Should Toronto be six cities again?

The amalgamation of 1998 was opposed in a referendum in all six of the municipalities it merged, and it happened anyway. That fact does most of the work in every argument about it since.

The case that it failed: a councillor in the merged city represents more people than a member of provincial parliament does, snow clearing and garbage standards were levelled to the middle rather than to the best, and nothing about a city that size is local.

The case that it worked: one tax base, one transit plan, one voice at the province, and a downtown that funds services in the parts of the city that cannot fund their own.

There is also a version of this argument that the rest of the region has a stake in. Peel’s dissolution was announced in 2023 and abandoned in 2024; what survives of it is the hand-over of regional roads to Mississauga, Brampton and Caledon on July 1 this year, and of waste collection to Mississauga. York has nine lower-tier municipalities inside it and Durham has eight. And this spring the province gave itself the power to appoint the chairs of those regions rather than let anyone elect them. Nobody has proposed a structure for this region that anybody is happy with.

Sources: CBC, Ontario abandons the dissolution of Peel · Peel Region, the service transfers · AMO, the 2026 regional governance changes