Waterloo Region Record

‘The community could learn something’ from report’s findings

JEFF OUTHIT WATERLOO REGION RECORD

WATERLOO REGION — In 2019, Ontario asked residents what they would change about their local government. Today we can reveal what 1,052 people said about the Region of Waterloo.

Most said they are satisfied to have eight councils deliver local services to 600,000 residents.

More than one-third said seven fire departments should be merged. More than a quarter said Kitchener and Waterloo should become one city.

Some said it is too confusing to navigate who does what

among all the governments. Others are concerned about bitter municipal politics in Cambridge.

The feedback is from an online survey the provincial government conducted on the performance of nine regional municipalities, involving a total of 82 local governments across a large swath of southern Ontario.

The 15-question survey asked how municipalities might be improved, if services are delivered effectively and efficiently by regional government and by cities and townships, and asked for ideas for making municipal services more efficient and cost-effective.

The results were never released.

The Record made a freedomof-information request for documents from the regional government review. In releasing 6,654 survey responses from across southern Ontario, the province withheld names to protect privacy.

Because the online survey is not a random sample of population, it reflects only the opinions of people who chose to respond. Assessing 1,052 responses that came from within this region, The Record found that:

60 per cent want to keep the current two-tier system of local government. Regional government is the upper tier that provides most services. City and township governments are the lower tiers that provide fewer services.

27 per cent desire a full amalgamation. They want Ontario to create a single city by dissolving Kitchener, Cambridge and Waterloo, as well as the rural townships of Woolwich, Wilmot, Wellesley and North Dumfries.

13 per cent want Ontario to dissolve the regional level of government and create two or more standalone cities.

Municipal Affairs Minister Steve Clark initiated the survey as part of a review of nine regional or county governments created in the 1970s: Waterloo Region, Durham, Halton, Muskoka District, Niagara, Oxford County, Peel, York and Simcoe County.

He said the province “will be looking at ways to make better use of taxpayers’ dollars.”

Clark also hired two expert advisers to make recommendations as part of the review. One was former Waterloo regional chair Ken Seiling. The other was Michael Fenn, a former deputy minister.

Documents obtained by The Record show the province spent $127,177 to review regional governance. Seiling was paid $49,155. Fenn was paid $58,308. Their compensation accounts for most of the provincial spending on the review.

After paying for their advice, Clark shuttered the review in the fall of 2019 and did not release any recommendations made by Seiling and Fenn.

“It was disappointing that they put everybody through this kind of mill ... only to have the government basically submarine the whole thing,” Kitchener regional Coun. Tom Galloway said.

Clark declared the expert report written by Seiling and Fenn confidential advice to the provincial cabinet, exempting it from freedom-of-information access. He has rejected calls from local councils to release it. The advisers signed nondisclosure agreements.

“To just have it put on the shelf is really disappointing,” Galloway said. “The community could learn something.”

The outcome deflated amalgamation advocate Ginny Dybenko, former business dean at Wilfrid Laurier University. It angers her to see the government withhold expert recommendations crafted at public expense that could point the way to improvement.

“In the corporate background that I’ve had, you look for every opportunity to do things better next time so that you’ll be more successful,” she said.

“And what an opportunity this was, how many people spoke and how many people gave some serious consideration to a very important set of issues. And I feel that both at a local municipal level plus an international development level, there could be some really important learnings there.”

She suspects the government bailed out after calculating no votes are to be gained in municipal reform.

Clark ended his review by saying he found little appetite for provincially directed reform.

He said he will let communities choose if and how they want to change.

But “there is no history in Ontario of self-generated municipal reform,” Seiling said in an interview. This is because it is the province that is responsible for municipalities, and because people often have emotional attachments to municipal structure.

Local mayors told Clark not to make changes. “It wasn’t broke so we don’t need to spend time on it,” Waterloo Mayor Dave Jaworsky said.

“I was delighted to see the outcome, to have our current system continue as is,” Cambridge Mayor Kathryn McGarry said.

She figures Clark found opposition to change among Progressive Conservative legislators and the public, and suspects the government balked at funding reform costs.

Regional Chair Karen Redman anticipated the review would lead to recommendations on reform. “This region has defined itself by collaboration, so I think the region works,” she said.

Seiling would not reveal the expert advice that he and Fenn gave to the province.

“It was a pretty wide-ranging set of recommendations for every municipality that we examined,” he said. “But at the end of the day we recognized that it was their decision whether they wanted to do anything or not, and they chose not to.”

Clark declined to be interviewed. Municipal government in Waterloo Region is almost a $2-billion-a-year enterprise. It levies almost $900 million in annual property taxes, employs 6,500 people full time, and thousands more part time.

A comparison shows this region is a democratic outlier, directed by 59 politicians who provide abundant representation at an above-average cost for governance.

There is one municipal politician for every 9,070 residents in this region. That’s triple what Windsor, London, Hamilton, Sudbury and Ottawa provide, at one politician for every 28,276 residents on average.

Galloway favours amalgamating the region into a single council of up to 25 politicians. But he figures it is pointless to advocate for change if the province is not pushing for municipal reform.

“If we get engaged in that conversation, it’s not likely going to go anywhere and just create some hard feelings,” he said.

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2021-10-23T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-10-23T07:00:00.0000000Z

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