# Doug Ford and Lord Durham

An episode of [Rose City Politics](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1247337855), 10 Sep 2023, 50 min.

Audio: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/56754312/doug_ford_and_lord_durham.mp3

On this episode, Melinda and Doug indulge their nerdiness without Jon, Don, or Pat to restrain them. The conversation ranges from the rebellions of 1837 to Windsor 2023. Rose City Politics is brought to you with the kind support of LiUNA Local 625: Building Better Communities. Support the show at Patreon.com/RoseCityPolitics. Read us in Biz X Magazine or online at BizXMagazine.com and RoseCityPolitics.ca

## Transcript

[0:24] Good afternoon everyone, and welcome to Rosity Politics with your very first giving my
[0:30] what do you call it, my maiden introduction. It's Melinda Monroe here and
[0:35] our regular panel today is spit on the small side. It's just Doug Startry
[0:38] myself. I'm going to have a little conversation with one another in vote the
[0:41] History of Municipalities. It is September tenth, twenty twenty three. Yes see
[0:47] this September tenth, twenty twenty three and support us at Patreon dot com slat
[0:52] slash Rosity Politics. We are also in print in biz X magazine, whereby
[0:55] the way, we are writing this week on scoring the municipal councilors. If
[0:59] you have I've provided your feedback on last week's episode, please do so.
[1:03] We're banned only in some places, and Rosity Politics is broadcast live on tape
[1:07] thanks to the kind support of laying A six two five building Better Communities.
[1:11] So we today we lost two of our regulars, John and Don both decided
[1:15] that they had better things to do with their time and actually are both and
[1:19] not feeling very well. And so it's just Dug and I and we were
[1:23] wondering what could we talk about then there's a real pool pourri of issues in
[1:26] the community. Right. We've had changes to the collection of garbage, which
[1:32] is a great thing to moving towards having taking organics out of the landfill.
[1:36] We had the really fun volleyball downtown, and we had the really interesting changes
[1:42] to the Daniel Bombardier got some of his colleagues together and painted there like building
[1:47] downtown to make it kind of more interesting and attractive and something to be less
[1:52] anxious and afraid of. So we've looked at this kind of basket of things
[1:57] as pol pourri of topics, and we've kind of landed. I think that
[2:00] you correct me if I'm wrong on thinking about what is this thing we actually
[2:04] called municipality. We kind of take it as a given it's just this territorial
[2:08] land with this regulatory structure around it. But how did it come to be
[2:12] what it is? And how does knowing that inform maybe some of our political
[2:16] analysis. Sounds pretty good. Nice job on the introduction, Melinda, I
[2:22] know I don't want to have this. I get all the jobs, well,
[2:23] you get all the jobs. I do all the work, You get
[2:25] all the jobs and how things. Yeah, that's the Monroe strategy. Parallel
[2:30] forty two system. So anyway, where we got here, how we kind
[2:34] of got here is that I'm very happy to say that I'm I've been asked
[2:38] to teach the municipal law class at the University of Windsor this this term.
[2:42] And in all these years I've worked in municipal government, I've just taken as
[2:46] read this is what a municipality is. And I never went back and said,
[2:51] how did this this thing come to be? Why are our municipalities different
[2:53] sate those in the United States or those in other countries? And that led
[2:59] me to the source of all municipal greatness was a report from Lord Durham in
[3:06] eighteen thirty nine. Soho our listeners who are particularly clever historians will recall that
[3:10] in eighteen thirty seven there were not one, but two rebellions against the Imperial
[3:15] Government in the UK that had to do with responsible government. People living here
[3:20] wanted the right to make their own decisions and not be told what to do.
[3:23] Not similar to the Boston Tea Party, but certainly not nearly as dramatic
[3:28] as the Boston Tea Party. More of a more of an herbal tea yeah,
[3:32] yeah, but kind of a herbal tea. I mean, people were
[3:36] shot up, houses were burned down. There's some great stories if you like
[3:38] podcasts. Eighteen sixty seven and all that is a fabulous podcast at a Trent
[3:43] University about the history of all of this stuff. So in eighteen thirty eight,
[3:47] Lord Durham Earl, the Earl of Durham, is sent to Canada to
[3:51] figure out, like, what are we going to do? We don't want
[3:53] any more in this rebellion nonsense, and so he wrote a report in which
[3:59] he which was very long, but in which you've talked about why we needed
[4:02] municipalities. And I'm going to read bits of pieces of that because it's kind
[4:05] of funny but also interesting. It's like pluce seschange, pluce set lamm shows.
[4:11] So he writes, independently of these sources of complaint, which had gone
[4:16] on for several hundred pages, A very considerable portion of the province has neither
[4:21] roads, post offices, mills, schools, nor churches. The people may
[4:26] raise enough for their own subsistence, and they may even have a rude and
[4:30] comfortless plenty, but a great sience comfortless plenty, but they can selldom acquire
[4:35] wealth, nor can even wealthy landowners prevent their children from growing up ignorant and
[4:40] boorish, and far from occupying a far lower mental, moral and social position
[4:44] than they themselves fill. So our children are going downhill in eighteen thirty seven.
