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Since the early 1990s, municipal amalgamations have taken place within the following major Canadian cities: Sydney and Halifax in Nova Scotia; Toronto, Ottawa, Hamilton, and Sudbury in Ontario; and Montreal, Quebec City, Hull, and Longueuil in Quebec. The temptation is to assume that, like so many other changes in public policy in this period, such amalgamations are simply part of a worldwide trend relating to neo-conservatism, globalization, and/or the apparent victory of capitalism over socialism. Nothing could be further from the truth. With the exception of controversial municipal amalgamations in Melbourne, Australia and in post-apartheid South Africa, it is only in Canada among western developed nations that municipal amalgamations have recently been high on the policy agenda.
The first part of this article explores the historical background to municipal amalgamation. The second looks at what has been happening in the United States. The third briefly describes the recent Canadian amalgamations and the conclusion examines their potential impacts.
The historical background
Municipal amalgamation is not a new or innovative policy. The Pennsylvania legislature amalgamated 28 municipalities in the Philadelphia area in 1854. Most of the claims, counterclaims, successes, and failures associated with the Philadelphia amalgamation are echoed in all the recent debates we have recently experienced in Canada. Whatever the benefits of the amalgamation, it did not prevent Philadelphia's long economic decline in relation to other major American cities, first New York and later Chicago and Los Angeles.
The best known of all North American amalgamations was the one in New York in 1898. Its approval by the narrowest of majorities in a referendum in Brooklyn was the culmination of a decade of political machinations involving the Tammany Hall machine and urban reformers intent on cleaning up corruption and waste. In the end, the reformers got their amalgamation but lost the ultimate prize: they did not gain control of the amalgamated city as they originally expected. Amalgamation in New York led to increased municipal spending, but this was no surprise because its proponents were anxious to build new municipal infrastructure in the far-flung suburbs of Queen's and the Bronx. Whether these suburban areas were actually better off in the long run in the amalgamated New York is an interesting question. In many respects it is...