The birth of regional government
The governing bodies here in the Niagara Peninsula have been an ever-changing succession of ever broadening areas — counties, townships, municipalities in the townships — villages, towns, cities — and eventually the Regional Municipality of Niagara, an amalgamation of much that had gone before.
It was in 1849 that the Baldwin Act established in Ontario a new way of organizing municipal government. The existing districts and district councils were abolished and 20 counties and unions of counties were established.
Further changes in municipal and educational institutions came about at Confederation, with the British North American Act of 1867.
In essence that arrangement was retained for the next century, but by the early 1960s the local governments of Lincoln County and Welland County were concerned about whether the existing local municipal government structure could deal adequately with the present and future needs of this area.
Dr. Henry Mayo of University of Western Ontario studied the situation and prepared a preliminary report for Lincoln and Welland counties in October 1964. He presented a second report in August 1966, recommending the establishment of a regional government for Niagara.
The result: on June 26, 1969, the Ontario legislature enacted the Regional Municipality of Niagara Act, stating that effective Jan. 1, 1970, 12 municipal governments and one regional government would replace the existing two counties and 26 local municipalities.
The duties and responsibilities of the Region would be those which could be done better and more efficiently on a regional scale rather than just in the limited geographical boundaries of the individual municipalities — things like fire and police protection, waste management, health and education.
For the first 10 years of this new regional government, it operated from some 11 different administrative offices scattered across the region.
The inefficiency of this could not be endured forever. A site was needed for a modern, purpose-built central Regional headquarters in a location central to the region’s far flung communities — all the way from Fort Erie to Grimsby, from Niagara-on-the-Lake to Port Colborne.
In 1980, the Region purchased from Brock University a six-hectare plot the university owned in Thorold, at the southeast corner of Merrittville Highway and St. Davids Road.
The site was chosen because of its proximity to existing highway connections — Highway 406 extending all the way from St. Catharines to Welland, Highway 58 and Thorold Stone Road reaching to Niagara Falls, and Merrittville Highway, similarly well connected. Another attraction of the site for the Region may have been that it was close to the university.
Ground was broken for the new regional headquarters in October 1981, and the first steel girders put into place in March the following year. The accompanying photo shows the scene on the construction site sometime in April 1982. The new facility was inaugurated on June 4, 1983.
The today photo that accompanies this article shows the extent to which Niagara Region headquarters has grown since then. But then, the population of the region has increased, too — by some 40 per cent since the Region was established (comparing the 1971 and 2021 census figures).