[4:48] Their means of communication with each other or the chief towns of the provinces
[4:51] are limited and uncertain. With the exception of the laboring class, most of
[4:56] the immigrants who have arrived in the last ten years are poorer now then at
[5:00] the time of their arrival in the province. Also true today there is no
[5:02] adequate system of local assessment to improve the means of communication, and the funds
[5:06] occasionally voted for this purpose are under the present system disposed of by a House
[5:11] of Assembly which represents principally the interests of more settled districts read Toronto, Kingston,
[5:17] Montreal, and which it is alleged, has been chiefly attempt in making
[5:20] their disposal means of strengthening the influence of its members in the constituencies which they
[5:25] represent. That doesn't happen at all anymore. These funds have consequently always been
[5:30] applied in part of the country where they were the least needed, and they've
[5:32] been too frequently expended to us to produce scarcely any predictable advantages of the lands
[5:38] originally appropriated for the support of schools. By far the most valuable have been
[5:42] diverted to the endowment of the University of Toronto. Also true today. So
[5:47] he goes on to Spanni say, even in the most thickly peopled districts there
[5:51] are but few schools, and those of a very inferior character, while the
[5:55] more remote settlements are almost all entirely without any So his recommendation, we have
[6:00] no schools, we have no churches, We have no ways to make money,
[6:02] we have no way to tax each other. We have no way to
[6:04] prevent Toronto and Ottawa from taking all our money. He recommends that there should
[6:10] be a plan of local government by elective bodies subordinate to the general legislature,
[6:15] basically needing the imperial government, and exercise a complete control over such local affairs
[6:20] as do not come within the province of general legislation. So he's basically saying,
[6:26] let these people who have you washed up on the corner of the Detroit
[6:30] River, or perhaps you know, on the corner of the Lake Huron and
[6:34] Saint Clair River, let them exercise jurisdiction over the where they're living so they
[6:40] can raise money for churches and schools and become way better colonizers than they were
[6:45] at the time. So it sounds to me like the at least in part,
[6:48] the Durham Report was informing the Imperial government that Upper Canada ended at Niagara.
[6:55] Essentially Upper Canada ended at Niagara and that and now it ends at London.
[7:01] Yes, so we've made we've made progress, folks. Yes, we've
[7:04] pushed things down a little further. So it's kind of amusing to me.
[7:08] How there what he's describing is in some ways not that dissimilar to what we
[7:13] currently have. And perhaps one could even point to dare we say things like
[7:15] the Convoy movement to say, we're tired of Ottawa taking all our money and
[7:19] spending it on stuff we don't want them to spend it on, so we're
[7:23] going to try and have some kind of Perhaps the eighteen thirty seven rebellion was
[7:26] not that dissimilar to a whole load of Chuck's parked on Wellington Street, and
[7:30] we're trying to figure out what to do. So when what we know after
[7:34] this is in eighteen forty eight, they province or the Imperial Government passed the
[7:39] very first Municipal Corporations Act, which wasn't really substantially overhauled until two thousand and
[7:44] one, So one hundred and fifty years under what was as I think I
[7:48] could algue one of the most impactful acts of colonization, probably in all of
[7:51] the things that the Imperial Government did. And that's how we got municipal government
[7:57] in Ontario. And that is how we got municipal government in Ontario. So
[8:00] so I'm interested in the difference between the formation of municipalities in Canada and the
[8:07] United States. That doesn't mean that you know anything about it, but I'm
[8:13] interested in it. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, and because
[8:16] you see in the United States one of the experiences first times, I spent
[8:20] a lot of time down there, remember driving down the Eastern seaboard and that,
[8:24] and I said to my partner, I said, I can understand why
[8:28] Americans fight so hard for small government. They have so much government. They
[8:35] have you know, parks government, and parks police and state police and town
[8:39] police and sheriffs and bailiffs and municipalities and counties, and I mean, it
[8:43] was just so much government everywhere. Well, I think they have way more
[8:48] government than we have, and yet you know they they they're sort of the
[8:52] country of we don't like the government, we're supposed to be the country.
[8:56] If we do like the government, we think have way less government. Do
[8:58] you think that Do you think that people in Ontario and people in Windsor think
[9:03] of the municipal government as the same sort of thing as the provincial and federal
[9:09] governments. Do you think that there's that there is qualitative continuity between all three
[9:13] levels of government in the eyes of the public. That's a really interesting question.
[9:22] I don't. I mean, I think probably the average person who's not
[9:26] sort of focused on politics or governments like we might be, isn't just experiences
[9:31] the whole thing is this sort of giant more ass u bureaucracy. Like I
[9:35] went to this office to fill in this form and they told me I had
[9:37] to go to a different one, And knowing whether they've been told to go
[9:41] from the municipal to the federal or vice versa, is kind of they're indifferent
[9:46] to that. It's like, why do I have to pay another parking fine
[9:48] to go to a different place to fill in the same form? Right?
[9:50] I think there is there. That's a good point. I think there is
[9:54] a sense that you know, maybe understanding the separation of powers is what separation.
[10:00] It's the nerd from the non nerd in terms of politics. Yeah,
[10:03] I think so. So that's a good point, and I was just curious
[10:05] about that. I think what you said rings true to me in that when
[10:11] people are mad, When when folks are mad, they tend to talk about
[10:16] whatever, whatever individual in government annoys them the most as the source of the
[10:22] problem in front of them, even if it doesn't make any sense right that
[10:26] you know, I'm so mad at Mayor Dilkins because you know Canada's foreign policy
[10:31] attitude towards Ukraine. That's you know, that would be kind of, I
[10:35] think, a normal thing for people to feel, true, although perhaps perhaps
[10:39] it's sort of the sort of ship rolls up hill in this context defies gravity
[10:43] in the sense that we're probably less likely to blame Drew dilkins on for the
[10:46] foreign policy, but we are likely to blame just a Trudeau for the fact
[10:50] that are sewer backed up. Yep, yep, yep. That's a fair
[10:54] point. That's a fair point. So so what do you think, like
[10:58] it's really interest instinct to memil into that. You said that this is the
[11:01] most significant act of colonization, the creation of Ontario municipalities. And I'm curious,
[11:09] like, what do you think, like what unique and special thing did
[11:13] Ontario receive from Durham's report and the subsequent reforms. Well, I mean the
[11:20] ability to govern themselves kind of independently, you know, so that windsor or
[11:26] perhaps probably with Sandwich at that time, could make different choices about spending its
[11:31] money than saying Colchester might have, or than Coughdam might have. And we
[11:35] see we even see sort of remnants of that still today when you think about
[11:39] municipalities up in the Perth County. I had some experience with where Perth South
[11:43] has chosen not to put its municipalities onto a wastewater system, but Stratford and
[11:50] Saint Mary's have, and so where they share a municipality, and I wish
[11:56] I could remember the name of the misvalty and I can't. Unfortunately, on
[11:58] one side of the street there is wastewater service and the other side of the
[12:01] street they're on septic tanks. And because because the municipalities at that level of
[12:05] grand annularity can make choices about where they're going to spend their tax money,
[12:09] they decided they would rather spend it on other things besides infrastructure. In some
[12:13] other places they might have the most gorgeous and perfect wastewater treatment system in the
[12:16] world, because for them that seems to be critically important. So on on
[12:20] a global scale, the like, does the Municipal Act empower municipalities more than
[12:26] the average sort of constitutional affordance for cities? Well, there isn't any constitutional
[12:35] affordance sources. I guess that's the first question. So the Municipalact. So
[12:37] the difference between eighteen forty eight and twenty one was in eighteen forty eight,
[12:41] municipalities were only allowed to do the things they were told you can do X.
