Toronto, the city not the sprawl, has a population of 3.2 million and pays its top bureaucrat $433,981.
NOTL, the beautiful, is home to 19,000 people and pays its guy $234,000.
Ten years ago, our town had six people on the province’s ‘sunshine list’ of top-paid civil servants. This year, we have 30 employees listed there (the cutoff is $100,000 a year in salary). The total number of NOTL employees is currently 80, which means about 40 per cent are on the list.
So, is this a problem? Is this place over-governed and profligate in its staff wages? Have our mayor-with-super-powers and the other elected folk been too generous doling out property tax dollars?
Doug Ford thinks so. It’s this kind of town hall reality which has helped foster talk about amalgamation – taking all the places in Niagara and mooshing them together into one entity. One mayor. One council. One CAO. One government.
The premier says any union will have to come from the region itself, but at the same time he’s mocking 126 elected politicians in this area (500,000 people) when there are only 124 members of provincial parliament (for the Ontario population of 16.2 million). His comments from last week leave zero doubt the wheels are in motion for a forced marriage, despite all the grief and pushback the idea’s garnering.
Old-timers look around this place and shake their heads. The public school is gone. The high school is no more. The hospital closed. There’s no doctor you can walk or bike to. But we have hotels up the wazoo, more coming and a massive tourist-fetching theatrical complex ripping up the Old Town’s main drag.
Is it a community, still? Or a heritage theme park?
As we know, Queen’s Park has a boffo Destination Niagara strategy, aiming to turn the region into a Las Vegas, but without palm trees or Adele. In addition to more casinos, the Shaw’s Royal George mega-project is a big part of that (Ford is throwing in $35 million). The province’s aim is to double the number of tourists coming to Niagara. That arouses the local Chamber of Commerce but seems certain to put even more pressure on the locals.
Having a single-tier government in Niagara is logical if the region is going to turn into one giant playground for GTA refugees and all those Americans. Currently, there are 12 local governments plus the regional one — led by a recent Ford appointee and cheerleader for amalgamation, Bob Gale.
There are two models on the table. One big single city. Or four smaller ones. Even in that second scenario, poor little erudite NOTL would be submerged into the tinsel swirl of Niagara Falls and the F-150 grit of Fort Erie. Woe would be us.
Our lord mayor has dumped on the idea, saying it would betray the history, heritage and culture that his recent council has been working to upend. It’s a memorable moment of hypocritical outrage. But then, he’d be out of a job otherwise.
For the record, turning us into a ‘burb of the Falls or the pointy part of a big region would likely be the beginning of the end of NOTL. For all the bad decisions that have impacted us, this place is unique — and not just for having more gelato that Italy and horses with jobs.
We were the capital once. The Americans torched us. We trained Great War soldiers. We’ve retained architecture that draws millions to see. The river and lake and trees are stunning. Nowhere else in Canada does this reality exist.
It’s worth fighting for.
But if we lose, then maybe secede? Seems we have enough people already to run a country.
Garth Turner is a NOTL resident, journalist, author, wealth manager and former federal MP and minister. garth@garth.ca
