This seems like an…

This seems like an incredibly misguided idea of a bureaucrat seeking a bonus or a meat headed minister or premier trying to 'cut red tape'. I am an environmental scientist and I have worked within the conservation authority system.

Each one is already in over their head trying to keep up with the constant barrage of of impacts to the watershed in which they exist and are responsible for. The issues within each watershed area incredibly different. If you think that managing the watershed in Durham is in any way similar to something like they Crowe river then you've never been out of the office to understand what it's like on the ground. Merging rural and urban authorities together will just dilute the ability to manage the rural parts of the watershed because they will be drowned out by the urban issues. It happens every time in government.

Water management issues are hyper local...not only this sub watershed but this single lake within this sub watershed. We're talking tens of thousands of lakes and waterbodies that need to be managed in order to ensure flooding is reduced and risks to homes is reduced. If these mergers go ahead this will cost billions in flooding issues in the coming years of climate change...mark my words, this is as easy to predict as things getting more expensive over time. Managing water is hyper local and requires hyper local knowledge. Some bean counter sitting at a desk in the GTA is not going to be able to have the knowledge of somebody who lives full time in a rural watershed about how to manage that system.

The issue of 'red tape' is a myth. Papers have been published about this. The term red tape is just a way for the colonizer mindset to push out the science based movement to things many generations ahead. The colonizer mindset is to exploit exploit exploit and let future generations worry about the consequences. That is what this merger will do. It will push the impacts of flooding and property damage onto the next generation to save a few dollars today and let some buddy of the premier build some dream building they've had on their mind.
This proposal is going to set things back by decades and over a short time will cost the people and government way more in losses due to flooding a reduced quality of water management. Any body who has worked within a single watershed knows the complexity of it and can see how bad of an idea this is and it was quite obviously proposed by somebody or a team of somebody's who have zero experience in this field. This is what happens when you allow government oversight from the capital to overrule the knowledge of the local people. Always a bad idea...but it will go ahead because somebody will get a gold star and a bonus in their contract for executing this. That's the useless momentum of bureaucracy that flows as predictably as a river to the sea.