I tried to look at the website of Amalgamation Yes last week and this is what came up on my screen: “Website suspended due to high traffic load.”
Clearly, some residents of Victoria, and perhaps a few in its outlying municipalities, think the soup of local governments around here needs stirring up.
I don’t. And I object to being bullied by know-it-alls who can’t run a website properly into participating in a future referendum, the intent of which would be to ruin my neighbourhood and disrupt the even tenor of my ways.
I distrust politicians and editorial writers who adopt a coy neutrality on the “issue” of amalgamation. I distrust them saying only that it should be researched and then left up to “the public” to vote for or against — so that politicians could use public pressure as an excuse to exercise “leadership.”
I ask: Whatever for?
The plethora of mayors and councilors around here and their supporting bureaucracies is entirely manufactured as an issue by politicians eager for more power, and downtown shopkeepers anticipating a more favourable tax regime. As a concern to most residents, it ranks somewhere between noisy leaf blowers and noisy beach parties.
Amalgamation could take many forms, of course, apart from satisfying Victoria’s craving for lebensraum. Cadboro Bay might fit more comfortably with Oak Bay than with Saanich, for instance. A bit of tinkering may be advisable.
Victoria Mayor Dean Fortin says that without a strong downtown core, the whole region suffers.
What’s weakening that core, he says, is Victoria having to bear the cost of all the region’s social burdens. Amalgamation would be a way of sharing the burden wider.
I wonder if downtown businesses ever thought of sharing what captive customers in the outlands provide.
The B.C. Chamber of Commerce laments that “fractured governance has become entrenched in municipal self-interest and may be creating unfortunate circumstances for urban centres.” It argues that amalgamated cities can take better advantage of federal and provincial money to undertake large projects and address common issues.
So it wants the community charter to be amended so that the province can order amalgamation, the way premier Mike Harris did to Toronto and the Parti Québécois government to Montreal.
The chamber obviously is aware of studies that have shown amalgamation doesn’t lead often to greater efficiencies and lower costs, that economies of scale are achieved only among the smallest cities, that policing, refuse collection and government bureaucracy cost more per capita as populations served rise, though street maintenance may be cheaper.
When Toronto swallowed six municipalities in 1998, amalgamation was expected to lessen or get rid of the structural inefficiencies of duplication and overlap. But the new structure failed to produce the cost savings that were predicted.
The chamber says that the “mixed review” of amalgamation “outcomes” in Winnipeg, Halifax, Ottawa, Quebec and Toronto is because it’s too early to see the advantage of changes made between 1972 and 2003.
It thinks Vancouver’s experience of amalgamation in 1929 is a better example of what can happen here. Eh? In 1929, when people were dodging streetcars and trains at level crossings in that city and living in tents in Point Grey?
And isn’t the whole point of Victoria and its suburbs that it’s not Vancouver — or Toronto or Montreal where local government is an embarrassment?
There might be something to the claim that a stronger Victoria means a stronger region. But no one can demonstrate that at this stage.
Maybe the proponents of amalgamation would do better to argue that the quality of our lives would improve if we didn’t have so many governments to contend with. But how does one gauge that?
Why must amalgamation be the only solution to problems that have nothing to do with how many mayors and police chiefs we have? Better management, more co-operation and co-ordination of services — more common sense — promise far more than municipal disruption or regional evisceration.
I shudder to think of a gas station disfiguring Oak Bay or the llama herders of Sooke having to trek to Bastion Square to complain about marauding dogs.
High traffic load suspends more than websites. Amalgamation NO.
