Through the “Dirty Thirties” and the austerity of 1940s wartime, there’d been neither need nor opportunity to change municipal structures. But post-war prosperity created new conditions. Roads through the District, and especially 2-lane Highway 11, the Main Street for major towns and many villages, choked with family cars and expanding trucking company fleets. New road construction, by-passes, and upgrades became the order of the day. “Baby boom” children crowding existing classrooms and one-room schools required new school buildings or expansions to existing ones.
Developers keen to facilitate Muskoka’s accelerating vacation economy, encountering hurdles in one municipality, simply moved their game to another more amenable to progress. Building standards varied, as did assessment levels, waste water discharge rules, and allowable densities for development projects. To impose district-wide standards and controls, Queen’s Park would have to change Muskoka’s municipal constitution.
The urgency for this simultaneously became evident along a different 1960s trajectory: the fragmented work by elected representatives in Muskoka’s 25 individually governed townships, villages, and towns. These separate municipally organized bodies not only each faced would-be developers but interacted with Ontario’s many departments, Crown corporations, and agencies. Muskoka’s representative to the provincial legislature arranged meetings for each municipal governing entity to present its smorgasbord of issues to a variety pack of departments (education, highways, lands and forests, health, municipal affairs, and attorney general) as well as Crown agencies like Ontario Hydro and the Liquor Licensing Board of Ontario.
Muskoka’s MPP Robert Boyer endlessly orchestrating these gatherings. In most cases the delegation of councillors, accompanied by their municipal clerk, also expected him to escort them, introduce them, and support their case to the minister or senior civil servants with whom he’d scheduled their long-sought meeting. The permutations and combinations of so many municipalities seeking face-time with their numerous Queen’s Park interlocutories and overlords made clear, on this score as well, why fragmented Muskoka really needed to get its act together.
The concept of a federal structure for Muskoka District made sense. At the end of World War II, Canada was one of only four federal states in the world. We’d followed the Americans, who’d themselves adopted the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations) governance model of a Seneca, Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Tuscarora confederacy of indigenous nations. Australia and Switzerland did the same. Federal systems confused others around the world: “How can you have two governments running the same people on the same territory?” But we Canadians were acclimatized to the pragmatic necessity and costs of dual jurisdictions, overlaps, and redundancy.
Just as Canada operated since Confederation with a national government and subsidiary provinces each with their own jurisdictions, Muskoka as a confederacy would have two orders of government: a single District-wide one, and six regional ones for Georgian Bay, Muskoka Lakes, Gravenhurst, Bracebridge, Huntsville, and Lake of Bays. Each would have separate jurisdictions, but coordinate actions with some elected representatives sitting on both district and their regional councils.
When the District Municipality of Muskoka Act implemented this new constitution for local government in 1970, Muskoka reached its zenith as a geographically-contained, politically accountable, self-governing identity. This highly desirable state then eroded over the half-century since. How such a fate befell Muskokans is the subject of next week’s column.
