Bill 186 changes seat representation on Peel Council
Good trade-off in new Peel Council

Text of a Guest Column published in the Mississauga News in April 2005.

In April 2005, Ontario’s Minister for Municipal Affairs and Housing, John Gerretson, introduced a bill to enact changes in Peel Region’s governance. If your eyes have not glazed over by this point, let me explain in more detail.

Peel Region is the umbrella body that provides some shared services to the municipalities of Mississauga, Brampton and Caledon. Set up in the 1970s, it allowed what were then isolated, semi-rural communities to provide, and afford, such services as connecting roads, water and sewer, waste collection, policing and other shared services. The structure helped such places as Erindale, Dixie, Meadowvale, Streetsville, Port Credit, Clarkson, Erin Mills and others organize into the city of Mississauga. Our city now has about the same population as the whole province of New Brunswick. A similar process occurred in Brampton. Brampton’s population is about equal to Regina and Saskatoon put together.

The City of Mississauga’s position on Peel Region is that it has done its job, that we have outgrown the need for the Peel umbrella, and that some regional services (education, and policing being among the exceptions) ought to be provided by the individual municipalities. After all, much smaller cities than Mississauga and Brampton are not part of regional governments. I have agreed with this position. I still do.

The Government of Ontario, however, does not want to get into the disassembly of regions, the undoing of amalgamations, or the spawning of new municipal mergers at this time. Fine. All three mayors understand that. However, the representation model on Peel’s regional council was seriously unbalanced. Last year, the Ontario government appointed a facilitator to look into some changes within the Peel regional structure. The facilitator made nine recommendations, and eight of those nine were adopted. Those eight recommendations that were adopted dealt mainly with which services would be delivered by the region, which by the cities and how.

One recommendation was not adopted. The facilitator had suggested that representation on Peel regional council should anticipate future population growth in Brampton that has not yet happened. On this point, the Ontario government disagreed, as the number of elected representatives in Ontario traditionally always follows, but never leads population.
This still left the issue of Mississauga’s serious under-representation on Peel regional council to resolve. Mississauga, with about two-thirds of Peel’s population, had ten votes, while Brampton and Caledon together had eleven. The Minister has proposed that Mississauga will gain two additional seats, for twelve votes; Brampton will gain one seat, to move from six to seven seats, and Caledon will remain unchanged at five seats. Mississauga will thus have exactly half the votes on Peel’s regional council, as every city councilor from Mississauga is also a Peel regional councilor.

Is this a recipe for deadlock? History suggests otherwise. There is no track record of Brampton and Caledon pooling their votes to ‘gang-up’ on Mississauga, and thus no sensible or rational reason to assume that Mississauga regional councilors will act selfishly with half the vote. In my experience, our Mississauga city councilors have shown themselves to be capable managers who exercise fair judgment.

Mississauga’s existing nine (proposed to be eleven) city councilors have worked hard on regional issues, and we have financially strong and well-managed municipal and regional governments to show for it. The balance of votes among the three municipalities will lead the regional councilors to find an acceptable middle ground, and to act in the best interests of the citizens of all three cities. That makes sense. People in Mississauga harbour no ill will toward their friends, family members, neighbours or complete strangers in Brampton or Caledon, nor is the reverse the case either.

As we must have the Region of Peel, then it ought to work efficiently; serve everyone’s best interests; and its representation and decision-making powers ought to be fairly-distributed. That’s what the representation model proposed by Minister Gerretson aims to achieve.

The legislation will allow Mississauga and Brampton to reorganize their ward boundaries in time for the municipal elections in 2006. In Mississauga, that means the establishment of two additional wards in the city. My own city councilor, Pat Saito, now represents about the same number of people in Ward 9 as does the Premier of Prince Edward Island, and Ward 9 will finally be split. Living in Lisgar, that means I and my neighbours will get a new city councilor. Our municipal government will still run lean and efficient after the addition of the two new wards. Life will go on.