, all of whom sought to protect their municipalities.
“These happy warriors would come to the meetings not to cooperate, but to see who could best each other,” said Hamilton Mayor Larry DiIanni.
The suburban representatives demanded — and received — regional council funding for their own industrial parks, sucking jobs out of Hamilton and blocking the development of older, abandoned brownfield industrial areas.
Enter Cooke, a Conservative Party member who ran for regional chairman in 1994 on a pro-amalgamation platform, advocating a complete merger of Hamilton, the suburbs and the regional government.
“I wanted to focus our economic development coherently across the region, rather than have various cities, hamlets and towns competing against each other,” he said.
Cooke won the election, giving birth to a political movement within the province’s Conservative Party that would lead to amalgamations not only in Hamilton but in Toronto, Ottawa and several other Ontario cities.
The province merged Toronto first, amalgamating that city with five of its suburbs in 1998, and in the process creating North America’s fifth-largest city.
Then the provincial government of Conservative Premier Mike Harris set its sights on Hamilton.
While Harris might have borrowed the idea of merging cities from Cooke, the premier did not emphasize the economic development benefits. Instead, he focused on the savings that would result from reducing the numbers of elected officials and government employees.
The legislation that merged Hamilton with its five suburbs and the regional council was titled “The Fewer Municipal Politicians Act of 1999.”
“Having fewer municipal politicians was presented as if it was a self-evident boon to manking,” said Dick Tindal, a retired St. Lawrence government professor. “But in a representative democracy, politicians are all we’ve got.”
Although Cooke won re-election on his pro-amalgamation platform, the suburbs resisted merging with Hamilton. Overwhelming majorities of suburban voters rejected the amalgamation in informal, nonbinding referendums.
But as was the case earlier in Toronto, where opposition to the amalgamation had been even more widespread, the Harris governemnt went ahead and merged the six Hamilton-area municipalities anyway…
The amalgamation reduced the number of elected municipal officials from 59 to 16.
Voters in Allegheny County, by way of comparison, elect 1,107 municipal officials, not counting constables.
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"Where architectural imagination is absent, the case is hopeless." - Louis Sullivan
Last edited by thistleclub; Oct 26, 2014 at 4:46 PM.
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