[12:45] In two thousand and one, the ship was to say you can do
[12:46] anything unless we've told you you can't. And so that is a big expansion
[12:50] that happened almost all across Canada around the same time, to say we're going
[12:54] to stop tinkering at the provincial level and let you have a lot more on
[13:00] me at the local levels. So that was the big change. But when
[13:01] I say the biggest active colonization, I think what I'm really getting at is
[13:05] It wasn't the most evil thing that the British or the Friendship has colonizes.
[13:09] Right, we did lots of really evil and destructive and genocidal things. The
[13:13] municipality probably wasn't can be class as genocidal when I think impact. For what
[13:18] I mean is, you took a territory in which people were cohabitating as as
[13:22] emigrants or as people who had come up as freed people from the United States,
[13:28] or indigenous people who were all kind of cohabitating on the land, and
[13:31] you handed a certain subset of them the authority over a particular jurisdiction to now
[13:35] make the rules, tax each other, regulate each other, building standards,
[13:41] put in roads, schools, and churches to make them more like the colonizer
[13:46] than they were like whatever was here in the intervening sort of two hundred years
[13:52] where people just kind of scraped along together and kind of did their best and
[13:56] negotiated. Uh. Interesting, And how are we going to bridge this to
[14:03] today? How are we going to do that, Melinda? How are we
[14:05] going to how are we going to create a bridge to get from eighteen forty
[14:09] eight to twenty twenty three. Well, I think one of the things that
[14:11] Durham says. It's really interesting is he says that they had no ability to
[14:16] make wealth. So even the wealthiest landowners had I guess what you're seeing is
[14:24] kind of the imposition of nineteenth century capitalism. Even the wealthiest landers, their
[14:28] children were worse off than they had been before. So what he was seeing
[14:33] was there was no way for these colonials to figure out how to generate wealth
[14:37] out of what they were doing. To extend to which wealth is being generated,
[14:41] it's being shipped back to rich people in New k through the Hudson's Bay
[14:43] Company or the Northwest Company or you know that, those enterprises. So he's
[14:48] saying, we'll create these municipal corporations, which is what they're calling, so
[14:52] they can start to make money. If you bridge that to twenty twenty three,
[14:56] you know what are we all talking about here? The ev plant,
[15:01] the next star plant. We're talking about how to generate more factors, how
[15:05] to bring in more immigrants in order to put have workers working in these factories.
[15:09] It's the same activity, but we just we just having to have fixed
[15:13] borders, at least temporary fixed borders in which we're doing it. But it's
[15:16] it's all Stullan aid, at the same thing, make money at the local
[15:20] level, keep that money at the local level, so that people at the
[15:22] local level could see their children be better off than they were themselves. Okay,
[15:30] So Windsor specifically as a municipality, Windsor has some challenges. We've got
[15:39] some historic challenges. In fact, you know, you if you read phrase
[15:45] your father's blog, and you definitely should read his blog if you're a listener
[15:48] to this show. I was really impressed with his peace on immigration and poverty,
[15:54] in which he talked about the roots of enduring poverty in our community and
[16:00] the pockets, Like, let's be fair here, there are pockets of enduring
[16:03] poverty. And this is not a this is not a region that is blighted
[16:07] by poverty, you know, in a majority of the population. And I'm
[16:11] not trying to I'm not trying to portray it that way, but we have
[16:15] deep pockets of poverty. Uh. And and the causes of that are related
[16:22] to, you know, education, and they're related to investment. What kinds
[16:27] of investments are made here and what what consequently what kinds of careers become possible
[16:33] here? And and uh, the you know, the sort of the changing
[16:41] the changing face of economic reality and the demands of the economy globally, I
[16:47] think have have created a more and more difficult situation in windsor because we lack
[16:52] some of those essential tools like the like an educated population with which to significantly
[16:59] change our circumstances. And so so I think that's really that is some interesting
[17:07] context to kind of bring to the conversation that that that you were bringing up.
[17:14] We compare municipalities in Ontario, right, we have we have mandatory reporting
[17:21] for municipalities. Statistics Canada is now reporting on economic performance between municipalities. You
[17:30] can look at the estimated GDP for a particular metropolitan area and compare it to
[17:37] others. Lots of statistical information, but what you know, what I find
[17:41] surprising is how little comparison actually happens. There is comparison between municipalities in terms
[17:51] of outcomes. It happens. We see it in the media. There are
[17:53] studies, there is research, there are rankings those I've been looking at that
[18:00] stuff for a long time. In fact, the Mean Media and Moose the
[18:03] Data Podcast we did an episode looking at rankings of Canadian cities and the conclusion
[18:10] that we drew is that in the you know, for the most part,
[18:12] they're they're largely pretty shallow. These are you know, these are research studies
[18:18] that are that are typically not really extensive, didn't have a big investment.
