Looking back on the birth of a megacity
April 21 passed by Torontonians without much, if any, notice. No pomp, nor any circumstance. It was a momentous anniversary though, 20 years to the day that Bill 103 made its way through the Ontario legislature for its third and final reading, after which then-lieutenant-governor Hilary Weston signed it into law. It would radically change Toronto.
Sometimes called the City of Toronto Act of 1997, it took effect on Jan. 1, 1998 and amalgamated the six municipalities of Metro Toronto, a municipal entity created in 1954, into what we still sometimes call the Toronto “megacity,” though as time passes the idea of “megacity” means less and less. This is simply Toronto now.
Metro Toronto, for those who weren’t here or have blurry municipal memories, had six municipalities with their own mayor and councils: the “old” city of Toronto as well as York, Etobicoke, North York, East York and Scarborough. They took care of most local issues, while a seventh, Metro level of government took care of bigger issues such as sewers, police and the TTC.
Amalgamation was initiated by the Mike Harris Conservatives, and some of those who look fondly on the Metro era remain convinced it was a plot to water down the more progressive Toronto council with right-leaning councillors from the more suburban areas — and that Rob Ford was the penultimate result of amalgamation.
It sounds conspiratorial, though every time a councillor from well outside the core meddles with downtown bike lanes or a scramble crossing far from his or her ward, that conspiracy theory comes to mind.
Amalgamation happened fast. Rumours were circulating in the fall of 1996 when then-North York mayor Mel Lastman appeared on TV saying it would be impossible to amalgamate Toronto. However, as Julie-Anne Boudreau points out in her 2000 book Megacity Saga, “amalgamation in Toronto captured media attention and political life from December 1996 until the passage of the provincial legislation enacting municipal consolidation” just four months later.
Opposition mobilization was swift. An incredibly organized and politically savvy ad hoc group called Citizens for Local Democracy formed, and numerous public meetings were held.
Co-founded by Premier Kathleen Wynne, it was sometimes called “Rebellion 1997,” a play on William Lyon Mackenzie’s Rebellion of 1837. John Ralston Saul said the Harris Conservatives were governing in the “Napoleonic Tradition” and at one meeting, Margaret Atwood read aloud her short story “The Big, Bad Megacity Monster.”
During the debate in the legislature, the NDP and Liberals filibus- tered Bill 103 by filing about 12,000 amendments that each had to be debated and voted on, 24 hours a day, taking 10 days in total. Many motions were the same, but just had a different street name swapped in, and every one was voted down except the one mentioning tiny Cafon Ct., found near the intersection of Albion Rd. and Kipling Ave. It slipped through, meaning it had to be consulted on any change to city regulations, but was later nullified too.
Outside the legislature, massive demonstrations were held. To this day, at or after nearly every big protest in Toronto, whether it was against the Gulf War in 2003 or the recent anti-Trump marches, somebody will say, “this is as big as megacity,” remembering when people marched against Bill 103. The vast majority of Metro residents were against it: In a poll conducted March 3, 1997, a resounding 76 per cent said no to amalgamation.
Twenty years is a long time, but traces of the Metro era are all around us.
At Metro Hall, considered for a time to serve as the new city hall for the amalgamated city before old Toronto’s “new” one was wisely chosen, there’s an awards wall that only goes up to 1997. At the five other former city halls, now civic centres of one sort or another, references abound to municipalities that no longer exist, accidental memorials to this era.
Some call for a return to the old Metro days, like Alan Redway, former mayor of East York, who argues for de-amalgamation in his 2014 book Governing Toronto: Bringing back the city that worked. Though divisions between “downtown” and “suburb” have been cranked up in recent years for political gain, there isn’t much political will to de-amalgamate, though there’s certainly room to tweak how we’re represented nowadays. The citizens are likely still for local democracy.
I’ve argued here de-amalgamation talk is a rejection of the very multiculturalism and idea of equality that Toronto seems to celebrate in theory, but perhaps not in practice. Breaking Toronto up nowadays would mean severing the wealthy core from vast areas of poorer Toronto, a Toronto where most newcomers land, a move that seems, again in theory, un-Torontonian.
Had I lived in Toronto in 1997 I might have been out in the streets too, protesting Bill 103, but this is the city we’ve got now, and the thought of breaking it up is incredibly depressing.
In a world that seems to be tearing itself up in the style of Brexit and other isolationist movements, here we are in Toronto, almost three million strong yet tiny in the global context.
Twenty years later, if we can’t make this little, extremely prosperous place work, what hope is there for national and international unity? Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef