Metro Toronto

By the early 1950s, Toronto's surrounding suburbs, including North York, Etobicoke and Scarborough, were growing rapidly but individually lacked the tax base to fund major infrastructure like arterial roads, water and sewer systems and public transit expansion on their own. The Ontario government responded with a 1953 order creating the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto, a new upper-tier government that took effect in 1954, coordinating regional services across Toronto and its suburbs while leaving each municipality's local government and mayor in place underneath it.

A model, then a merger

Metro Toronto's two-tier system, often called a federation, was studied internationally as a model for managing metropolitan growth without fully erasing local government, and it oversaw major projects including the construction of Toronto's subway system and the Gardiner Expressway over the following decades. The structure lasted until 1998, when the Ontario government under Mike Harris pushed through full amalgamation, dissolving Metro Toronto and its constituent municipalities into the single, unified City of Toronto that exists today, over the objections of most local councils and a municipal referendum that had rejected the merger.

Sources

• The Canadian Encyclopedia — Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto
• Wikipedia — Metropolitan Toronto

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