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Newly elected Mayor Coderre has done his homework using one of our books. The Merger Delusion, written by Westmount Mayor Peter Trent, was featured in the Montreal Gazette’s article today on the city’s new agglomeration council. David Johnston wrote the following:
The senior political figure in this new mix will be Westmount Mayor Peter Trent, also president of demerged suburbs’ Association of Suburban Municipalities. Trent published a book last year, The Merger Delusion, which chronicles the merger-demerger history and offers a blueprint for more stable regional political organization on the island. Among other things, he is calling for scrapping the agglomeration council and replacing it with three independent management boards run jointly by elected figures and appointed technical experts — one for transit, one for water management and another for public security.
As a gesture of respect toward the agglomeration council, three of the four principal city of Montreal mayoral candidates paid him a courtesy visit during the election campaign (all except for Richard Bergeron of Projet Montréal). Of the three who did visit, two said they had read his 675-page book, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, from cover to cover. And one candidate showed up with the book all marked up with comments and questions (Coderre).
“He had done his homework,” Trent said with a chuckle on Sunday.
Click here for the full article
The following is an excerpt from Peter Trent’s The Merger Delusion.
In my view, over time Montrealers will have to transfer their admittedly tenuous allegiance to a fiction based on geography (the Island) to a larger reality based on demography (the region). How many individual municipalities make up this reality is less important, but one megacity containing half the region’s population is just too big. Eventually the megacity must be broken up or radically decentralized. The need or desire to break things up presents itself in large municipalities and in large corporations. General Motors did it by maintaining mildly competing standalone marques with their own bodies and engines, aimed at different market segments. Since municipalities are in the service business only, the need to deliver local services with flexibility and autonomy is even more pronounced. Even the army (the ultimate “service” industry) finds it more effective to break up its otherwise monolithic structure. The British and Canadian armies are based on the regimental unit, each different, and each fostering unique traditions, loyalty, and a sense of family.
A single meal at a local restaurant will invariably taste better than the identical meal costing the same served at a thousand-person banquet – plus you get choice. Breaking things up increases the quality and variety of the offering – and, municipally, it decreases the cost. If you are satisfied with uniform services, then you might settle for a centralized municipal system, but the costs will be higher. If you want to be citizen driven and adaptable locally, full decentralization of a city is the answer. Most members of the staff in a large bureaucracy are so far removed from the citizens they are supposed to serve that they forget what they are really there for. Municipalities should be looking at things not from the bureaucrat’s perspective but from that of the taxpayers. We have to move to a citizen-as-customer from a citizen-as-consumer mentality.
In private industry, the payment for a service is intimately linked to the delivery and nature of that service. People choose among services based on price versus quality. In local government services, one can only do this, as Charles Tiebout pointed out, by moving to another municipality. With wholesale mergers, this ability is curtailed, and one gets uniform quality at a cost that has nothing to do with the service rendered.
Why not just radically decentralize megacity services? In any municipality, decentralization of local services generally only works if you decentralize both the input and the output: the revenue and the spending. Otherwise the handout from central management will arrive with many conditions and uniform standards attached to it. You also need a third element: a local political culture. It’s like a three-legged stool: you have to decentralize the political, the fiscal, and the administrative elements equally. Political decentralization (the easiest to put in place) matched with centralized taxation and bureaucracy allows the local politicians to shrug their shoulders and say, “I’d like to help you, but my hands are tied. The problem’s at the next level.” Even with political and administrative decentralization, the local politician is still not really accountable: “We have no money for it. They cut our yearly handout. They needed the money elsewhere. I could raise local fees or taxes, but they’ll just cut our handout even more.” Once you fully decentralize the political, the fiscal, and the administrative, you run the risk of powerful boroughs warring in the bosom of a single municipality. While to try to avoid friction in politics is Pollyannaish, if you are going to have it, it should at least be between clearly distinct entities. So you come full circle and might as well create a network of smaller municipalities. In other words, the end state of any true decentralization process is a series of small municipalities.
A municipality and its citizens form a pyramidal structure: the greater the population, the greater the distance between the served and the servers: that is, between the council and the citizens. The distance in between is made up of increasing layers of bureaucrats. Provincial and federal governments are far more diffuse. A premier, for example, does not directly run a hospital or a school. The link is much more tenuous. When a bacterium was found in the ventilation system of a hospital, no one called the premier about it. But if the toilets don’t work in the arena, or if the snow stays around too long, or if there’s a spate of break-ins somewhere, the mayor’s office is the first to hear of it – in a smaller municipality. In a megacity, only the lobbyists get to talk to the mayor, while complaints get lost in the system.
After nearly a century of existence essentially in the same physical form, the old City of Montreal never developed cohesiveness, nor did its citizens develop a sense of belonging. It was always a loose collection of wonderful neighbourhoods, run by an indifferent, remote, and expensive bureaucracy. That the architects of the megacity thought that an even bigger city could somehow make Montrealers start to embrace it always surprised me. Bulking up has not made the Montreal megacity any more cohesive – and certainly not more loved – than its predecessor.
Peter Trent’s The Merger Delusion was a 2012 finalist for the Writers’ Trust of Canada Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. Watch a video for the book here.
To learn more about The Merger Delusion, or to order online, click here.
For media inquiries, contact MQUP publicist Jacqui Davis.
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