Region approves council changes
New arrangement would see Oshawa lose two seats; changes still need to be approved by municipalities, province
By Graeme McNaughton/The Oshawa Express
Oshawa is one step closer to having two fewer seats at regional council.
At a meeting of regional council, a majority of councillors voted in favour of a new way of distributing how many seats each municipality has. While council will remain as a 28-seat entity, Oshawa would lose two seats, bringing it down to six. Those two seats would go to Ajax and Whitby, putting them at four and five seats respectively.
“All we’ve been after since 2006 is a composition that you could stand up and say, ‘Yeah, it’s fair, it’s reasonable, it’s acceptable,’” Don Mitchell, the mayor of Whitby, said during council.
“This compromise has that. I’m happy with that.”
While a majority of council supported the change, it wasn’t totally loved by those in council chambers.
“I’m not going to stand here today and say I’m OK with losing two members, because I’m not,” Neal said towards the end of the debate on the report.
“And I don’t know what’s going to happen back at the ranch back home. I have no idea. And I don’t know what’s going to happen with wards dividing up the city.”
Oshawa mayor John Henry also lamented the loss of Oshawa’s two seats on council, especially given the contributions the city gives to the region.
“We dispatch 70 per cent of the fire services. We supply a big portion of the specialized fire services and needs throughout the region. We also supply an airport, and that our contribution to the region is still large and huge, and we do still have a large industrial base,” he said.
“Politics is great because it’s issue-based, and today there will be a reduction in at least one community.”
Bob Chapman, who sat as Oshawa’s representative on the council composition committee, echoed what he said following the final meeting of the committee, saying that the new layout will be good for council, and the region, as a whole.
“When I was sitting on this committee, as were most of, if not all, of the other members, we were looking at the regional perspective and what’s fair to the region. It would have been easy for me to sit there for eight months and say, ‘Do what you want, I’m not voting for any reduction in Oshawa. Oshawa is going to stay with eight seats as far as I’m concerned,’” he said.
“But the whole committee looked at it as a whole, and what’s good for the Region of Durham.”
With council also approving to send the motion out for provincial approval, the next step is for the proposed council changes to be approved by the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing before going out to individual municipalities for a vote.
Debbi Wilcox, the regional clerk, told councillors the entire process would take up to a year.
Changes coming to Oshawa
It was inevitable that Oshawa was going to lose two seats on regional council – but that didn’t stop Henry from attempting to soften the blow.
Albeit unsuccessfully, Henry put forward two amendments during debate on the new council composition – one to bring council down to 26 seats from its current 28, with the two coming from Oshawa, as well as having the region cover the costs of municipalities redrawing their ward lines.
Speaking with The Oshawa Express after the meeting of council, Henry said his proposals were a way for council to not only downsize, but also to fulfill a desire many residents expressed in the last election.
“It’s a challenge for us. It’s going to be a challenge for Whitby and Ajax, and I don’t think they understand the costs that will be attached to this,” Henry said.
“This was a real opportunity for council to downsize by two. If you look at the referendum questions that were on the ballot in Ajax, Whitby and Pickering, the question was all the same. It talked about a reduction in council. So if they’re going to reduce (Oshawa’s seats) by two, they should have reduced council by two.”
In the 2014 municipal elections, voters in those municipalities overwhelmingly supported a question asking if they would like to see the size of regional council brought down.
“(The committee) missed…the big things, things we could’ve worked on, like a master snow plow plan for everything south of Highway 7, or how we deal with road surfacing, or even to the point of how we manage and what repetitive services among other municipalities so that we can work together, but none of that was talked about,” Henry added.
“This was simply a conversation about reducing the size of council by two from Oshawa and moving them to Whitby and Ajax, which goes against that referendum question.”