By Pepper Parr
September 11th, 2023
BURLINGTON, ON
Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing Paul Calandra
The province may not move forward with a review of six regions with both upper- and lower-tier municipal governments. In a statement released earlier today Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing said he will be reviewing the move announced by his predecessor to appoint facilitators to assess regional governments in Durham, Halton, Waterloo, York and Niagara regions and Simcoe County.
Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing said today that he “wants to ensure the province’s approach supports the goal of getting homes built quickly in those fast-growing areas.
The previous minister, Steve Clark, said last month that the facilitators in the six regions would be appointed by today, but the change in plans comes a week after
Clark resigned amid the fallout of two scathing reports on Greenbelt land swaps.
Burlington City Council had an item on a Standing Committee agenda with considerable detail and how the process of determining if administrative efficiencies could be achieved.
City Manager Tim Commisso – might not have to undergo a review of what his working relationship with the Region is going to be.
The overall framework and approach being recommended for developing a regional review strategy and resultant City of Burlington submission to the regional facilitator is based on the consideration of service delivery options or categories.
This may never come to pass which would make the We Love Burlington group happy. They opposed the idea when it was before the public back in 2019
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By not revealing the facilitators report significant issues with Halton Healthcare system that we hoped would be resolved one way or another at that time continue to be unaddressed. This particularly affects our senior population who stats show are the largest group of victims when legislation is set aside. The Minister personally assured us our lack of compliance with legislation audit results would be addressed. He got his assistant to provide us with an email that would get the info to him. He failed to keep his word and Halton’s healthcare system continues to victimize those seeking healthcare services.totally unaware of the risks of the lack of compliance with legislation put in place to protect.
The Region health board has 0 sets of minutes for the community to review last time we checked. Check out the number Hamilton has, hundreds.
Hopefully, now that it is a Legislative Committee Review the Committee will come to Halton and allow public maximum 30 minute delegations in terms of service expectations being met or not met.
Correction: Back in 2019, the plan was not the same as this.
The plan then was to amalgamate the municipalities and give more power to the Regions and the fear for We Love Oakville and WL Burlington was the loss of local voice. We did not want to see a City of Halton. WLB did, however, delegate in favour of finding efficiencies and felt some things should be controlled by the Region rather than individually by multiple municipalities. That review ended up being shelved and the report by the Ford-appointed facilitators was never made public. This time, the plan was the opposite: give more powers to the municipalities and possibly disband regional governments. See Peel and the recent passing of Bill 112 (the “Peel Back Bill”).