Cities and Regions: An Ongoing Evolution
The “Toronto” as we know now did not always exist. While this city has physically and economically changed around me in the last decade (new high-rise constructions everywhere, the York-University subway expansion and the rising cost of living to name a few), it boggles me a bit to learn that the structure of governance was not always the same, and that the current City of Toronto is younger than I am!
Starting with the incorporation of the city of Toronto back in 1834, this city has grown and reformed itself multiple times, including annexations of surrounding neighbourhoods in 1914, the formation of the “novel” two-tiered Metropolitan Toronto in 1953, and more recently the 1998 abolition of the Metropolitan city and amalgamation of Toronto and surrounding five suburbs into a single-tiered municipality. Metropolitan Toronto was not the only regional municipality to suffer such a fate — the provincial government of Mike Harris further amalgamated three other regional municipalities of Ottawa-Carleton, Hamilton-Wentworth and Sudbury to single-tier municipal cities of Ottawa, Hamilton, and Greater Sudbury respectively in 2001.
These changes to governance structures of city and regional municipalities only serve to exemplify that municipalities are the creatures of province in Canada. In 2019, the Ontario government announced a review of the eight regional municipalities — Durham, Halton, Niagara, Muskoka, Oxford, Peel, Waterloo and York and their lower-tier municipalities. Despite distinct regional governance structures, several of these regional municipalities are interconnected to the City of Toronto in matters of everyday life, employment, economy, infrastructure and more; to an extent that Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) are essentially synonymous in common parlance.
With population growth, the urban sprawl in the Greater Toronto Area has exploded in recent years and citizens of the GTA are more mobile than ever within the regions for work, education, or other opportunities. So where does that leave the future of the regional governments or of the City of Toronto? The current Ford government may have abandoned the regional reform idea, but it may not be too farfetched that in the next 15 or 25 years that as lower-tier municipalities grow, the reform is undertaken again by the province of Ontario to make fundamental changes to the regional municipalities of the GTA. What that will look like, only time will tell, and I will be watching with interest.
