Seen from the side, however, a cross-section shows Muskoka District sliced into bits and pieces by someone from the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.
This horizontal image reveals truly bizarre jurisdictional butchery of our small but vital section of Ontario: social and community services are severed and tied up with those of Simcoe County; our electoral representation in the national and provincial legislatures is shared with Parry Sound District; administration of justice and legal services, also long-combined with the district to our north, are now married as well to those of the county to our south; Muskoka schools and educational systems were meshed in 1998 with those of Victoria County and Haliburton County to our east; medical and health services in Muskoka are generally now northern extensions of Simcoe County systems, with some features connecting to Haliburton.
For most directly involved, each recasting of Muskoka’s jurisdictional framework seemed a rationale step, at the time. They did not anticipate the cumulative consequences, over decades, of Muskoka forfeiting control over local affairs. Queen’s Park sought optimal service delivery in specific fields, without heeding authentic community identities and hard-won governing integrities.
Yet this very evisceration of Muskoka District caused Muskokans to increasingly note: lack of accountability in municipal affairs; inability to deliver on a number of Muskoka-centred needs; public debt and wasted funds on unwarranted projects, ill-devised contracts, duplicated operations, and twice-paid tasks; the floundering of Muskoka’s interstitial municipal representatives trying to master all these distinct and diverse intergovernmental relationships; policies developed and programs conducted by Muskoka’s ever-growing force of district, town, and township employees secure in their positions, isolated from the people of Muskoka, indifferent to the lived experience of locals, foreign to the District, and controlling of elected representatives.
Municipal councillors became detrimentally reliant on civil servants and consultants. Their long terms in office, extended from originally one year to four, further withered democratic accountability. So did ceasing the once common practice of submitting ballot questions to voters.
Our government has been diffused into surrounding counties. Special purpose bodies for social assistance, social housing, child care, and homelessness are valuable, but not accountable to Muskoka municipal representatives. Provincial entities like the OPP and LCBO operating in Muskoka are directed elsewhere. The District Municipality of Muskoka Act was repealed in 2003, our 1970 municipal structures becoming subsumed under general Municipal statutes. Our distinctiveness was eroded further by the provincial government removing Muskoka’s northern benefits as a “district.”
Facing imminent municipal government revamp, District Council might speak in single voice through a unanimous resolution to stop any further diminishment of Muskoka and reinstate democratic accountability to local affairs, not in nostalgia for times past, but aspiration for good government tomorrow.
When I asked part-time Muskokan Doug Ford what he likes best about Muskoka, he instantly replied, “The people!” Doesn’t such a premier, at this historic juncture, deserve a collective assertion of our Muskoka imperative from the representatives of those people?