[18:26] They were you know, most of these reports are made for the purpose of
[18:29] generating media, you know, for the purpose of generating some attention and some
[18:33] water cooler conversation. Well, look at that Toronto drivers or worse than winds
[18:37] or drivers or whatever that sort of thing. But I beyond, like moving
[18:41] beyond those like water cooler quips and those little stories that give you that like
[18:45] sort of one day that one day conversation piece. I don't think there is
[18:52] a whole lot of interest in Ontario in general in terms of looking at cities
[18:59] and saying, well, this city had this outcome, that city had that
[19:02] outcome, and what are the differences and what are the causes? Like I
[19:04] don't think that we make enough out of the value of the like municipal experiment
[19:11] in that each municipality, as you say, Melinda, each municipality has an
[19:15] opportunity to use its resources within certain limits any way that it wants to build
[19:22] the community of the future that that community wants. And some of us are
[19:27] doing better than others, And I'm just I'm constantly struck by how incurious people
[19:33] seem to be about that. Yeah, it is. I mean, the
[19:37] University of Charnel has an institute a municipal finance and governance. It does try
[19:41] to do a bit of that, and I think there are our pockets of
[19:44] trying to understand that. But I think I wonder sometimes if we if we
[19:48] sort of miss the opportunity to kind of go back to that first principles,
[19:52] Like what was the point of creating these things? Was to create a way
[19:55] for a group of people in a particular location to create some wealth so they
[19:59] could create some good the well being for one another. And then do we
[20:03] or do we do that? Like so we've we're kind of we're kind of
[20:07] sclerotic in terms of our municipal boarders, like they are what they were in
[20:11] lots of cases for hundreds of years, and have we said well there,
[20:15] you know, is that really the right Was that really the right choice?
[20:18] But one of the as you were talking, I was saying, one of
[20:21] the really interesting ways in which we need mentioned the word competing as palies.
[20:25] We look at our county this conversation about regionalization all the time. So were
[20:30] the boundaries that were set eighteen forty eight the right ones were the boundaries that
[20:34] were reset in what it was in so that nineteen ninety nine, So that
[20:40] we went from how thirty something was palies is seven eight? Really? And
[20:45] then how did and are those are still working? You know, how would
[20:48] we decide if they were? I mean at the time they were amalgamated because
[20:52] Harris was trying to save money on this and that, and there were too
[20:55] many levels of government, too many elected officials, too many non elected officials.
[20:59] So now we have in this region we have a mayor who wrote his
[21:02] PhD dissertation on the question of whether we should amalgamate, and his question was
[21:07] we would be better off if we spent less money on government. That was
[21:10] ultimately his thesis. And when he found that, in fact, we would
[21:12] not spend less money, he still wants to region lines because if it's not
[21:17] about wealth, then maybe it's about well being. And if Dawn were here,
[21:19] he'd be talking about this constant pressure on the taxation and on the development
[21:26] charges between Windsor and Councy, Windsor and La souths comes in Lakeshore or LaSalle
[21:30] and Amersburg because just across that very easy to cross the line. I can
[21:36] build my house and pay a fewer development charges, or I can build my
[21:38] house and pay less property tax and that in the city. You know,
[21:42] the city is supporting a lot of the things that bring well being to the
[21:45] region, but other parts of the region not paying for that. And the
[21:49] other debate we hear is the mayor saying he wants SEC Road to be a
[21:52] provincial road because the rest of the county should be helping to pay for the
[21:56] maintenance of it. So I think that it takes us back to that kind
[21:59] of first principle. It's about wealth and about well being. Could we do
[22:03] a better job of wealth and well being in Windsor in Essex County if we
[22:04] were cut off differently. Yeah, that's a topic of conversation that we've had
[22:11] on this show once or twice. I do think that a county wide amalgamation
[22:17] would be bad for the Region's that's my own view, And we've we've kind
[22:22] of talked about the different ways that you can slice and dice and that I
[22:26] guess we've seen those kind of moves happen like this provincial government is not unwilling
[22:30] to redraw the map, but I would suggest that the interests of the government
[22:37] and the interests of the government's local allies and associates would probably predetermine the path
[22:44] that such a like an aggregation would take. And to me, conservatives would
[22:48] want a unified regional municipality of windsor Essex. I think that that would be
[22:56] something that if you're a conservative in your and your perspective is that the world
[23:02] is a better place when conservatives win more often than they don't, then I
[23:06] think that a countywide government would be the best solution for you. If you
[23:11] don't see things that way, and you you think that perhaps people should be
[23:15] lumped together based on, you know, whether they have some kind of common
[23:21] goal and that whether they're the whether that government can pursue a coherent line,
[23:26] like whether there is a clear interest for that region or that municipality, whatever
[23:32] that collection is like to me that that having a community of interest is what
[23:37] makes you a community. And the closer the maps come to that, the
[23:42] closer those lines on the map come to being that community of interest, that
[23:47] abstract ideal, the better off we are. And we've had that the question
[23:52] about coming together as a region. But to some extent, we've talked a
[23:56] little bit about how we lack some community of interest between even wards within the
[24:00] city, and so the other question might be would be better off if we
[24:03] were more municipalities in the city than fewer, Like so if we were to
[24:07] say take all those suburbs and say you go off and be your own municipality
[24:11] and tax yourselves, and if you don't want to have any community centers of
[24:14] parks, and you don't have to, but downtown we do. Now the
[24:17] problem is the wealth from this is where we get back to like picking a
[24:21] piece of geography, throwing down some you know, we talked about T shirts
[24:25] making baseball time, and it's like, throw it down some T shirts at
[24:26] the corner and say this is your municipality, and in this geography you can
[24:30] tax each other and build community centers and libraries and schools. And even some
[24:34] of the people in the southwest part of that say, well, I don't
[24:37] want them to have community centers and schools in the northeast part of it because
[24:40] they're France, or they're Catholic, or they're whatever I don't like. But
[24:44] the province is said, now that's your geography, and you tax each other
[24:47] and you figure out how you're going to work within that geography. It's we
[24:52] just saw, you know, you talk about provincial policy. We just saw
[24:53] this happened in the Brampton Mississauga area. So they took the region appeal and
[24:57] kind of blew it up. And so region appeal is this massive thing right
[25:02] where Mississauga was dominating forever in Hazel account wanted out a region appeal forever and
[25:07] then Hazel's gone. But and then doug Ford's you know, Nemesis Patrick Brown
[25:11] is there in Brampton, but they took it apart, and Mississauga is not
[25:15] in the region anymore. Brampton is not in the region anymore. What the
[25:18] region, the region's responsibilities like roads and transit and all things are now changed
[25:22] because of that. And so I mean, for a miss pillow, you're
[25:26] making all the money in the world figuring out how to you know, get
[25:30] that kind of worms sorted out. But it was the disaggregation of I mean,
[25:34] Brampton and Missauga are probably amongst the largest miss pounties in the province.
