The Ontario conservative government has broken another record. It has turned around and cancelled more schemes than thieves trying to figure out how to rob a police station. What Doug Ford and his cronies often announce with great flurries of publicity, they quietly and meekly admit they will not do.
The latest plan for the conservatives to cancel was the plan to separate the three component municipalities of Peel Region. This plan was introduced to so much cheering, we really thought they had a winner in which we could all cheer.
But no such luck. It was less contentious than Highway 413. It did not get the interest of the police like in the billion-dollar boondoggle in the Greenbelt. It was not as silly as the ‘Buck a Beer.” It was not as mean as passing laws saying nurses and teachers could not have the raises they needed. It got so bad with the Greenbelt fiasco, they had to promote Stephen Harper’s apologizer Paul Calandra to municipal affairs so that he could weep over the failure in making more Ontario developers billionaires.
One scheme that they are actually resuscitating is beer in the convenience stores and big box stores. We thought we would have to wait for many more years before any Queen’s Park government got sensible and gave the convenience stores something to keep them alive other than milk and lottery tickets. Mind you the blue stocking types have yet to have at our premier and they can sometimes be resourceful.
But if the Peel County dissolution was successful, the Tories were prepared to look at more regional municipal complexes in the province. The problem was that they rushed the Peel solution at the behest of the late Hazel McCallion and did not do the analysis that was needed. When the provincial panel that was supposed to assist the three new municipalities in the transition realized some of the complications involved, they panicked and advised the province to cancel the plan.
What they should have done was to help by examining ways to solve the problems. One of the alternatives was to recognize the connections between Mississauga and Brampton and if put those two municipalities together as one city. That would have provided far more cost savings in the long run.
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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry
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