A poll

[james_davis_nicoll]

[Poll #1916453]

Comments

[seawasp]

Canada should be claimed by the Empire State and form the New Canada Imperium, which will then use our vast numbers of apples, access to fine art, and the resources of Canada to conquer the rest of the Americas.

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

This is very doable in Victoria II by Paradox Plaza. I'm just sayin'.

[akawil]

Can you ask about the 1898 New York amalgamation next? (100 years to the day before Toronto...)

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Interesting coincidence there!

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

As a US citizen, I claim my inalienable right to meddle in the affairs of other nations!

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

And I wonder why some cats are more equal than others . . .

[tortoise.livejournal.com]

Poor cat #3. Nobody likes her.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Oh, the subtlety -- I hadn't noticed that cat #3 was female. This is another one of his m/f polls, isn't it?

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

Dammit now my brain is trying to rewrite "Heart of Darkness" (aka "Apocalypse Now") in terms of an expedition up the Don River to seize a raving Ford...

-- Steve really needs to curb his brain sometimes.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

It'd be either the Humber or Etobicoke Creek, wouldn't it?

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

Probably; the Don stuck in my head because of yesterday's flooding, but the Humber is probably the better route to reach the Heart of Fordness.

-- Steve looks at the above and realises it really, truly is time for him to head to that doctor's appointment as clearly hypoxia has set in.

A wild rob ford appears

[ice-hesitant.livejournal.com]

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

other option: more amalgamations! always more amalgamations!

[ice-hesitant.livejournal.com]

With GO train service to Kitchener-Waterloo, surely it is time for the 416 to annex those areas. We can skip the 905 -- amalgamate the 416 and the 519 but keep the 905 separate.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

On to Megacity Toronto, reaching from Detroit to Quebec City?

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

Then we'll create William Gibson's BAMA and the two can fight it out with mecha.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

Drokk! Now I have a mental image of Julian Fantino riding a Lawmaster...

-- Steve's grip on reality is growing ever more tenuous, apparently.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Honestly, all I know is I like the word amalgamation.

[terheyt.livejournal.com]

I'm fond of megacity, but only when pronounced like audacity.

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

It cost money to amalgamate, it would cost more money to de-amalgamate, no point in spending, I mean wasting, that money.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

Being amalgamated costs money, as an ongoing cost. Mostly for reasons that will stick. (Eg., the tremendous resistance to moving to a single building code means there are something like nine active ones in the GTA, and this is much, much more expensive than just nine times one building code. De-amalgamating would remove a lot of hill-to-die-on issues from the individual codes.)

De-amalgamating would be a one-time thing. Much cheaper in the long run.

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

I read that as saying that being not completely or not properly amalgamated costs money.

And, of course, de-amalgamation would mean 9 active building codes in each of the 9 administrative areas.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

Sure, but being fully amalgamated won't happen. There isn't a mechanism available to a Canadian government under the Charter that would work. What we've got is massive cost inflation due to the overhead of pretending to be amalgamated.

The original amalgamation was pushed through against serious opposition (more than 3:1 against) by Mike Harris to get Barbara Hall out of office as Mayor of Toronto and to make it likely a right-wing suburban mayor would be in charge of the mega-city in perpetuity. Like most things Harris did, it was a bad idea.

[julesjones]

It's a good fifteen years since I saw a very small corner of the fight over European harmonization of standards. And I still winced reading that post.

($BOSS was our industry's rep on several British Standards committees. I occasionally deputised for him. Some of it would have provided fodder for fiction, were it not that fiction suffers from the handicap of having to be believable.)

[timill]

It should be divided into three parts alphabetically. Streets starting A-M would be in one riding; streets starting N-Z in another; streets starting 0-9 in the third

[ice-hesitant.livejournal.com]

De-amalgamation fans tend to forget about the existence of East York and York, which went for Smitherman rather than Ford. Living in East York, I have no interest in being suddenly thrust into a different city (especially while people in the remote Beaches remain in Toronto).

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

Who says we have to de-amalgamate precisely along the old boundaries?

North York, Scarborough, and Etobicoke generally don't want density. If York and East York figure they'd rather be part of Toronto-the-dense-urban-entity, I'd say that was entirely reasonable.

Then again, I'm in favour of replacing our current appointed senate with an elected one where you're elected from either a city or a region, the difference being net flow of tax revenue. (Negative means you're a city and get, say, three senators to a region's two.)

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

Amalgamation should be reversed

they no longer use that in dentistry either..

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

You mean Toronto is a symptom of mercury poisoning? Hmmm . . .

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

San Jose has an entire newspaper devoted to news about the pernicious element.

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

*giving you that wide eyed innocent look* and it would explain sooo much!

[wldrose.livejournal.com]

I want Newfoundland to be its own country once again but I bet we would have a treaty with greater Toronto

[vass]

Not check boxes, cardboard boxes! For the cats.

[dbdatvic.livejournal.com]

I need more information on the first poll portion. Are we talking back into its constituent citizens? Buildings? Bricks and mortar? Atoms?

--Dave, I see someone already noted that to amalgamate further you need more mercury