[25:40] You know, if you take Toronto out of the mix. They're both gigantic
[25:42] and very rich. I'm thinking about our border, and I think that if
[25:52] you like look at if you look at the history of Windsor and the border,
[26:00] I think one of the driving forces of having a you know, amalgamating
[26:06] the city is having one political unit that it has enough of a critical mass
[26:11] to have a meaningful conversation with upper levels of government control the border. So
[26:18] if if sandwich Town is the site of the border, or worse, have
[26:22] multiple borders and multiple municipalities, If sandwich Town is the site of a border
[26:26] and sandwich Town retains its municipal boundaries, what does that do to Windsor?
[26:30] How does Windsor How does Windsor as if we imagine that Windsor remains Windsor,
[26:37] but Sandwich state Sandwich, how does Windsor deal with the federal government that is
[26:44] actually dealing with Sandwich on the border. I think that. So I think
[26:48] that like there's there's multiple layers of pressures to consider, and it's not just
[26:56] those that community of interests, Like what's the ideal the ideal size for municipality
[27:00] is one freaking family, Right, It's hard to make a lot of wealth
[27:04] because they have a clear they have clearly aligned interests. Right as soon as
[27:08] you get beyond that, I think you can make the argument that, well,
[27:12] this is too big. You know, as soon as you get to
[27:15] two families, you've got you can make the argument, well, we've gotten
[27:17] too big, and now the interests of the minority of the smaller party or
[27:21] being ignored in favor of the interests of the larger party. Right, So
[27:26] I think that pressure is always there, But there's there's also the pressure of
[27:32] like, if you're not a big enough concentration that that you're consequential, then
[27:37] you're going to struggle. Like if Windsor was if Windsor was one hundred kilometers
[27:41] away from the border, we could be as small as we want. But
[27:45] I don't think that would work here. That's a really interesting observation, I
[27:48] mean, and I mean that they at one point we were kind of one
[27:52] municipality with Detroit and many respects. It wasn't until whenever the border of the
[27:57] Jay Treaty and that all happened that we became too that the border went down
[28:02] in the middle of the river. But there were shared interests across that border
[28:04] forever, you know, and they and they persist, and they persist.
[28:08] I mean, we don't govern each other, but we do have shared some
[28:11] shared governance. We look think about the tunnel, the two companies that run
[28:15] the tunnel and how they work together. So I think you raised this interesting
[28:21] point that you know, I think about quite a lot, which is like,
[28:23] where is the point where how big can you be where you can still
[28:26] negotiate and get by? And then when do you have to start having rules?
[28:32] So you sort of the balance between rules and deals and rules and deals
[28:36] sort of breathing in and out. We can we can solve this problem by
[28:38] negotiating about it, but this one we have to actually get some rules.
[28:41] Do you remember James Burke. No, he did a documentary show that was
[28:48] called Connections, great show British show back in the seventies and eighties. You
[28:52] should definitely check it out. But there was a point that he made about
[28:57] the ideal size of a polar plitical unit. And Burke's perspective was that the
[29:04] entire world should be made up of political units no larger than Kentucky. That
[29:11] Kentucky, Kentucky, for whatever reason, like I think at the time,
[29:15] Kentucky was like a million people Kentucky was the perfect size. You know,
[29:19] I don't know what. I don't have any recollection of the arguments he made
[29:23] to make that point. But like a million people, big enough to be
[29:26] consequential, big enough to have and fund and have the people to staff all
[29:32] the things that you need, but small enough that you can't decide to be
[29:36] the bully. So I thought it was so just since you asked, there's
[29:41] at least there there is an answer that I'm aware of out there. I
[29:44] don't know how good it is, but there is an answer that has been
[29:45] attempted. And so should that be like a rule? I mean, you
[29:48] know, imagine if the province you know that we're creatures of statute. Apparently,
[29:52] if the problem said you can't be more than a million people, you've
[29:56] hit a million people, and now you have to split. I love that
[29:59] idea. You know you have to, you know, some of you have
[30:02] to go and be part of a different municipali. That's what we do with
[30:03] writings, right, that's I mean. Now, writings are are pretty like
[30:08] soft political boundaries. They don't mean much except for who your representative is.
[30:15] But at the same time, like we we split writings in order to keep
[30:18] the critical mass under the number that we think is is too big for it
[30:23] to be a reasonable you know, reasonable number of people to have only one
[30:27] representative. So so that kind of concept is not unknown to us. But
[30:33] the problem with doing that with municipalities is people get super attached to their municipality.
