Removed my reply to this post in the 2016 US Election thread, because I think it belongs here instead,
Loachman said:
It seems to surprise citizens of Toronto that the rest of Canada does not think like them, and does not wish to be ruled by them.
It seems to surprise citizens of the rest of Canada that Toronto does not think like them, and does not wish to be ruled by them.
See, I can do that to.
GTA secede? Where's the door?
Ottawa and the province will never return what they've taken away. The reason they haven't is obvious: There's just no political gain to be made by doing right by Toronto. For a political party trying to get elected, it's far easier and cheaper to sway a few hundred voters in a rural riding than to convince several thousand in the GTA.
The GTA is the favourite whipping boy of all federal and provincial political parties.
Until the City of Toronto Act was passed in 2006, the City had to go to Queen's Park for permission for something as minor as a speed bump. We can't get decent transit because our taxes are being spent on paving roads in the Middle of Nowhere, Ontario.
"In my book Urban Nation (2008), I wrote that Canada's cities were the orphans of Confederation, creatures of the provinces locked in constitutional arrangements that are almost a century and a half out of date. Our large urban regions are now the economic, social, and cultural engines of the country. They compete with other large urban regions around the world to create prosperity and well-being.
In Canada, these regions create the wealth that gets shared with the rest of the country through our redistribution and transfer arrangements. It is in our cities that the capital pools are assembled to take the oil, gas, and minerals out of the ground, where the factories and laboratories are built, and where much of our modern industries of information and design are based.
But our cities are not in control of their own destiny. Like Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire, they are very much reliant on the kindness of strangers. They have few residual powers and limited revenue tools, being overly reliant on property taxes and barred from levying income or sales taxes, the big revenue generators. They are closely controlled by provincial governments and generally ignored by Ottawa. Their role in Confederation is to send money and keep quiet.
And they are under-represented in our federal and provincial parliaments. At the federal level,
the average rural riding has 75,000 residents, the average urban riding 120,000."
That is the reason I do not follow party politics.
Read this on Milnet.ca , "Poor, rural and small town Canada gets paid by urban Canada, simple as that."
The GTA can always dream of the independence enjoyed by Prince Edward Island, but I doubt it will become a reality any time soon.
Unfortunately,
"Political observers say the change is unlikely to happen, given it would require the approval of Parliament and seven of the provinces, with at least 50 per cent of the population."
Toronto Star March 16, 2010
"In the 1970s, Paul Godfrey presented to the Royal Commission on Metropolitan Toronto, as chairman of Metropolitan Toronto, arguments that the region should have the capability to set policy as does a provincial government."
Michael Gravelle, the Minister of Northern Development and Mines, said "I look at it from the perspective of would this be good for Northern Ontario . . . and I don‘t think it would be.”
http://www.liquisearch.com/proposal_for_the_province_of_toronto/history
If they hate Toronto so much, they sure didn't mind driving in from God knows where to apply for jobs on our emergency services, after Queen's Park forced Toronto to lift it's residency requirement. The province said it discriminated against out of town applicants.
I mean applicants with many years of out of town experience who were willing to leave small town Ontario to pursue their "dream" - as they put it - to come work for our department.
Another example was that the province only funded our department for Toronto's residential population. Not its business day and visitor population.
So, 50 per cent of our funding had to come from our municipal tax base.
One-third of Canada s population is located within a 160 km radius of Toronto.
One-half of the population of the United States is within a 1 days drive of Toronto.
Toronto is Canada s #1 tourist destination with 21 million visitors in 1999.
48% of Toronto s population are immigrants.
Toronto is Canada's gateway to the international marketplace with accessibility via highways, air, rail and urban transit.
http://www.cpha.ca/uploads/confs/2003-ctph/phct_bonnie_henry.pdf
As a result, there were always more people coming in from out of town, out of province, out of country, requiring our services than the department was funded for by the province.