I think he meant culturally?
Nope...i meant literally, in a legal/structural sense.
What an odd claim! Of course they were separate cities.
Until December 31, 1953, everything outside of what was then the City of Toronto was "separate", as in completely independent of the City of Toronto. As of Jan 1, 1954, everything within the current boundaries of Toronto were no longer "separate".
The cities (or in some cases, towns, etc.) were separate entities withing the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto, and before that, the County of York. The same way any city is an separate entity within a County or Region.
There were no "cities"...it was towns, villages and townships (members of York County) prior to "Metro". Upon the formation of Metro, they were no longer independent members of York County...they were semi-autonomous entities of a municipality.
The same way any city is an separate entity within a County or Region.
Nope...being part of a municipality (city), County, Region (and Regional Municipality) are completely different.
Would you say Mississauga (in Regional Municipality of Peel) isn't a separate city?
The Regional Municipality of Peel is not the same as what the municipality of "Metro" was.
The major difference lies in the roles of the tiers.
"Metro" was very unique...the first of its kind in NA (possibly the world). Peel is a different animal. In the early 20th century, the old City of Toronto no longer saw any net benefit in outright "annexation", but the outlying towns & villages wanted it. "Metro" was the province's experiment to solve this problem.
Metro was under continuous change during its entire 44-year history. The 13 entities that made up Metro was reorganized in 1967 so that there were only 6 entities. The only entity called a "city" was the "old" Toronto, as it was always designated a "city" (although under Metro it was not an independent city any longer). The 5 other new entities were designated "boroughs".
4 of the boroughs didn't start calling themselves "cities" until Mel came up with it as a PR stunt. Since the level of the autonomy of the Lower Tier decreased the entire time of Metro, the idea that these newly declared "cities" were somehow more independent by virtue of the fact they were now called
cities is silly.
By 1998, the role of "Metro" had mostly accomplished what it was invented to do...and fairly successfully. Harris was indeed correct that switching to a single tier would save the city money. But we enjoyed the benefits of having that existing lower tier that did a great job on a more "local" level. We knew this costs us more money to run the city that way, but we were happy to spend the added dollars to do it.
But Harris didn't care what we wanted...he was forcing us to accept poorer services and save money. But he didn't stop there...he wanted us to spend the same amount of money as before by downloading the difference in forcing provincial services on the city in a move he called "revenue neutral".
Then the knife got twisted, as circumstances made it no longer revenue neutral. Add this to the long existing practice of sucking taxes from Toronto to prop up the entire province and you can see why Torontonians were unhappy.