By James Bow

This past November, over 62,000 voters in the cities of Kitchener and Waterloo cast ballots on whether to talk about amalgamating their cities into one. Although a narrow majority in both cities voted in favour of talks, the residents of the city of Waterloo were overwhelmingly opposed, settling the issue for the next few years.

However, this was not the first time the two cities have talked amalgamation. In the mid-1990s, the province commissioned John Sweeney to review the political arrangements within the Region of Waterloo. Although amalgamation didn’t occur during that review, the fact that we revisited the issue 10 years later suggests the issue will come up again.

This past November, I was a Kitchener resident who voted against amalgamation talks. I firmly believe that merging Kitchener and Waterloo is a bad idea.

I can understand the desire some have to reduce government, and it is hard to tell where Kitchener ends and Waterloo begins, but people who believe that Waterloo and Kitchener can be unilaterally merged don’t understand the damage such a move could do to the wider community.

Kitchener and Waterloo are part of the Regional Municipality of Waterloo, an urban county government that has served us well since 1974. The region exists because it addresses two linked but contradictory goals: that it be a city government large enough to deal with the issues of the wider region around Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge, while having councils small enough to respond well to local concerns.

This is why the Region of Waterloo exists over top of the City of Kitchener. The region operates as a two-tier municipality, with an upper tier, like the federal government, administering issues common to the region, while the lower-tier cities of Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge, as well as the townships, are the provinces serving the communities upon which they’re based.

The Region of Waterloo is becoming a big city with big issues, but important decisions come in small packages as well. It would be unfair to ask residents of Elmira, concerned about local speed-bumps, to sit through a lengthy regional council meeting crammed with agenda items including parks and recreation matters in Ayr. On the other hand, both Elmira and Ayr do have reasons to be interested in proposals for rural transit routes, or how the regional government attracts international investment.

It may seem as though the boundaries between the lower tier cities are irrelevant — even a nuisance when trying to run public transit across them, but those same boundaries become very relevant when calling upon the regional government to deal with an issue that is important just to a single neighbourhood.

The regional arrangement has changed before. The Sweeney Commission led to the creation of Grand River Transit through the merger of Kitchener and Cambridge’s transit systems. Cities change as they grow, so it is likely that the regional arrangement will change again in the future. However, it’s important to maintain and foster the local identities of the cities of Waterloo, Kitchener and Cambridge, because they have distinct characteristics that might be given short shrift in a merged entity.

Combining Kitchener and Waterloo into a single city upsets that balance that we have at the region. An uber-Kitchener would dominate the agenda, alienating Cambridge and the townships. A merger would disrupt the camaraderie that exists at the regional level. It would, in the end, lead to the full amalgamation of the Region of Waterloo as a single municipal government. And communities such as Ayr and Elmira as well as Kitchener and Waterloo lose out when municipal governments get too big.

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James Bow is a writer and father of two in Kitchener.
You can read more about him at http://bowjamesbow.ca/