No Urge To Merge

Lately a lot of people on Twitter have been discussing the idea of merging Kitchener and Waterloo.  It's an idea that stays around even though there's not a lot of support for it.  And indeed, the Tweets seemed to be against it too.

Personally, I think it would be a good idea.  Usually the fear expressed by those against the merging is that Kitchener and Waterloo have different cultures, and we shouldn't mess with that by unifying them.  I certainly agree that the two cities have distinct cultures, but I would posit that it has nothing at all to do with their separate governments, and everything to do with the fact that Waterloo has two universities and an economy built around insurance and technology, compared to Kitchener's no Universities and blue-collar background.

The fact is that all cities have distinct areas, and it's rare that their governance is what causes that.  As an example, let's look down the 401 at London.  If we were to arbitrarily cut the northern third of the city off and call it a separate city - let's call it "Elba" - we'd have to conclude that it has its own distinct culture.  But that would be in spite of it having always had the same government as the rest of the city.  Instead it would be because of the presence of UWO and a bunch of middle class and higher neighbourhoods, and suburbs expanding into small towns.

I've noticed that when the topic of merging comes up, people make the assumption that its all about cost savings.  Really, I doubt the savings would be significant - they'd be mostly in the form of eliminating politicians, high ranking civil servants and buildings and other things that get taxpayers mad but don't really make up a big part of the budget. 

I think the bigger reason for uniting is in decision making.  As an example, take development.  Both cities have committed to not sprawling any further than their current boundaries, but that commitment is going to be tested soon, because Waterloo is almost out of undeveloped land.  The sensible way of dealing with this would be to encourage more development in Kitchener, which still has lots of land.  A united city would probably make that decision, but Waterloo probably won't: once the fees from developers stop flowing in, the anti-sprawl agreement will be quickly forgotten. 

But the merger won't happen any time soon, since the two cities value their cultures, feel superior, and don't want to take on each other's expensive projects (RIM Park and Kitchener's downtown.)  And the region does elect some Conservative MPPs, so Hudak won't be forcing it on us as a cost cutting measure.  Instead I'll dedicate my energies to preventing them from changing the name of Kitchener back to Berlin.