A Commentary by Doug Draper
I know that almost any talk of amalgamating government services in Niagara, Ontario is repulsive to a number people, including some I have a lot of respect for.
Dennis Parrass, present chair of Niagara Economic Development Corp., tells regional councillors system is "broken" and "dysfunctional." Photo by Doug Draper
Yet I talk to few people who feel that the status quo is working very well in Niagara when it comes to anything from launching a 21st century transit system (similar to the one Waterloo has) for our region, doing away with a two-tier system for dealing with water and wastewater that is costing too many residents too much for the privilege of turning on a tap in their homes, or drawing more business to our region that will create jobs and keep young people here.
For too long now, Niagara has suffered from some of the worst unemployment rates, lowest average income rates, and highest rates of people in desperate need of food banks and affordable housing in the country. And all the while, we’ve had 12 local municipalities in Niagara that seem more interested in competing with one another over which one gets a new police headquarters or hospital complex or a private business that may be located here, than they are in working together as one Niagara. And we have had one regional council after another that has been too timid to do anything about it.
Indeed, few regional councillors have dared to mention the word “amalgamation” in the council chambers, whether it be linked to a discussion of amalgamating essential services like transit or water and wastewater or, God forbid, amalgamating some or all of Niagara’s local municipalities. Those few who have broached the idea of a more unified region with lines like; “At the risk of bringing up the ‘A word’ … .” Regional staff told me a few years back that they had been advised not to use a phrase like “regional transit system” in context with any plan to expand transit services in Niagara, for fear of inflaming some local councils and transit operators who might feel threatened at the though of the regional government entering the transit game. So we talk about “inter-municipal transit” instead.
Our municipal politicians are walking on eggs folks while our region continues to suffer one of the worst jobless rates, highest number of people living below the poverty line and has transit services, a system for delivering water and wastewater services and an economic development strategy that are among the most retrograde in the province.
One part of this disturbing picture that finally came under the kind of intense fire it deserves this March is the regional government’s own Niagara Economic Development Corp. (NEDC) and the patchwork system of five Economic Development Offices (EDOs) in Fort Erie, Niagara Falls, Port Colborne, Welland and St. Catharines that should be working together to promote this region as a place to visit and do business. At a March 10 meeting of regional councillors and others, a few members of NEDC’s board gave them an earful about the failings of the system that we never heard publicly when the NEDC was floundering around under the direction of Patrick Gedge, who left the moribund earlier this year.
“You have (an economic development) system that is broken,” said Dennis Parass, the chair of the NEDC’s board told the meeting. “We are not functioning together,” he added of the regional body trying to work together with ‘Economic Development Offices’ in five local municipalities, including St. Catharines, Niagara Falls, Welland, Port Colborne and Fort Erie. “I am being honest here,” said Parass who runs a manufacturing firm, Handling Specialty, in Grimsby. “This is not functioning.”
“I am here to advise blowing up the system,” said Jack Lightstone, president of Brock University and a member of the NEDC board, who spoke at this same meeting in words that seemed a tad unlikely for someone who has usually set a far less edgy tone in his public pronouncements. Will the regional council, he asked, “have the gumption and the courage to erect something that is region wide?”
Will the regional council have the gumption? That is an open question given the level of parochialism that almost always seems to drip into the well, contaminating it to a point where you can hardly talk about regionalizing anything. There are a some new faces on the council, including St. Catharines regional representative Andy Petrowski, who told me on the phone recently that if Lightstone wants to blow the current system up, he’s “help him find the dynamite.”
But how much more dynamo is there to do it? How many of the Niagara mayors who sit on the regional council are ready to go back and say to the directors of their Economic Development Offices; “You know what. It is time to level what we have and put together one economic development body that will be the advocate for all of Niagara.”
We’ll apparently find out in the few weeks ahead when the 12 local mayors and directly elected regional councillors get together to review a report and possible recommendations coming out of the March 10 meeting.
In the meantime, others in Niagara are not waiting for what they have watched over the past many years of municipal councillors in this region chasing their tail on this one. More than 40 businesses across this region, says Walker Industries vice president Mike Watt, have spent the past year cobbling together their own ‘Greater Niagara Chamber of Commerce’ (a tentative title for this new organization) to pursue the kind of work the NEDC and EDOs should have been doing together – drawing business to our region, whether it goes in Pelham or Welland or Fort Erie or any one of the other municipalities.
Who cares which local municipality a new manufacturing plant or office building goes in, as long as it’s location conforms to the urban boundary plans and smart growth principles and policies set for this region.
“I’ve been frustrated for years by the infighting between various municipal interests,” Watt was recently quoted saying in an article in one of Niagara’s daily papers. “I don’t care if a new plant ends up in Niagara Falls or St. Catharines.”
Amen. Will our municipally elected leaders listen and follow suit?
(Share your views below and visit Niagara At Large at www.niagaraatlarge.com for more news and commentary on matters of interest and concern to residents in our greater Niagara region and beyond.)
Niagara At Large 
Geriatricracy will never work because it is NOT meritocracy. Young people are the new *blocked elite* and until their input is valued, included, and requested instead of ridiculed, excluded, and ignored, the transmission of history -NOT its transformation- will continue thereby arresting the human potential of an entire generation. Ageism is the problem – always has been.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/17-13
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I thank Doug Draper for the courageous artcile where he goes against faddish ideas. The main reasons for smaller municipal units is to make is easier to mount campaigns for council. Some municipalities in Niagara, Thorold and Niagara Falls however, elected their councillors on a single consitutency basis. What I find really wrong about the divided number of municipalities is that it is an arugment for urban sprawl- West Lincoln and Niagara Falls are battling the province over their future urban boundaries, coming up with local municipal market area arugments to justify paving over good agricultural land!
