Nov 18, 2016 | Vote 0 0
Get Scarborough out of Toronto, campaign tells former city's residents
Free Scarborough runs on persistent anti-Megacity views
Free Scarborough
Mike Adler/Metroland
Kieran Byrne (left) signs a petition Wednesday for Robert McDermott, a realtor collecting signatures to 'Free Scarborough' by de-amalgamating it from the rest of Toronto. McDermott says most Scarborough residents support breaking up the Megacity, and people in Toronto's other former municipalities are interested too.
Scarborough wants out of Toronto. Seriously.
The Free Scarborough campaign is out door-knocking for signatures to redraw a municipal boundary along Victoria Park Avenue in 2018.
Leader Robert McDermott isn’t trying to de-amalgamate the whole Megacity Ontario’s Mike Harris government created. He just wants to give Scarborough back its tax money, autonomy, and city hall.
“We’d manage our own affairs,” he told a woman living near Craiglee Nursing Home in Cliffside, a South Scarborough neighbourhood where McDermott signed up several residents near Kingston Road.
He said he may need 400,000, recorded by volunteers in each Scarborough ward, before the province would hold a referendum.
When one man said he didn’t know enough about the issue, McDermott said Scarborough money was being spent downtown, “squandered and wasted.”
He didn’t sign, but Kieron Byrne did. “It would be a change, and change is always good, right?” Byrne said.
A realtor who twice unsuccessfully ran for councillor in Scarborough, McDermott in 2014 also organized a Toronto-wide slate of candidates against the city’s municipal land transfer tax.
He said Scarborough, once run by fiscally responsible politicians, has different values than the former City of Toronto, where money is spent on things suburban voters don’t want.
“It’s them against us,” McDermott added during an interview, unwavering in arguing what the province did to Scarborough by creating the Megacity in 1998 can be undone.
“We’re not a suburb of Toronto. We’re a viable municipality.”
Freeing Scarborough is an uphill battle, and McDermott said if there’s no referendum in 2018, he’ll run for council again, urging people to vote only for candidates who support a breakup.
“You support amalgamation, you won’t get our vote.”
So far McDermott’s cause has a Facebook page and an email address -
thefreescarboroughcampaign@hotmail.com - but soon it will have T-shirts, website and a steering committee, he said.
There’s interest from other former cities in de-amalgamating Toronto. McDermott said he’d work with other campaigns, but they’d have to set up on their own.
Giorgio Mammoliti, a York West councillor with happy memories of independent North York, said amalgamation hasn’t worked for any of the former suburban cities merged with Toronto.
It “ruined our mood” in North York, said Mammoliti, adding people in Scarborough, Etobicoke, East York and York feel the same, seeing resources going to the former Toronto and nothing coming back.
“All we get are scraps to appease us in the suburbs,” Mammoliti said. “They’re turning us into slums.”
Anything’s possible, he added, if there’s a groundswell of people who agree the Megacity should break up.
Toronto-Danforth Councillor Paula Fletcher, who represents an old Toronto ward, moved a motion at city council a few years ago “to explore what de-amalgamation would look like.” She got 16 votes.
She’s surprised Scarborough would want out; its new subway extension, paid with taxes from across the city, is a good deal, she said, but added she understands why anti-amalgamation feeling is still alive.
Toronto’s “legacy” cities, including old Toronto, need more recognition and autonomy, Fletcher said, since people think we don’t understand each other, have different goals, and don’t get enough respect.