Defusion:

“In the long run, Aylmer would face a dead end”

Danielle Pilette, associate professor of Urban Studies at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), can understand that some residents of fused cities, such as Aylmer, feel they have been mistreated with the fusions.

At the time of the amalgamations, 2002, the PQ government had argued that fusions would reduce city-management costs, but this has not happened. Ms. Pilette said that she knew at the time that this prediction would not come true.

“This was a bad way to sell the project. Though it is true that the costs of some services may go down when we regroup, it varies,” added Ms. Pilette.

What is an ideal city size?

“There is an ideal city size with which to offer services; it’s a population between 50,000 and 100,000. Over that, costs are much more. Costs are usually higher in large cities because they require a lot of intensive services (police, fire-fighting). The larger these services, the higher the management-staff ratio, and that costs more in salaries,” explained Ms. Pilette. “The larger the city, the more complex its problems.”

Other services, such as water or sewage treatment, need a lot of capital for large equipment, with large volumes to handle. “On the other hand, more cubic metres of water to treat will result in lower operation costs. The challenge is to acquire the necessary equipment, and this is expensive. For that, a larger population is better,” said Pilette.

For the old, tiny municipalities, they had much to gain by grouping to lower their services’ average costs; but this was not necessarily the case for larger cities.

Urban unions had other advantages. “Grouping creates more wealth. It creates a higher gross domestic product (GDP) -- national and provincial economies depend a lot on large cities’ GDP. It is therefore beneficial (to the national economy) to form large cities that can be competitive on a North American scale. We see that capital accumulation, instruction and training yield added-value in large cities,” said Ms. Pilette.

This is one reason why the majority of Canadian large cities are the result of fusions.  Only one major city has a decentralized model, and that is Vancouver. Its centre-town population is still around 600,000. Ms. Pilette agreed that Vancouver is the only counter model in Canada.    

“If we are a small city, because of our level of service, we might not be considered as a possible location for a globalized company,”  she added.

But for Aylmer, attracting multinational corporations is less a focus, compared to other cities, since the majority of Aylmerites work for the federal government.

“Aylmer can always say ‘Yes, we want to be in a dormitory suburb and not attract economic development’, except, in the long run, Aylmer would suffer from an aging population and the real-estate market would crash,” she noted.

“A residential suburb can be viable and sustainable if the real estate market remains strong but, if it doesn’t, what do we do?”

“Gatineau agglomeration”

It is possible for Aylmer to return to a municipality status. But such a status would greatly complicate things, said Ms. Pilette; if Aylmer did defuse, it must remain linked to the thus-created Gatineau agglomeration. A defused municipality’s real-estate wealth has to be quite high; otherwise, its services cost too much.

“In Montreal, there are many linked municipalities where real-estate wealth is much higher than Montreal’s. But the linked and wealthy municipalities of Montreal are realizing that real-estate values are increasing more rapidly in the central districts. This central aspect is becoming an advantage and what people are looking for,” explained Pilette.

This trend would complicate things for a defused Aylmer, according to Ms. Pilette, since it is impossible to maintain a good financial situation without new constructions of varied types. “In other words, we can’t just run on existing structures,” she adds.

Should Aylmer become a linked municipality via defusion, Ms. Pilette believes residents would see after a few years that there are more constraints in being a district (or sector) because of the limited power within the agglomeration. “The (defused) sector must remain in the agglomeration; you have no choice; the sector has little power and the real estate wealth in the core increases faster than that of Aylmer. So, in the long run, Aylmer would be facing a dead end.” (Transl. CB)