25 years after Ottawa's amalgamation, is there any going back?

It’s been 25 years since capital of canada’s merger

Claudette Cain put up relieve picture her last council meeting as mayor of the City of Gloucester.

Her office was about to disappear on Jan. 1, 2001, when the new megacity of Ottawa would absorb her municipality. She took off the chain of office and handed it over for preservation.

"I can still feel myself taking it off of my head and tears rolling down my face," Cain remembered.

Janet Stavinga had to give up her chains, too — and her community’s historic seal. The last mayor of Goulbourn Township, she was elected the area’s first councillor for the new City of Ottawa. She remembers the day in early January when she was sworn in at the National Arts Centre.

The flags of 11 cities and townships, plus the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, hung from the rafters. One by one, they were raised into the darkness above.

"It was a very sombre moment ... As we saw our flags disappear," Stavinga recalled.

Twenty-five years later, the jury is still out on whether it was all worth it. Jim Watson, the last elected mayor of the old City of Ottawa who came back years later to run the new one, said amalgamation delivered a stronger, more dynamic city.

"I think it was a tough decision but the right decision back then, and I still believe that," Watson said. "I think we're better off with one voice."

But amalgamation spurred dogged resistance. From Gloucester to Goulbourn, leaders tried to save their communities and keep municipal government close to the people.

Today, most of them feel vindicated. They still see amalgamation as a mistake.

"I think it's a failure," said Mary Pitt, the last mayor of Nepean.

Before amalgamation, residents of the Ottawa area lived under two levels of local government.

An upper-tier regional government delivered about 80 per cent of services including transit, ambulances and arterial roads, while 11 local municipalities cleared other streets, ran fire departments and managed parks, recreation and libraries.

Each had its own council and city administration. Many, including Gloucester, Kanata, Nepean and Ottawa, even had their own hydro utilities.

In the late 90s, the Mike Harris government began forcing municipalities to merge, saying it would mean millions of dollars in savings from leaner cities with fewer bickering politicians.

Toronto's turn came in 1998, when it was formed out of six municipalities. The next summer, the province announced more amalgamation would follow, including in Ottawa.

Watson supported a single large city including old Ottawa and all the suburbs. Maybe the rural townships would be included, maybe they wouldn't.

But Cain and Pitt balked at that idea. Their municipalities were on a firm fiscal footing. Signs welcoming visitors to Nepean announced proudly: "We’re debt-free!"

They weren’t eager to see their ample reserves disappear to cover the old City of Ottawa’s debts.

"We tried our damnedest to fight it," said Pitt. "We had all this money and we had to give it away."

Opponents supported a three-city plan that would fuse Nepean with Kanata and Gloucester with what’s now Orléans and Cumberland, leaving Ottawa to absorb Vanier and Rockcliffe Park. 

Pitt said the new cities would be small enough that politicians would still be able to keep "their finger on the pulse."

Stavinga pushed to keep the four townships independent, but as part of a "rural alliance" that would provide shared services and partner with the new, larger Ottawa.

She still remembers the "rainy, wet, dark day" in November 1999 when she heard the province’s special adviser had rejected that idea — and the three-city model — choosing instead a single megacity stretching all the way to the outer edge of her township.

The new Ottawa would be larger than Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver combined.

"It was a forced amalgamation," Stavinga said. "We were brought in kicking and screaming."

She took a dreary drive back to the township building, sandwiched between rural estates and a forest.

"I had to stop my car because there was a gaggle of wild turkeys walking across the road and stopped traffic," she recalled. "And I thought to myself, welcome to the City of Ottawa."

The Ottawa Transition Board formed the new City of Ottawa. The province appointed its members in early 2000, and they got to work reorganizing the bureaucracy and hiring its senior staff.

In its final report, the board said amalgamation would eventually save taxpayers $86.5 million per year and allow the city to reduce its workforce by 1,100 employees. 

Critics say that never panned out.

"It's costing them more now than it would have if they left us all alone, because we all knew how to manage our money," Pitt said.

Taxes did go down — at least at first. In 2001, the city estimated the size of the tax cut at 10 per cent for that year. But that's only an average, and it helped some municipalities more than others. Goulbourn had the lowest taxes in the region. Stavinga said it didn't benefit at all.

"We had nowhere to go but up," she said.

Taxes began rising again in 2004, though that came as the province was downloading services onto municipalities. While the workforce held steady at first, it had swelled by hundreds of new positions by 2006.

