Regional solutions must be our focus, despite dissolution of Peel

Cities across the GTHA are beset by regional problems that require regionwide solutions and a metropolitan mindset.

thestar.com
Gabriel Eidelman
May 24, 2023

Mississauga has finally achieved independence. Legendary former mayor Hazel McCallion is surely smiling up above. But she would also be first to remind us: Mississauga is not an island unto itself.

Mississauga’s prosperity, no different than Brampton, Markham, Vaughan, or Toronto, is inextricably linked to the success of the Greater Toronto region as a whole.

Rising poverty and inequality stretch well beyond Mississauga’s borders. The opioid epidemic is destroying lives from Oakville to Oshawa. Carbon emissions are rising faster in Halton, Peel, York, and Durham than in Toronto proper. Homeless encampments have sprung up in Hamilton, even Newmarket — a visible sign that housing remains unaffordable everywhere.

Cities across the GTHA, in other words, are beset by regional problems that require regionwide solutions. We need to shift our thinking, from a municipal to a metropolitan mindset.

Fortunately, we have a homegrown model to build on.

In April 2020, a month into the COVID-19 pandemic, mayors and chairs from 11 of the GTHA’s 30 municipal governments began meeting, often weekly, to co-ordinate public health measures, communicate with provincial and federal levels of government, plan for economic recovery, and convey confidence to the public that their governments were working closely together, and well.

Over the following two years, this “war cabinet,” as one mayor described it to us in a series of interviews conducted for the University of Toronto’s School of Cities, would go on to meet a total of 74 times, marking the most sustained and productive period of voluntary regional collaboration in Toronto’s history.

The goal was simple: quiet diplomacy grounded by real data.

The region’s mayors and chairs shared information, drafted collective statements, and in most cases, delivered them privately through backchannels to federal and provincial officials, including Premier Doug Ford and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, to secure funding support and recommend legislative and regulatory changes that benefitted the region.

In June 2020, for instance, as the first wave of COVID crested, mayors and chairs helped convince the province to institute a regional reopening framework. Later, they helped secure $2 billion in federal and provincial funding for cities across the country, and a further $500 million in provincial funding for GTHA municipalities, specifically.

Just as important, they worked together to co-ordinate messaging so that residents across the region generally received consistent public health information from their local leaders, ensuring that decisions made by neighbouring municipalities did not undermine one another’s goals.

As the COVID-19 crisis subsided, meetings continued on a biweekly or monthly basis, with discussions turning to other pressing regional issues, such as the housing crisis, policing and community safety, and Afghan and Ukrainian refugee settlement and integration.

A constant throughout these meetings was the leadership of Toronto Mayor John Tory, the group’s chair, original convener and principal spokesperson in the halls of government. Now, though, with Tory out of the picture, the future of the GTHA mayors and chairs group is in limbo.

Although eight of the group’s 11 original members remain in office — two others, former Hamilton Mayor Fred Eisenberger and Vaughan Mayor Mauricio Bevilacqua, have retired — no new regional meetings have taken place since early 2023.

Without a renewed commitment to metropolitan thinking, we risk a return to municipal tribalism.

International experience tells us good things come from regionalism. Collaboration at the metropolitan scale increases productivity and drives innovation. It improves mobility. It helps cities meet their climate goals faster, with greater impact.

If the GTHA mayors and chairs group endures, and evolves, it could set a promising new path for intermunicipal and intergovernmental collaboration in the region, a step that could restore Toronto’s reputation as an exemplar of metropolitan governance.

But only if leaders across the region seize the opportunity.