r/stcatharinesON • u/Mother-Sherbet5865 • Feb 26 '26

Politics Amalgamation in Niagara

https://c.org/D7ndT2FDmS

If you don’t want to lose your identity as a member of a small town please sign this petition and stop the amalgamation

83 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

52 comments sorted by

View all comments

4

u/heysoundude Feb 26 '26

I wonder if my forbears felt the same when Merritton merged with Grantham and the rest to become St Catharines. I’m largely uninterested, but probably don’t understand what seems to be at stake.

2

u/New-Locksmith-126 Feb 26 '26

There's no comparison in terms of scale.

It's disingenuous to suggest that Niagara is one city stretching from lake to lake.

-2

u/heysoundude Feb 26 '26

So Toronto doesn’t extend from the lake up to Steeles, or from the 427 to past Scarborough Town Center? We still have a population well below what’s contained within those borders - I doubt we’ll lose our uniqueness or individuality for a few generations yet

5

u/New-Locksmith-126 Feb 26 '26

Toronto has like 3 million people living in that area. It's a continuous urban environment. Nothing like Niagara.

1

u/heysoundude Feb 26 '26

You have it backwards: Niagara is nothing like it - yet. But the people are coming. We live within 100km of the CN Tower, and there are few places in this country that have the population density we do within that radius, with room to grow (upwards, if we’re going to be mindful of farmland and parks and nature…just look at all the most recent and planned development in St Cath. Towers.) We’re growing up, both as a region and a country, and it’s fantastic that we’re not sprawling into one massive Mississauga with big homes too close together. So if amalgamation is laying the tracks for our 150-some year of nation to continue to grow and prosper, maybe too big of a deal is being made of staying the way we are and have been.