[30:38] Yes, as we've seen you you know, you you talked about the
[30:42] ninety nine amalgamation, and you know all those teeny tiny little you know,
[30:48] packet corners and and uh, the different like Linda, all the different little
[30:52] municipalities that people suddenly became so attached to, and we're so like outraged the
[31:00] province was going to come along and take away their their town. But you
[31:03] know, I feel very strongly that if you set those people down and asked
[31:08] them what was the most consequential governance decision made in the town of Olinda in
[31:12] its high in its entire history, they probably wouldn't be able to point to
[31:17] anything. You know. It's just that it's just carrying down the Knights of
[31:19] Columbus to build an aint ar. It's because it's got a name. It's
[31:23] because it's got a name, right, it has a name, and now
[31:26] and it's part of your identity. You're you are a Windsor, right,
[31:30] I'm a Windsor. Right. That's part of our identity. So and it
[31:33] matters to us. And identity matters a lot to people. So if somebody
[31:37] came along one day and said, well, Windsor has just gotten a little
[31:41] too big, So now we got Windsor and Blindser. If I was on
[31:45] if I was on the blindser side of the line, I'd be pissed.
[31:48] We'll end a pissed And this is the this is the of course, the
[31:52] sentiment that drives the the opposition to the naming of to the to the changing
[32:00] of the name of Amersburg. Right, because look, I'm from Amisburg.
[32:07] I know a lot of people in Amisburg. Amisburg is what it is,
[32:10] but what it is not is a hotbed of like virulently genocidal people. That's
[32:17] that is not the reason why the man on the street in Amersburg doesn't want
[32:23] you to change the name of his town. He'll retroactively come up with rationale
[32:30] to explain why Jeffrey Amherst wasn't such a bad guy. And but that is
[32:35] all driven by that's all driven by their own sort of ego involvement with the
[32:39] name, not because they care about Jeffrey Amherst, right, and so so
[32:46] there's those reasons for sure. And we even see you know, the old
[32:50] riverside and and and pled village and all of these names at Saint Clair's Shores,
[32:55] Walkerville. We see these in the cities, well in the real attachment
[33:00] to those things. And I'm from Marcabel, I'm not from I'm not from
[33:02] Remington Park that kind of thing. But it's but I think that the complexity,
[33:07] it's an interesting it would be an interesting thought experiment. What if we
[33:10] just said, if you're a million people, then you have to split,
[33:13] or you're half a million, you have to split. These municipalities owned so
[33:17] many billions of dollars and resources. So when the split happens, like so,
[33:22] who owns which pieces of the sewer or the water or your sewers attached
[33:25] to my sewer and now you guys are going to start dumping you know,
[33:29] crap and your sewers that's going to come to our treatment plant. And like
[33:31] it's something you know, sort of too late in the day in some ways,
[33:36] but sure, but then you've been Toronto has tried it at various times
[33:39] they've they've tried to put it all together and then they took it all back
[33:43] apart again. And no doubt there are people, there are probably people whose
[33:45] job is you know, supervisor responsible for knowing whether this was Metro Toronto or
[33:52] Toronto because you've got to keep track of all that. You're the data guy.
[33:55] Imagine the spreadsheets you'd have to have to manage. Did this win?
[34:00] Well, for sure? I mean you know, I guess an analogous process
[34:05] to a municipal fission would be a divorce right and uh, I'm sure you
[34:12] know. Well, there's there's an entire like subset of your profession that that
[34:17] is devoted to how do we split up the property? Because like when you
[34:22] buy that box of Kleenex for the family, you're never thinking, well,
[34:25] how the hell are we going to split these Kleenex up later? Yes,
[34:30] that exactly so, so there's there's that problem with trying to But but I
[34:35] think when you but when you start to see mega municipalities growing, for example
[34:39] the Torontos of the world, or even here, if you say, well
[34:44] you we're not letting you grow anymore. So the green belt so here we
[34:47] get the green belt, so green Belt is partly designed to keep that.
[34:52] You can be more people, but you can't be more land, you can't
[34:54] be more footprint. So we're gonna build the green We're gonna put the green
[34:58] belt in it, say you can't expand past these limits. That was a
[35:01] pretty reasonable thing to do, probably to kind of keep some control over what
[35:06] that megacity was allowed to become. It's not going to turn into Rio or
[35:08] Sealpollo or someplace like that. And yet now we have a government saying,
[35:13] well, now we're actually going to get rid of the green belt. And
[35:15] it's possible that the gt h A is going to just consume all of Simcoe
[35:22] County and all of Wellington County and all of you know, Waterloo and out
[35:28] into Niagara, and it's just going to be the tire place is going to
[35:30] be paved. Can we talk about the green belt a little bit? And
[35:32] that's I think that's a good a good like natural organic pivot that I'm now
[35:38] ruining. But let's talk about let's talk about the You always kind of talk
[35:43] about it. You can't just do it. Yeah, yeah, the the
[35:47] the green belt issue is interesting to me. So U with all you know,
[35:52] with all due respect, to folks who will take the opposite perspective.
