It won't happen any time soon because Waterloo rejected the notion in a referendum just four years ago. Waterloo formally rejects merger talks with Kitchener.
IMO the referendum was poorly posed. It asked for a mandate to discuss amalgamation. The two cities should have first held informal discussions/studies to assess the potential benefits then, assuming the results were promising enough, held a referendum using those results to make the case for amalgamation. Instead people voted with their hearts, not their minds, and it was no surprised that Waterloo said no.
In any case most services are already amalgamated via the region, e.g. police (but not fire), transit, main roads, etc. so the benefits of further amalgamation are relatively small compared to what they might have been in pre-region days.
And as it happens this just-published study on the subject concludes that Amalgamation [of GTA] a flop, Fraser Institute study suggests. [Cue the usual criticisms of Fraser as conservative...]
IMO the referendum was poorly posed. It asked for a mandate to discuss amalgamation. The two cities should have first held informal discussions/studies to assess the potential benefits then, assuming the results were promising enough, held a referendum using those results to make the case for amalgamation. Instead people voted with their hearts, not their minds, and it was no surprised that Waterloo said no.
In any case most services are already amalgamated via the region, e.g. police (but not fire), transit, main roads, etc. so the benefits of further amalgamation are relatively small compared to what they might have been in pre-region days.
And as it happens this just-published study on the subject concludes that Amalgamation [of GTA] a flop, Fraser Institute study suggests. [Cue the usual criticisms of Fraser as conservative...]