This spring, the world of Ontario municipal policy was rocked by some momentous news (wait, where are you going? This will get better, I promise). In May, the government announced that Peel Region, the municipality created during the Bill Davis years to coordinate planning and services between Mississauga, Peel, and Caledon, would be dissolved and that the three cities would be set up as single-tier municipalities. The late Hazel McCallion and her successor as Mississauga mayor, Bonnie Crombie, would see their long-held dream become a reality.
As 2023 comes to an end, the news is just as momentous: the Toronto Star is reporting that the Progressive Conservative government at Queen’s Park has had second thoughts and is now expected to abandon the dissolution of Peel Region altogether, although formally the premier’s office says that no decision has been made. Except that’s not quite true, since the dissolution of Peel Region is already law — passed by the Tory majority in June — and the six-month-old Hazel McCallion Act will now need to be repealed. It’s more than a little awkward.
The stated rationale for the 180-degree turn is the revelation that dissolving the regional municipality could cost taxpayers more than $1 billion and drive property taxes up by as much as 38 per cent, according to an analysis commissioned by the City of Brampton.
Here’s the thing: the estimated financial costs of dissolving Peel Region aren’t news. Brampton’s own press release last week acknowledges that the new report is based on a previous analysis, done in 2019 for Peel Region. That analysis was followed by another report from Ernst and Young that found “there is a risk that the net cost of providing services to all ratepayers … could increase by $500 million to $600 million by 2028.” The updated number is an extrapolation of the 2019 Deloitte estimate that now includes the impacts of higher interest rates and other cost increases since.
One can, of course, find reasons to question the veracity of these kinds of estimates. Ontario’s large cities create consultant reports the way mere mortals breathe — constantly and unconsciously. Peel Region produced the initial estimate and is the government that would literally cease to exist, so it’s got an interest in being as loud and alarmist as possible about costs. Brampton and Caledon join the lineup of turkeys lobbying fiercely against Christmas dinner, since the obvious implication of both the 2019 and 2023 reports is that Mississauga is, in fact, subsidizing the growth of its sibling municipalities with large sums.
The relative good news for the province is that it’s already appointed a panel of experts to adjudicate precisely this issue, and it includes John Livey (former Toronto city manager) and Peter Weltman (former financial accountability officer for Ontario). They might refute some of the most extreme cost estimates, but it will be difficult to show that the dissolution of Peel would be cost-free or even low-cost.q1111111
Anyone who has even a passing familiarity with municipal policy could have predicted that Mississauga’s independence movement would have substantial costs: cities, like any other governments, are made up of the services they provide, and Peel Region funds major services that its voters would presumably like to continue receiving — trifling things related to matters like policing, sewage, water, waste management, and major roads. However the legislature reshuffles the various responsibilities, the work itself needs to continue, and in at least some of these cases, there’s a plausible argument that dissolution would end up being more costly than the status quo.
Or you can ignore the entire field of municipal finance and policymaking and ask a much more basic political question: Given that the loudest proponents of Peel’s dissolution are the current and former mayors of Mississauga and that its loudest opponents include current and former mayors of Brampton, doesn’t it seem likely that the idea, if implemented, would benefit the city of Mississauga at the expense of Brampton?
Perhaps Ford had, in fact, concluded that six months ago but thought the costs would be more manageable. Perhaps he thought that Mississauga’s independence would keep Crombie out of the Liberal leadership, and when that failed, he lost his enthusiasm for the notion. Or perhaps the Tories are reassessing their odds in the 2026 Ontario election: if Ontario adopts the new federal riding boundaries in southern Ontario (as has been the practice for nearly a quarter century), a new seat will be added in northern Brampton and part of Caledon, meaning Brampton and Caledon will together have six seats, just like Mississauga.
Like it or not, 2026 will now loom large for all the municipal administrators in the region, since the contest between Ford and Crombie is extremely likely to include an obvious and substantial policy division: if the Tories win, Peel will get continuity; if the Liberals form government, it will face dissolution. (The Ontario Liberal Party’s 2026 policy platform has, of course, not yet been written, but it’s difficult to imagine Crombie leading the party and not insisting on moving forward with this.) So you can add Peel to the list of GTA-specific issues, like the fate of Highway 413, that will likely suck up a disproportionate share of the political oxygen in the next election.
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