The cost of change over the years - From the cluttered desk with Keith Roulston

The debate before North Huron Council over the sharply-increased rent for Blyth Ladies Baseball League shows where municipal amalgamation has taken us in a quarter of a century.

 

It was back in the late 1990s that Premier Mike Harris outlined plans to merge municipalities to reduce the number of governments in the province, and spin some of the responsibilities of the province off to municipalities. As the editor of The Citizen at the time, I remember the debates.

 

Some municipal politicians really bought into the idea, with an early vision dictating that there should be only one municipality north of Hwy. 8. Some wouldn’t agree and the vision was changed over and over as towns, villages and townships came up with different arrangements. 

 

Municipalities negotiated partnerships and finally, in 2001, the Ontario government imposed amalgamation based, generally, on these agreements (with Howick, with its heavy Mennonite population, going it alone).

 

One of the problems with the rules the Harris government set for amalgamation was that municipalities must remain whole. The problem for a municipality like Blyth was that it lost all the countryside around the north and east of the village when Morris and Turnberry united. The entire area south of the village in Hullett joined Central Huron, and this included The Old Mill, Sparling’s Propane, Bainton Limited processing plant, what was then Grand View Lunch and is today the Tim Hortons and the community’s only gas station, and today’s Cowbell brewery. Only the immediate area north and west of the village in East Wawanosh remained part of the community.

 

At first, the changes didn’t have a big effect.  People from the old communities ran the new municipalities, like Blyth’s John Stewart in North Huron, Grey’s Brad Knight in Huron East and Nancy Michie in Morris-Turnberry. They had to learn to serve new citizens, but they also remembered the reality that municipal boundaries didn’t make communities.

 

But these leaders aged and had to retire. They were replaced by younger people who have no  knowledge of communities before amalgamation. In North Huron’s case, today’s decision-makers work in Wingham and seem to have the perception that East Wawanosh and Blyth are just hinterlands for Wingham. East Wawanosh was to provide space for Wingham to spread out to as it grew. 

 

Things aren’t all negative. I now live on a paved road in East Wawanosh, which was hard to contemplate in 2001.

 

But  on the other hand, has there really been  the savings that Mike Harris envisioned? How many staff were there in your municipality in 2001? How many are there today? Do you know? Or has the distancing of municipalities from the people they serve become so wide that you can’t find out? (Not to mention the effect of reduction of staff in most local newspapers.)

 

The women of Blyth Ladies Baseball League were assured, by North Huron recreation staff, that their rental rate for Blyth ball diamonds (which were built mostly through volunteer donations) would increase 17 per cent. In actuality, they soon realized, the rent increased was really a stunning 61 per cent.

 

In the old days when recreation was run by a committee that reached across municipal boundaries to include all the areas served, local councillors would have been right on top of such a rate increase. Now, there are only two Blyth councillors among the six councillors and one reeve who have the final say about recreation.

 

I don’t know if it’s a general trend that would have happened anyway, decline of community newspapers or just the distancing of local government from the local citizen, but somehow we don’t seem as involved with local government as I remember people being before amalgamation. In the old days, a certain section of the local population was always looking over councillors’ shoulders. Hiring one extra employee was a major decision, scrutinized by the citizenry.

 

Did municipal taxes go down because of amalgamation? I’m not covering council meetings these days, but I doubt it. Did provincial government costs go down because the government didn’t need to oversee municipalities? Maybe, but costs went up in other ways. We’ve seen from the rental of local ball diamonds that some costs have generally gone up, and because there is no longer local governance like the old, multi-municipal recreation committee, ordinary folks no longer have as much control.
Maybe I’m just an old geezer who likes things the old way, but it seems to me we got more for less before amalgamation.