The City of Brampton has voted in favour of keeping Peel Region status quo.
Mayor Patrick Brown and city councillors submitted their unanimous decision to have Brampton, Mississauga and Caledon continue to make up the region to Ontario’s ministry of municipal affairs on Tuesday evening after a special council meeting was held.
“The three options were continuing with the Region of Peel, which is the current structure, or have an amalgamation, have a mega city, or a dissolution of the Region of Peel, where we don’t share regional services, and it was very clear based on the financial analysis, based on residents’ feedback that they want us to continue with the Region of Peel,” Brown said while speaking with CP24 as the meeting concluded.
“They don’t want unnecessary tax increases, just for the sake of changing or altering regional government.”
The meeting was held after Mississauga Mayor Bonnie Crombie called on the province to remove the city of more than 721,000 residents out of Peel Region, allowing it to govern its own affairs as a standalone municipality.
Back in March, the City of Mississauga voted in principal to formally express its desire to be separated from Peel Region.
At the time, Crombie said Mississauga taxpayers send $85 million to Peel Region every year “to pay for growth of Brampton and Caledon” and that money would be better spent going directly towards Mississauga’s priorities.
She said that Mississauga provides 59 per cent of the funding to the Region of Peel, but it only holds 50 per cent of the votes in the region’s council.
While the three cities’ governments have exclusive domain over some local issues, the region handles policing, garbage collection, water and wastewater, roads, and some other services.
Caledon previously voted in the same direction as Brampton with Mayor Allan Thompson saying he believed Crombie’s plan was fiscally irresponsible.
Brown said, on Tuesday evening, that the operation of the current system is tried-and-true.
“We did our homework, we did our due diligence, we did two financial analyses and it showed very clearly that the wisdom they had in 1974, when they created the region, still holds true today,” he said.
Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government launched a review in January into eight regional governments across the province, including Peel, Halton, Durham and York in the Greater Toronto Area. The review is still ongoing and Premier Doug Ford previously indicated that it will be complete by this spring.
It should be noted that former Mayor Hazel McCallion pushed for Mississauga to separate from Peel Region in the early 2000s as well, but was never able to gain support from the province.