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We keep electing these idiots so I guess that makes us idiots also !!!!!!!!!
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Should a new regional economic development body emerge over the next little while, I pray that its mandate include the strongest focus possible on relocalization and regional socioeconomic sustainability. Anything less than that will only hold the region back from its greatest potential.
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I was one of the few Regional Council candidates in the last election who was not only advocating amalgamation, but embracing it. Sadly, what we got was the same old, same old as voters once again chose the status quo. We will never grow as a region as long as we are divided into all of these different little “fiefdoms”. Say goodbye to your young ones everyone as our population slowly ages into the sunset years of a retirement community…
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Here’s a question for everyone. What are the negative drivers in Niagara that have prevented this Region from having any significant economic growth?
-lack of strategic plan?
-high taxes?
-poor transportation infrastructure ?
-perceived union militancy in labour force?
-high energy costs?
Anyone else…………
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-Yes!
-Somewhat
-Yes!
-Yes!
-No! (Are our energy costs any greater than other Ontario regions? )
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The NEDC board members who spoke at this meeting have conducted a masterful slight-of-hand. Instead of the meeting being about NEDC’s rather lousy reputation, and future directions to correct such perceptions, the focus has now shifted to the municipal EDOs, which no-one other than the chair of the seemingly disfuctional NEDC is complaining about. (Roy Timms, of Timbro Construction, and the Niagara Industrial Association wrote a letter to the Tribune stressing how much cooperation there actually is between the municipal EDOs.) Now, instead of discussing how to improve NEDC, the region is looking at the whole economic development structure in Niagara, when really the only bodies that should be discusing municipal EDOs are their respective municipal councils. Another great example of “regional creep” from the university president who openly advocated for an amalgamated Niagara (recall his suggestion of inserting “Niagara” between the city and province on all letters being sent to addresses in Niagara). Another move to perpetuate the continued broken state of NEDC by the chairman of the board who denies anything is wrong.
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No company in their right mind would locate to an area that has never balanced a budget or kept the taxes on the people low, as to the Economic Agencies, they justify their survival with smooth talk but nothing tangible to show, to me they are like emperor Nero fiddling while the economy is dissolving, and going down in flames. the biggest culprits for screwing our economy are the Chamber of Commerce USA and Canada who lobbyed for NAFTA and sent our jobs to Mexico they suceeded in getting our governments to buy into this crazy factory and job destroying idea. now the tax load is stuck on the backs of senior citizens and young people , repeal NAFTA now!!!!
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Joseph Bakrovich’s questioning
A malaise set, a malaise that caused these plants to closed shop and move or just go out of business. Fifty years or so ago I left the Royal Canadian Navy and settled in Moncton, N.B. a city of 48,000 people with absolutely no industrial base to talk about while at the same time Welland had 48,000 people and and an industrial base that was over overflowing with opportunities. To day Moncton has a population exceeding 200,000 people with new industry moving in almost daily. Welland well Joseph you said it all. WHY?? I remember Algoma Steel in Sault Ste Marie was once in the same predicament as Atlas here in Welland and it was saved by the intervention of the Provincial, Federal Governments, the Unions (John Levick) and the employees. I also understand that Cindy Forester near the end of her term as mayor set up a committee to attempt to rescue Atlas …What happened here??? New mayor with different agenda???
John Deere, Yvette and I were in Council the Night the “Late Councilor Sandy O’Dell” spoke out about allowing developers to build right up to the doors of John Deere(There will be consequences he stated) a few weeks later a delegation from John Deere attended Council attempting to stop the lunacy stating “We will be in court every week because of the normal paint fumes from our operations”. Still this was basically ignore and ……Well One does not try to skate with an elephant and one does not try to dance with an elephant and certainly one does not screw around with an elephant, Do they?? John Deere did not think so.
The others are before my time and there must have been reasons and just maybe not always good……
I am sorry to say Joseph you have every right to be alarmed and perturbed (Actually disgusted) by the exodus of the once viable industrial base from Welland especially after all the hoopla from politicians about free trade and how Welland would flourish and grow considering the location of Welland in relation to the proximity of the U.S.A. and the Golden Horseshoe.
Where was NEDC and “ALL”the others when this was happening?????
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It is unfortunate that people here keep voting for the status quo. I live in an area that is heavily populated by post-secondary students and absolutely none of them that I interacted with in the past five years have stayed in the region. Their reasons are two-fold: (a) lack of decent paying jobs in the fields of study; and (b) poor transit in the region. A student indebted to the eyeballs with a student loan is not going to go further into debt to buy a car so they can just work minimum wage. I think it is time we woke up and brought this region to the 21st Century!!!
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The Province of Ontario in the early 1970s did a study of the whole Province , we were designated here in Niagara as Tourism/ Recreational other areas were designated manufacturing I don’t know if that had anything to do with our demise? I still blame the Chambers of Commerce for lobbying for Free Trade, as that sent Ford Glass , John Deere and the GM Foundry to Mexico, a land of violence and no environmental rules, now we are warned not to ride a bus in Mexico, as we could find ourselves in a mass grave..
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