Thank you for this…

Thank you for this opportunity to comment on the proposed changes to the system of Conservation Authorities in Ontario. My comments fall into two main areas and I will try to be brief.

Briefly, I do not see any compelling evidence that justifies such a dramatic change in the system of Conservation Authorities nor do I see any evidence that the change will improve the outcomes of the existing arrangement.

First, some years ago, prior to the pandemic, I attended a Great Rivers Forum in Wuhan China. This brought together a couple of hundred specialists from around the world to discuss processes to sustain the health and wholeness of rivers. To my great surprise, as someone coming from Ontario, I was treated with great respect, even awe, by the environmental scientists because of our system of conservation authorities. To them, a system which focused holistically on a watershed was generations ahead of any other jurisdiction. The key was the watershed: not a river, not a region, not a climate zone. These scientists knew far more about why the CAs were so effective than I did.

My point is that moving away from a focus on the watershed to a region (even if based on a collection of watersheds) is a transition away from the core value and strategic advantage of CAs.

Second, I spent a great majority of my career as a heritage professional working for a municipality. I experience, first hand, a municipal amalgamation process. The belief was, then, that streamlining and eliminating duplication would have positive impacts on efficiency and costs. At the time, I did not understand how combining a number of large bureaucracies into one larger bureaucracy would increase efficiency. I still don't.

The reality is that any improvement is public service that has occurred in my city has nothing to do with standardizing procedures and reducing duplication. If anything, management, oversight, evaluation and planning became more difficult.

Regardless of how it looks on pater, in the real world, combining bureaucracies makes the new bureaucracy more fragile and prone to error, not less. Public service becomes more remote and impersonal, not less.

The error is in thinking that you can standardize. In fact, different operations (i.e. cities, town or CAs) do things differently for perfectly valid reasons. An amalgamated municipality (or CA) has to find ways to adapt to the messy reality on the ground or accept that they will be less effective.

Yes, there are economies of scale but when bringing together existing large organizations, the actual improvements are incremental. And are offset by increased complexity in other areas. In my experience, anyway.

And, two plus decades after municipal amalgamation, the local resentment (some quite reasonable) persists. It was a reality that I had to work with almost everyday and it most definitely was an impediment to my work.

To repeat, I do not see any compelling evidence that justifies such a dramatic change in the system of Conservation Authorities nor do I see any evidence that the change will improve the outcomes of the existing arrangement.

Once again, thank you for the opportunity.