When Amalgamation Fails
Breaking up is hard. Breaking Free is important. Breaking down Big Box Government is the future of Local Life
The Road Back: Why De-amalgamation Discussions Make Sense
Now is the time to put an end to a disappointing chapter in local government history.
Communities across Nova Scotia have suffered for too long without a clear mechanism to undo the amalgamations that were forced upon them.
We need an amendment to the Municipal Government Act to put those decisions that directly affect communities back into their hands.
A De-Amalgamation amendment will provide a legal pathway to achieve de-amalgamation while mandating robust engagement with the community throughout the entire process.
This will ensure communities understand the consequences and can make an informed decision about their future.
Whether that is to proceed down the path of de-amalgamation, or to get on with the job of providing more and better for their community, this amendment will deliver much-needed clarity and choice for strong independent communities to grow and prosper in the way they should be free to do.
What is it?
Almost 30 years later Amalgamation divides a region it was intended to unite.
Amalgamation was a classic Business School MBA-driven ideology that applied big corporate ideas to government. We now more generally understand Representative Democracy is not a business.
Few remember the difficult and democracy-less details of Amalgamation. As we near the 30th anniversary, you can read about How We Got Amalgamated here.
What’s Wrong?
The justification for these forced amalgamations was never made clear to impacted communities and never voted on. Community advocates and leaders from a diverse range of local government areas have spoken out from the beginning without success.
The benefits of municipal amalgamation have failed to materialize. Costs generally increase after amalgamation, government grows cancerously, largely due a the bigboxification of bureaucracy, and increases in service-efficiency remain elusive.
Worse though, real, natural, well-defined communities have lost their government, independence, voices, and the right to imagine and create their own future.
Amalgamation has not led to more efficient service production or delivery. Municipal mergers reduce competition between municipalities, which weakens incentives for efficiency and responsiveness to local needs, while also reducing the choice for residents to find a community that best matches their ideal taxation and service rates. The Halifax municipal merger resulted in boundaries that encompass nearly half the province and population, creating a kind of competing provincial government in an ungovernable mess where the same problems still exist in transportation and land-use planning. Municipal amalgamations have sometimes forced rural residents to pay for urban services they do not have access to, created unreasonable expectations, and forced an ever-expanding ‘urban and up’ policy to carry the impossible cost of providing urban-style services to rural regions. In short… everyone loses.
What Stopping us?
There are three barriers to de-amalgamation under the Municipal Government Act as it currently stands in Nova Scotia.
The first barrier is that smaller communities whose governance was amalgamated into larger councils have effectively lost their voice if the amalgamated council and larger community don’t support their calls for demerger.
The second barrier is uncertainty regarding costs. The cost of any de-amalgamation should be fully funded by the provincial government that arbitrarily instituted it, but there is no funding currently in place. There would obviously be an immediate administrative cost for a demerger even if the separate councils are more efficient in the long run. Credible estimates are in the order of $10’s of millions. If councils foot this bill, it’s local communities who pay through cuts to local services. These communities have already paid multiple times over through dysfunctional local democracy for the past almost 30 years.
The third current barrier to de-amalgamation is legal. We will never even be able to consider de-amalgamation with out some sort of legal path and process. To enact de-amalgamation, with no statutory mechanism in the legislation is impossible.
A Path To Representative Government
The Municipal Government Act Amendment would remove the greatest barrier to discussing de-amalgamation.
It would allow residents at the local level to drive a plebiscite by providing the Minister a petition of more than 10% of residents from a former village, town, county or rural region area. The question at the plebiscite would be “Should the [former area] be re-constituted as a separate local government area? Yes / No”. If a majority of electors of a former area vote yes, the Minister must enact the de-amalgamation within 12 months. This gives communities a direct voice and a possible route for de-amalgamation where the amalgamated council itself does not support it.
The bill allows a council election to be postponed to allow for sufficient time to conduct a plebiscite and give effect to a de-amalgamation after a successful plebiscite, and provides that an election must be held no later than 12 months after a de-amalgamation to ensure that reconstituted areas are not held in administration for inappropriate lengths of time. It recommends that the direct and immediate costs of a plebiscite and de-amalgamation to be paid for by the provincial government not by residents or regions. Councils will be prohibited from selling assets or amending local environmental plans during the plebiscite process.
Finally, the amendment would provide the necessary statutory mechanism for any other area that seeks to de-amalgamate through a submission a reasonable path to successfully de-amalgamate.
Precedent
Nova Scotia wasn’t the only place caught up in the early 1990’s Amalgamation craze. Ontario, BC, and Quebec, along with places as far off as Australia and New Zealand got caught up in the undemocratic big boxing of their local governments that created unaccountable, unfirable, uncontrollable bureaucracies far out of proportion with the needs and wants of their communities.
Bitter de-amalgamation battles in Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg, and other places show one thing clearly: it is reasonable and better to legislate a clear, methodical path to de-amalgamation than to let the issue fester and frustrate communities. The goal should be simple - happy communities in a prosperous region. The old disproven ideology of past government and big-box bureaucracy should not hold us back.
What to do
To resolve the deficiencies of the current legislation by providing a legal pathway for de-amalgamation proposals to be discussed, analyzed, and implemented is the right way to ‘celebrate’ the upcoming 30th anniversary of Halifax Amalgamation.
Resolution of the above deficiencies will provide clarity and certainty to communities seeking to deamalgamate, enable disparate communities to come together for discussions, and the inclusion of a referendum will embed whole-of-community support as a fundamental element of the de-amalgamation process.
Community consultation on the business case and de-amalgamation proposal, followed by council resolution to support these, will ensure the community and councillors (as the governing body) are aware of, and supportive of, the financial and other implications of a potential de-amalgamation.
In addition, for transparency and public decision-making purposes, the de-amalgamation business case will need to be made available to the community prior to a referendum being held, to ensure the financial and other implications of the de-amalgamation, including the mechanism to finance these, are known by the community at the time of the referendum along with the Community and Governance plan for the area.