But the population was also growing, and the ratio of staff to residents fell slightly during that five-year period. There were fewer administrative and support staff, and more front-line workers.

The numbers, in other words, leave a lot of room for debate.

Watson, who returned to lead the new city in 2010, said he found a more efficient operation. He said there was less duplication and fewer squabbles between competing municipalities.

In his view, amalgamation did save money — gradually. But there were also one-time costs, including for severance payments, with the province picking up only part of the bill.

Amalgamation allowed the new city to offload real estate, like Kanata City Hall. It made $72 million selling Ottawa's old city hall on Green Island to the federal government. 

"I think, by and large, citizens benefited," he said.

Did that money buy better services? Watson said amalgamation meant better libraries and recreation in rural areas.

But Stavinga said snow clearance wasn't what it used to be.

"[Goulbourn Township's] snow clearance was fabulous, but our level of service was to such a high degree that it could not be replicated over this entire City of Ottawa, so ours had to go down," she said.

"Goulbourn paid a price."

Pitt said Nepean paid a price, too. It cost tens of millions of dollars. After amalgamation, Nepean residents launched a petition campaign to keep their reserves. They ended up with a fraction, with some of it going to fix boulevards and parks in the area.

There was another price to pay, says Pitt, and the currency was local democracy.

"It's harder to get to your councillor now. It's harder to get to the mayor now. You can't just walk into Mark Sutcliffe's office, I'm sure, and just say, ‘I want to see Mark.’ No," she said.

"They used to walk into my building and say, ‘Is Mary here?’ ... It's not like that anymore. You lose that closeness."

Rideau-Jock Coun. David Brown feels that same loss. He was only 11 when amalgamation happened, but he still feels a strong attachment to Goulbourn Township, the community Stavinga once led, and part of the sprawling ward he now represents.

"I’m a Goulbourn boy," he said. "I live in Richmond, I don’t live in Ottawa."

When the old township hall was torn down in 2023, he pried the plaque off himself to save it from the junkyard. He still keeps it in his office.

He feels the rural voice has been diluted in the larger city.

"I'm doing the job that 10 elected officials used to do. I represent two former townships and a sliver of the old City of Nepean. And now it's just me," he said.

Brown said he’s in "awe" of how easy it is for politicians in nearby rural municipalities like Mississippi Mills or North Grenville to get things done for their communities.

"I operate as one small cog in a very big wheel, whereas they operate as the big cog in a small wheel," he said.

There used to be an active campaign for de-amalgamation. Clive Doucet, the former city councillor for Capital Ward, held a public meeting in 2009 to advocate for the idea. He argued downtown councillors were tired of getting thwarted by a majority including rural councillors who don't share their interests.

In rural Ottawa, the Carleton Landowners' Association held public meetings in the mid-2000s and put up signs across rural Ottawa calling for "Carleton County — Yes!"

But most of those signs are long gone.

Tom Black, who was in a leadership position at the association during the campaign and later took over as president, still insists amalgamation was absolutely the wrong decision.

But he said there’s now nothing left to fight for. The township office is gone, and so is all the machinery of local government.

"I don’t think it could ever go back to what we had," Black said. "I think it would be almost impossible to rebuild it."

Watson said de-amalgamation would be phenomenally expensive, and the province would never allow it.

"The voices for going back to the good old days, they're not really there anymore," he said.

Pitt isn't calling for a separate Nepean. At this point, there's little chance her city would get its money back.

"How do you separate these cities again? 'No, that was mine. No, I should have that part of the city,'" she said. "It would be argument after argument.”

Stavinga said the costs would be enormous, and it’s better to try to improve the democratic processes we have now.

"The page has turned on this one," she said.

Brown said he still hears demands for de-amalgamation in his community.

"It still exists," he said. "I hear it every week, and there have been days that I've said it because I'm frustrated with the city or with the way an issue is going."

He said there could be many benefits, but it wouldn’t be easy.

"There would be 25 years of that spider’s web that we would have to deconstruct," he said.

Brown also said things are getting better. He pointed to a rural summit that got commitments on ditches, drainage and paramedics, as well as the greater role of the rural affairs committee that he now chairs.

"We're starting to see that it's OK to have a different policy for one area of the city and maybe not another," he said. "But I think it's taken us 25 years to get there."

Reporter

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