Surveying the lands of Upper Canada was arduous work. Men had to hack straight lines through forest, and those lines were then measured with heavy chains of standard lengths, creating uniform, regular parcels that could be sold to colonists. (The arduous work did not involve any consideration of the fact that it was European administrators like Sir John Graves Simcoe making these decisions and not Indigenous people.) The surveying of Upper Canada was a major technical feat that laid the groundwork for much of the demographic and economic expansion the province has seen in the following two centuries.
As a political fact in the 2020s, however, the lines drawn on a map in an era before gaslight may no longer be fit for purpose. That was one of the messages the Ontario legislature’s standing committee on heritage, infrastructure, and cultural policy heard from citizens at a meeting in Orillia on Monday.
“The whole area has outgrown itself. Simcoe County was created in 1843 and Grey County in 1852, in an era of horses and buggies,” said Jim Torrance, president of the Blue Mountain Ratepayers Association. “I’m sorry, but I haven’t seen my county put up a hitching post or deal with horse discharge in a long time, but these boundaries are meant to constrain us today from what we can do?”
For Torrance, the issue is the boundary between Simcoe and Grey counties — a north-south line that starts at the shores of Georgian Bay and administratively divides the communities along the shore from one another, something that’s increasingly hindered coordination as the towns have grown. He argued at the committee that everything from transit services to water infrastructure is more difficult to coordinate because of the line on the map and everything that flows from it — separate counties with separate elected officials answering to separate electorates.
Torrance’s arguments found a receptive audience, at least from the Progressive Conservatives on the committee, which has been charged by the province with investigating possible reforms to local government, with a particular focus on the regional municipalities in the Greater Golden Horseshoe — including Simcoe County, Niagara Region, Waterloo Region, and the regions adjacent to Toronto itself. The government is particularly interested in the possibility of changing the way Ontario municipalities deal with water and sewer infrastructure.
For the province, finding a more efficient way to pay for water infrastructure could unlock more and more rapid homebuilding. For small municipalities, water infrastructure makes up some of the largest costs in their capital budget. A solution that the PC members on the committee repeatedly highlighted in their questions to witnesses was one we’ve already heard about a bit this year: the idea of moving water services to a dedicated publicly owned corporation paid for by user fees instead of local taxes.
The town of Innisfil, south of Barrie, actually made the change from a tax-paid water service to a corporation model in 2015, creating the utility Inservices. Mayor Lynn Dollin said the move has been a boon for the town, which is undergoing a major population boom.
“It’s a model that’s working for us, and it suits our part of Simcoe County,” Dollin told the committee. “There’s no denying that infrastructure to support housing is expensive, and I believe that both the provincial and federal governments both need to play a key role in funding these generational infrastructure investments.”
The provincial government clearly hopes that the municipal-services corporation model will reduce, if not eliminate, the need for major capital grants from Queen’s Park to municipalities looking to connect homes to clean water and sewer lines. Some deputants to the committee, however, sounded a note of caution — arguing that towns that have made large, expensive investments in their water capacity will want to be compensated if those tax expenditures get swallowed up in new corporations.
The biggest hot-button issue the committee may consider is whether there’s a case for wholesale amalgamation of municipalities or for more minor adjustments to municipal boundaries along the lines of what the legislature did in Elgin County last year. That’s something Dollin warned against — it’s a touchy issue in Innisfil, which lost a chunk of land on its northern boundary to an annexation by Barrie back in 2010.
Dollin probably doesn’t need to worry for now. The government is seemingly in no hurry to make any major changes in the municipal sphere, notwithstanding its asserted priority to get more homes built. Nothing in the Ford government’s history suggests it’s eager to make big, contentious changes to municipal-finance and infrastructure rules immediately before a general election. But, unlike with the thunderbolts of the past — cutting Toronto city council in half, creating “strong mayor” powers — which were kept hidden from voters until after the elections were over, citizens will in this case at least have a reasonable sense of what’s coming.
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