The East York-Riverdale Mirror

Initially it had served Toronto, and the suburbs that surrounded it, very well, earning the city an international reputation of being the best-run municipality in the world.

However, by the 1990s, Metro duplicated many of the functions that were being successfully carried out by the six mature municipalities it serviced.

In January of 1995, the provincial Progressive Conservatives set up the Mike Harris Task Force on Bringing Common Sense to Metro.

Rather than being a true task force, its real purpose was to create an image of Toronto politicians in the mind of the public as being irresponsible spenders, with the solution being the Conservative's ideology of tax cuts, smaller government and fewer politicians.

As an alternative point of view, the provincial NDP government prior to Mike Harris, under Bob Rae, had set up a task force chaired by Anne Golden, the head of the Metro Toronto United Way.

Both task forces came to one conclusion and that was the Metro level of government needed to be replaced with something better in order for the GTA to prosper.

Another shared conclusion was that municipal amalgamation was not the solution due to the simple fact that this approach always increased operating costs and added operational complication rather than promoting efficiencies.

The provincial NDP government fell in 1995 and the Conservatives, under Mike Harris, came to power, bringing with them the Common Sense Revolution.

Anne Golden delivered her report to Harris, with the conclusion that a strong Metro government covering the entire GTA was needed in order to ensure a fair and even property tax system for everyone's benefit.

Harris immediately rejected the report on that grounds it encouraged the growth of government, which was counter to the ideology contained in the Common Sense Revolution.

A year later, Harris announced Toronto's forced amalgamation, which is now recognized as having been done deliberately to place the new municipal government into a manufactured fiscal crisis.

This was part of an overall strategy on the part of the provincial Conservatives to place all of Ontario's government-funded institutions into a similar fiscal crisis in order to accelerate privatization and promote the systematic "busting" of unions.

Today's attacks on Mayor David Miller and his supporters on city council are simply a continuation of the one begun by Harris and the supporters of the Common Sense Revolution 12 years ago.

Indeed these criticisms are the seeds for even worse financial problems in Toronto's future than were deliberately created a decade ago when the now discredited Common Sense Revolution was first introduced.

It is clear that if the GTA is to remain globally competitive and sustainable, we are going to have to establish a Metro level of government for the entire region and undertake new reforms aimed at establishing a truly fair tax structure for everyone.