There is no shortage of things to get peoples’ blood pressures boiling in the Battlefords.
The latest controversy erupted not long ago. I was reporting from the Joint State of the City/State of the Town Address, as I have done the past few years.
aI went in expecting the usual speeches from the mayors about how great these communities are doing. Instead, we got exciting stuff.
North Battleford mayor Ian Hamilton went to the podium at Fort Battleford and opened up a big can of worms, in addition to his mouth.
“I am often asked why are we not one community? And I do often wonder what might be, or what could be?”
Amalgamation, again! Gasp! Aargh!
Just raising the idea of combining North Battleford with Battleford is enough to bring people out marching down 22nd Street with their pitchforks.
The distinct sense I get from folks in Battleford is they do not want amalgamation. They see amalgamation as more of an “annexation.” They think it’s all a plot to stick Battleford residents with taxes to pay for all of North Battleford’s problems.
More than that, those residents worry amalgamation will reduce their services and they are terrified, absolutely terrified, of losing the small-town quality of life they expect.
Proponents say taxpayers on both sides of the river will come out ahead from cost-savings when the duplication of services is eliminated. They speak of marketing opportunities of promoting one “big city” of 20,000 as opposed to two smaller places.
But amalgamation supporters will have to do better than that to sway Battleford residents. Unless those supporters can convince those residents this isn’t a “takeover” or “tax grab,” or a threat to their small-town living, Battleford will have none of it.
As for Mayor Hamilton’s suggestion to study the pros and cons, you don’t need to hire some out-of-town consultant to do a report on it. Instead, talk to people who have actually lived through a civic amalgamation and experienced it first hand.
Namely, me.
Here’s the reality: even if amalgamation were to happen, it isn’t going to make a huge difference to anyone’s daily lives. It won’t suddenly make the Battlefords appear better than it is to outside investors, but it also won’t ruin life in your neighborhood, either.
I know this because I lived in a place that not only went through an amalgamation, but the biggest one in Canada.
Metro Toronto.
The city I had just moved to, North York, was going to be swallowed up to become part of the new “megacity” of Toronto on Jan. 1, 1998, along with York, East York, Scarborough and Etobicoke.
Up until then the City of Toronto was just one of six municipal councils that were part of “metro Toronto.” There was also a regional “Metro Toronto” council on top of all that.
Under amalgamation, the metro government was eliminated and the various municipal governments were all combined to form one city, with one mayor and council.
You would think getting rid of this bureaucracy would be popular. It wasn’t.
The proposed “megacity” was a huge controversy that dominated the news every night. Civic officials were outraged, and a plebiscite was called where the residents actually voted on whether it should go ahead.
Amalgamation lost by a massive margin.
However, and this may surprise people in the Battlefords, amalgamation was never a local-level decision.
Like many other amalgamations, this was entirely a provincial decision by Premier Mike Harris and his “Common Sense Revolution” PC government.
The province was looking to cut waste and bureaucracy across the board, and they saw their opportunity to take the knife to metro Toronto’s multiple municipal governments.
The province didn’t care whether these municipalities or voters opposed amalgamation. It was going ahead.
I became a “Torontonian” whether I wanted it or not.
After all that hot air, you would think North York was in for a massive, drastic change when we finally joined the “City of Toronto.”
This is perhaps the most stunning part of all of it. Daily life didn’t change much.
The buses and subways continued to run and the water and sewer system still worked and the trash still got collected — at least, when the garbage collectors weren’t going out on strike.
The snow got cleared, most of the time. One time, a big blizzard hit and the “megacity” was so overwhelmed that Mayor Mel Lastman (who formerly was mayor of North York), famously called in the army to clear the streets.
Toronto may have been a “megacity,” but it still couldn’t handle the snow.
As for claims that amalgamation would save taxpayers’ money, that didn’t work out too well.
Property taxes went up and up, and fares for the TTC always went up. If that wasn’t enough, Mayor David Miller also introduced a $60 vehicle registration tax and a 1.5 per cent land transfer tax.
There was also no great change to the “image of the city.” The same people who hated Toronto before the “megacity,” still hated Toronto afterwards. Except now, there was even more of “Toronto” to hate.
Before, the image of Toronto was of “the Big Smoke” — a smoggy city forever gridlocked with traffic.
Amalgamation did nothing to change that, and it hasn’t been solved yet. Here it is, years later, in 2016, and they’re still flummoxed at Toronto City Hall trying to figure out what to do about the gridlock.
At least now it’s just one city council flummoxed about it. Before, it was six councils plus Metro council, too. I guess that’s progress.
For all the talk about what it would do for Toronto, amalgamation accomplished basically nothing. I don’t think that’s the answer Mayor Hamilton wants to hear.
But residents accepted the new “megacity” relatively quickly. This is probably not what folks in Battleford want to hear, either.
What I am really saying is folks in North Battleford and Battleford really need to calm down over this “amalgamation” talk.
It is far less of a big deal than everyone thinks it is. But it is a distraction, and people ought to focus instead on more important issues facing the Battlefords.
This issue is not worth tearing your hair out over. Save your hair for the Riders season.