[35:57] I think it's pretty clear that there have been some transparently bad faith stuff that
[36:05] has happened. I think it's pretty clear, Like, you know, nobody
[36:07] has been convicted of anything. There's no police investigations that we are aware of
[36:13] that are ongoing. But but if you know, if I had to place
[36:17] a bet as to whether whether this thing had dirty roots, I would say
[36:23] that it did. Like, look, it's transparently doug Ford has enriched people
[36:29] who are such close associates to him that they you know, they attended his,
[36:34] you know, the family wedding. And we're talking about billions of dollars
[36:37] of wealth that has been you know, removed from the green belt, billions
[36:42] of dollars of value removed from the green belt and transferred to private interests apparently,
[36:47] and the Auditor General seemed to think pretty convincingly at the behest of elements
[36:55] of this provincial government. So one of the defenses that this provincial government raises
[37:04] about the green belt issue is that previous government, specifically the Kathleen Wynn government,
[37:10] also made adjustments to the green belt. And I think that's kind of
[37:15] interesting and not for the reason the Conservatives are playing defense with it. What's
[37:19] interesting to me is that I don't think human nature changes much over time,
[37:22] and I don't think that the distribution of people is all that different across different
[37:28] political parties. So if there is this irresistible opportunity to extract value that we
[37:36] have been like kind of letting grow in the green belt decade after decade,
[37:40] right, there's this irresistible opportunity to enrich your friends. It is the problem
[37:47] right now that Doug Ford did this and it's unprecedented and no one has ever
[37:53] thought of it before. Or is the problem that he did it in a
[37:59] ham fist and extremely fast manner Like Basically, what I'm asking is is the
[38:04] real crime, is the real thing that's happened here, that he's done something
[38:08] that nobody else has ever done, or is he doing something at a pace
[38:13] and with a level of visibility that is not not previously seen. Well,
[38:19] I think it's I think it's pretty clear that it's inherently and you see this
[38:22] in the responsive poles. It's inherently that is obviously, and people are believing
[38:30] this enriching his friends right there? You know, only fifteen parcels got taken
[38:35] out. They're all going the money's all going to friends or political associates of
[38:37] Doug Forth. So if he had I think, but I think you're right
[38:40] it. As much as it pays me to say that we want to take
[38:45] something on the green ducket, make it christine we and keep it pristine,
[38:50] we're not very good at that. Like we're terrible savers when we see this
[38:52] in all of our economic data. Human beings are just terrible savers. You
[38:55] know, how many of us have said, well, I'm going to put
[38:57] that in a max out my rspe of here, and we don't do it
[39:00] because well I thought maybe I'd actually buy a boat, or we put the
[39:04] money on our RSP and then we take it out because well now I can
[39:06] buy this other house it's better value, and so on, and so how
[39:09] many of us are getting into retirement anxious because we didn't save the money.
[39:13] We're not good at it, and we're not and so we're not doing a
[39:15] good job with the green belt, and so we're tempted. I don't I
[39:20] don't criticize them necessarily for being tempted to use the green belt to solve problems
[39:23] in the GTA. But it was just so obvious. I mean, the
[39:27] guy the company had a guy called Phoenix kissing it. I mean, you
[39:30] know, he could not have made it more obvious if he had just waved
[39:35] to put up a billboard and said, if you're a friend of mine,
[39:37] come on down. I have a billion dollars. Right, So what interests
[39:40] me about this is, like, what I'm really interested in is what like
[39:49] whether this is unique and how unique it is. Like, you know,
[39:52] we started this podcast talking about the the what was then Upper Canada, the
[39:59] Ontario of the eighteen thirties and the eighteen forties, and we talked about the
[40:02] fact that Lord Durham came and said, holy shit, these people who are
[40:07] close to the center of power are like using the public resources to enrich themselves
[40:14] and they're letting everybody who lives in the hinterland turn into a bunch of hobo
[40:19] hillbillies. Like basically, this is Durham's report, right Yeah, And I
[40:25] guess like where I'm going with this is we have transparency. We have mechanisms
[40:32] to enforce certain principles and policies because we understand the limits of human nature.
[40:39] We understand how like people are tempted. And what I'm getting at here is
[40:46] this appears to me so I don't know exactly when the green belt was created,
[40:51] but the green belt has been around for decades and there have been adjustments
[40:55] made to the green belt in the past. So were those adjustments? Was
[41:00] there some phoenix kiss analog in twenty nineteen or twenty seventeen, whatever, Who
[41:07] was who was, you know, waiting for their little little suitcase of cash
[41:12] or whatnot? Allegedly maybe speculatively did that stuff happen? And did it just
[41:17] happen at you know? Was it at a smaller scale? Was it?
[41:23] Was it at a at a more sedate pace? Like what are the reasons?
[41:29] Or and this is what I'm getting at, like, is doug Ford
[41:32] actually an outlier in terms of his approach to governance and his personal view of
[41:40] how important it is to play by the rules? I don't know that I
[41:47] could say, I mean, except to say that in my twenty years of
[41:51] experience living in Ontario, to the extent to which the previous governments were personally
[41:58] enriching themselves or their friends, wasn't there were there were lots of There were
[42:01] lots of Auditor General reports about screwing up, making mistakes and doing things a
[42:07] gas plants and doing things the wrong way, or changing the tax rules so
[42:10] that it made it look like that at a surplus when they didn't. But
[42:13] they weren't personally enriching. And Kathleen Wins, you know, best woman at
[42:19] our wedding, didn't tell me get a billion dollars or the value out of
[42:21] the green belt. So these things, so they did they secretly get a
[42:25] billion dollars or something about that, I don't know, But the Audio General
[42:28] reports on the behavior of those governments didn't weren't turning up evident personal enrichment.
[42:34] Sometimes people got advantages like up in Sorbera and the stuff that happened in thunder
[42:40] Bay Air I believe around elections and somebody getting kicked out of being the candidate.
[42:44] But these are minor by comparison. But I think when taking it back
[42:47] to the municipal question, one of the things that is happening with this green
[42:51] belt decisions, the municipals aren't a part of it, so they're actually saying
[42:57] we don't want that land taken out of our gl We actually are trying to
[43:01] protect it. So now it's gone from the green belt. So there are
[43:05] protests coming from some of the municipalties were impacted, but they're not being given
[43:08] any weight. And the munip parties are saying in Hamilton, for example,
[43:14] saying, well, okay, this lands and out of out of the green
[43:15] belt. But that land we had been thinking about the possibility of asking for
[43:21] it to come out of the green belt, but not for another twenty five
[43:23] years because we don't need it right now. We got other stuff to do.
[43:27] We can't even get you sewers and electricity in there for at least a
[43:30] decade. There's no housing going on that land because we can't service it in
[43:36] anything like the time you need us to do that. So the needs of
[43:38] the municipalties where they way they musipeadly could have either advanced forwards agenda or the
[43:45] way they are now in a position maybe to delay as agenda. He's just
[43:49] cut the middleman out of the equation entirely. So if the end look,
[43:54] I think that maintaining a green belt around Toronto is I think that it's important
[44:01] to maintain those lands, but I also don't think that every square inch or
[44:05] the green belt is necessarily sacred and that it's not impossible that the value of,
[44:12] you know, taking some of the pressure off people in Ontario on housing
[44:16] is worth maybe putting a bit of water in our wine on the green belt.
