Amalgamation

[danbrotherston]

It will be interesting to see what happens with the Peel Region de-amalgamation.  After 25 years of forced amalgamations elsewhere in the Province, I don't think anyone can point to tangible cost savings (cost savings was one of the main arguments in favour of amalgamation).  After 50 years of Regional government, I think that most Regions have done a good job of integrating services for big and generally unsexy infrastructure (eg waste management and sewage treatment).  If the Peel Region process blows up, I can't imagine any politician wanting to try it again elsewhere.

Peel is being de-amalgamted? I'm not sure I understand what that would mean for them, but possible I am missing some context.

Amalgamation has almost never ended up achieving the stated goals of cost savings. It has always achieved its actual goals of diluting and reducing the power of cities in favour of more conservative suburbs.

But I do think the regional model makes sense. The problem is that different services make sense to provide at different scopes. The regional model gives more flexibility to achieve that a little bit.

Although less flexibility than the Netherlands seems to achieve, where services are actually strangely decoupled from government. For example, our transit, garbage collection, and libraries are all organizations (not for-profit corporations) independent of our local government (some are contracted by the local government, so ultimately funded by, but run separately from) but all operate over a different geographic scopes.