Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipality officials and many RM councilors and administrators say the recent report recommending municipal amalgamation goes beyond what they thought it was set up to do.
They say they would never have supported the establishment of the Task Force on Municipal Legislative Renewal if they had known its main focus would be on forcibly amalgamating RMs, villages and towns.
And they suggest its recommendation to reduce municipal government numbers was fixed by the provincial government from the beginning to fit in with a secret government agenda to do away with most rural governments.
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Joe Garcea, the University of Saskatchewan political scientist who headed the task force, said he was given a green light to look at how to improve municipalities. The task force only decided to focus on amalgamation once it became clear that improvements were impossible without widescale amalgamation, he said.
SARM president Sinclair Harrison said in an interview that he suspects the government wants to reduce the number of RMs so that its visits to the annual SARM convention are less intimidating.
“If you were a cabinet minister and you had a choice to walk into a room with 100 people or 2,000 people, which would you pick?”
Harrison said he suspects the provincial government told Garcea that it wanted to have fewer than 125 municipalities, and told him to go out and get the evidence to back up that plan.
SARM director Bob Schultz said at a North Battleford task force meeting that people in rural Saskatchewan feel betrayed by the recommendations of the interim report.
He said SARM and the Saskatchewan Urban Municipalities Association supported the creation and work of the task force because they believed it would investigate giving more power to municipal governments. Instead, the task force suggests doing away with most municipal governments.
At the North Battleford meeting, Town of Cut Knife administrator Dick Emanuel said local governments feel blindsided by the report’s emphasis on forced amalgamation.
“It seems we missed the fine print when the task force was created.”
Municipal government minister Clay Serby did not respond to a request for an interview.
Garcea denied that his task force was told what to conclude or that it went beyond its mandate.
He said the task force decided that if there were fewer than 125 municipalities, “we can start talking much more effectively, much more clearly, about the kind of powers that municipalities should have, the kind of functions they should have, how they should perform, the kind of relationship they should have with the provincial government.”
Garcea said the task force wants to give more power to municipal governments and give them more autonomy from the provincial government, but that is impossible now because most are so small.
He said the task force has asked the provincial government to outline its plans for municipal government reform, because without knowing what the structure will be, the task force can’t make recommendations.
So far the government has not replied.
