Looking back on rural amalgamation, 25 years later

It’s been 25 years since Ontario absorbed Osgoode township and other rural areas with the City of Ottawa, but Doug Thompson still stands by his belief that it was a poor decision. 

Thompson was mayor of Osgoode Township at the time, having won the seat in 1997 after serving as a city councillor for the township for 17 years prior to that. He, along with the mayors of the other rural townships, formed what they called the ‘Rural Alliance’ and tried to stop the merger before it happened. They argued the countryside south and west of the old urban core was large enough, distinct enough and self-sufficient enough to stand on its own. The province disagreed.

“We fought hard for two years trying to keep the four rural townships separate from amalgamation, but the province said no,” Thompson recalled in an interview with the Lookout.

On Jan. 1, 2001, Ottawa was remade in one stroke, combining 11 urban and rural municipalities and the former Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton into a single city. 

The result was a municipality of roughly 2,760 square kilometres serving about 800,000 people — a city whose boundaries suddenly stretched far beyond the old urban core and deep into farmland, villages and country roads. Today, about 90 per cent of Ottawa’s land mass is rural, even though only around one in 10 residents live there. 

For rural residents, that mismatch has long fuelled a basic question: what happens when places built around local access and local decision-making are absorbed into a government designed to think citywide?