On the last night Gloucester existed as its own municipality, the mood in council chambers was not celebratory.
“It was the saddest council meeting we had,” former Gloucester mayor Claudette Cain recalled in an interview with the Ottawa Lookout. “I cried as I took off my chain of office, and I handed it over to the president of the Gloucester Historical Society.”
Outside those walls, the clock was ticking toward Jan. 1, 2001 — the moment when Gloucester, Nepean, Kanata, Cumberland, Vanier, Rockcliffe Park and the rural townships of Osgoode, Rideau, Goulbourn and West Carleton would be folded into a new, single-tier City of Ottawa.
What had once been a patchwork of municipalities with their own mayors, councils, priorities and identities was about to become one sprawling supercity. For some, it was a practical modernization that was decades overdue. For others, it was a forced political experiment that erased local control in the name of efficiency.
A quarter century later, the arguments have not disappeared. They have simply aged.
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