What is the ideal size of a municipal governing body?
No one knows, although it is a question Simcoe County councillors are currently wrestling with.
Actually, they have been wrestling with the issue for at least a decade. Coming to a decision has proven to be the difficult part.
The most recent proposal — to cut the number of Simcoe County councillors in half from the current 32 to 16 — was referred back to the county’s governance committee for “more information and discussion,” always a politician’s favourite move when it comes to controversial issues.
County council is currently made up of the mayors and deputy mayors of all 16 member municipalities, and does not include Barrie and Orillia. The proposal on the floor was to limit county council to mayors only. There would also be a full-time warden, either elected by the public or by the 16 councillors, meaning the new body could be 17 people in all.
At a recent county council meeting, the arguments in favour of a reduction included the general need to cut the size of government and the unwieldy nature of a 32-member governing body. There would also be an annual saving of about $270,000 in politicians’ salaries.
Those against the change tended to follow the “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” school of thought.
Both sides of the argument hold some merit. There is no rule when it comes to the size of municipal councils.
Simcoe County council has 32 representatives for about 350,000 people, once you remove the populations of Barrie and Orillia, which are separated cities.
York Region, the county’s southern neighbour, has 21 council members to represent almost 1.2 million people while the northern neighbour, Muskoka Region, has 23 councillors for less than 70,000 full-time residents.
Toronto has 26 council members for almost three million people.
As I said, there are no rules.
The last change in the structure of the Simcoe County council came as a result of the 1994 amalgamation, which reduced the number of municipalities from 28 to 16 and the number of members of county council from the very unwieldy 38 to the somewhat less unwieldy 32.
One of the driving forces behind the possible change is the feeling, articulated by Collingwood Mayor Yvonne Hamlin, that if local politicians don’t act, Queen’s Park will do it for them. The province has launched two reviews of the county structure over the past six years.
Hamlin pointed out Premier Doug Ford seems to have a dislike of large governments at the municipal level, best illustrated when he reduced the number of wards in Toronto from 47 to 25 while the 2018 election campaign was going on.
Personally, I think 32 people is too large a number for a municipal governing body. I was one of the Barrie representatives on what is now called Simcoe County’s committee of the whole for more than 15 years. (Because the county looks after matters such as social services and ambulance for the separated cities, four Barrie councillors and three Orillia councillors sit on the committee, giving those municipalities some input.)
I have to agree with Springwater Township Deputy Mayor George Cabral, who said he’s heard people call the size of county council “cumbersome.” It’s almost impossible to have any kind of meaningful discussion with that many people in a room. Committee members are forced to practise a form of self-censorship, knowing if everyone spoke for even two minutes, discussions would go on for hours on every issue.
In some ways, that can be a good thing; in other ways, it’s not so great for democracy.
Speaking of democracy, the entire issue of the separated cities’ representation is not addressed in the latest county report, except for one paragraph: “If council considers a change to composition, attendance by these municipal partners may have to be adjusted as well to better reflect representation.”
I’m not sure what those changes would be, but Barrie and Orillia taxpayers are now paying millions of dollars annually with very little say in how it is spent and have had to do so since the Mike Harris government took those services away from the two cities 25 years ago.
In effect, one-third of Simcoe County residents are being taxed without representation. The province, which has the power, has shown no inclination to fix this situation.
I think Simcoe County generally does a good job of delivering services to Barrie. It’s still undemocratic.
But that’s a topic for another day.