[44:21] And I think that if you put it to Ontarians in that way,
[44:23] Ontarians would agree. I think. I think so if if this thing had
[44:30] proceeded in an orderly fashion, as you say, with municipal partners, let's
[44:38] do a sweeping review of the green belt, let's get all the experts,
[44:43] like, we know, we've got some pressure here, we need housing.
[44:46] Let's really take a hard look at this. I think we could have gotten
[44:52] somewhere good. I think we could have too, I agree. And there
[44:54] were and some of those municiplines were saying, there are parts of this that
[44:58] we want to take out of the green Belt, and this is how we
[45:00] planned to do it. They just were ignored. They could have been helpful.
[45:04] Now I could see Ford and his friends in the in the in the
[45:08] development sectors saying, wow, that's gonna take way too long. We don't
[45:12] have one hundreds of years to do all of that. And but we know
[45:15] from also from the work that was done by the Housing Task Force, they
[45:19] don't need the green Belt right now to build the housing they need to build.
[45:22] Do they need it over time? Probably, so you have time to
[45:25] do the right thing with the green belt and build the housing that needs to
[45:30] be built. But he just went straight to doing the most ham fisted as
[45:35] you say, and evidently corrupt choice that he could possibly have made, like
[45:38] his instinct. Somebody was Andrew con I think said on on X you think
[45:45] it was a bad idea. People liked the drug doing to be the premier,
[45:46] like his instinct was to choose the He opened up his range agon he
[45:53] said, I got some green belts here, would you like some? Like
[45:57] there was no actual process so theyre so that I think is your answer to
[46:01] my question. There is something unique about doug Ford that that that brought this
[46:07] on and makes and I would argue makes him unsuitable. If if you know,
[46:13] we can't have we can't have leaders of government who are selling off the
[46:17] you know, the provincial assets or federal assets to the to the highest bidder.
[46:22] We can't have that, which is certainly what this appears to be on
[46:25] its face. Right, Well, it's not even selling it off, like
[46:29] I don't know. This is part of the things they don't know I don't
[46:31] think it is. They'll they'll they owned that property. They're not paying a
[46:36] fee to take it out the green They're just realizing the benefit. I think
[46:38] some of those purchases happened very in a very short period of time before the
[46:44] transfer of the land from green belt to you know, do what you want
[46:49] with it. But yeah, those folks own the land already. The green
[46:53] belt decision just increase the value of their land, like just unlocked all of
[46:59] that that that latent value that would have been there. Right. But I
[47:04] think what we're you know, to keep coming back of it to Lord Dermo.
[47:07] We're seeing with this green belt thing, and we see it. I
[47:08] think when you look at things like the strong Mara of powers, is this
[47:10] tension between the trying to avoid the rebellions was, Well, let's give people
[47:16] at their own scale, a scale they can manage, you know, like
[47:20] so are our wards and winsor for example only about twenty thousand people, so
[47:23] one townsor can kind of manage that can get together and they can negotiate and
[47:28] figure out what they're going to do with this piece at geography. The tension
[47:30] with the provinces. Yeah, but you guys down there everyone, So you
[47:35] don't understand what we as a province are trying to do. So we can't
[47:37] let you do that stuff you want to do because you're gonna mess up the
[47:40] stuff we want to do. And that the tension between a government where you
[47:45] can actually like really engage with your elected officials and one where you know,
[47:51] you know, how do you engage. So you might be able to call
[47:53] up Andrew Dowey, you might be able to call it police like Retsky,
[47:55] but are they actually able to do anything at all within the within the caucus
[48:00] or within the provincial government. Not really, And then it gets even worse
[48:04] when you get to the federal level. So this tension is, you know,
[48:08] so we had rebellions because the local people were saying, we need to
[48:13] have control of our own lives, and so we're in this. I don't
[48:15] think we're about to have a rebellion down here, Windsor, but people want
[48:20] to have some decision making over their own lives. I don't think we're about
[48:25] to have a rebellion here, and we don't walk up Walker Mills. Beginning
[48:29] to get a little tense, but I think I think Windsor Windsor doesn't Windsor
[48:36] doesn't riot Windsor doesn't do that. That's not we're We're we're the type that
[48:43] we we grumble under our breath when the when the shift supervisor walks by.
[48:47] But I don't think I don't see Windsor being a We're not going to be
[48:52] the first ones into rebellion, that's for sure. Anyway, I think this
[48:55] has been just an absolutely lovely conversation Melinda on a Sunday afternoon. And maybe
[49:01] our colleagues when they listen to this podcast, we'll realize that they can never
[49:07] leave us alone again because we just get way too esoteric. Yeah, do
[49:12] you want to take us out? I guess I will hang on. Let
[49:14] me get it correct form of notes here everyone, in my apologies, I
[49:19] don't have John here to tell me what to do. This is what I
[49:21] like about Melinda. She takes every job seriously. That's why she gets all
[49:24] the intro as the outrow outro, because he doesn't have a separate outro.
[49:29] All right, here's the outro. Well, thanks everybody. It's a Sunday
[49:31] and Sunday, September tenth, twenty twenty three. Our regular panel was Doug
[49:36] Startry and myself me Linda Monroe. You can't support us at patreon dot com
[49:39] slash Rosity Politics. We are going to be very soon in biz X magazine,
[49:45] online everywhere, band only from some places, and we broadcast live on
[49:49] tape thanks to the kind of support of Lena six two five Building Better Community m

Shows are listed from Apple Podcasts' charts and directory, and Podcast Index where it is used. Every show and episode belongs to its publisher and plays from the publisher's own feed; this site hosts none of them.