Recently I was looking at an atlas/gazzetteer of North America (maps are casual reading for me). I noticed some of the Canadian provinces have counties or divisions similar to counties. The provinces with counties were Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Quebec (I think), and Ontario. When did this happen, what is the purpose of the counties, and will other provinces have counties? Are they even called counties?
I don’t know about the other Provinces, but NB and PEI do call them counties.
The county divisions predate Confederation (1867) as seats for regional bureaucracy. Originally each country (here in Nova Scotia) had its own municipal gov’t (they still do), its own academy, hospital, courts, shire town, etc. These divisions are becoming less important in the age of amalgamation. We used to have a school board for every county but now we have fewer than a dozen. Gerrymandering has also chopped the province up politically.
Nowadays the county looks after snow removal and road maintenance and municipal development projects much like any other municipal gov’t.
Alberta has counties and municipal districts; I have the AB map hanging on my wall right now. Here’s a list of them:
Yes, there are counties in southern Ontario (e.g. Middlesex, Oxford, Lambton, Essex et al.). They divvied up the province in the same way that counties do in the U.S., serving pretty much the same function. Canada has quite a large spread of land, so there were (and still are) a lot of rural communities and counties, districts and regions is one way of dealing with all the administration issues that may come up in populated areas.
From the Government of Ontario’s webiste
In northern Ontario, where there is a significantly smaller population, the districts the types of services that are administered by southern Ontario counties, are administered according to “districts” or regions – basically a consolidation of municipalities.
I’ve no idea how long the counties have existed. They’ve been around for as long as I have at least. IIRC, the counties were formed by acts of legislature as population made them necessary.
E.g. Renfrew Country was formed on June 8, 1861 by an Act of Legislature of the Province entitled “An Act to provide for the separation of the County of Renfrew from the County of Lanark”.
Interesting. The original counties of Lanark and Renfrew (in Scotland) also share a border. When it comes to local admin though, they’re not called counties anymore, and East Renfrewshire in particular was badly gerrymandered by the Tories in 1996 when they were desparately trying to cling onto power at any level (they failed HAHAHA).
I know that as rural populations increase, amalgamations are happening left, right and center. It’s happening on the municipal level (like Toronto absorbing its neighbours) and within counties as well (I think London merged with a bunch of smaller townships like Lambeth about 15 years ago or so.)
So it’s hard to say if more counties will appear (let’s say, up in northern Ontario where the populations are sparse enough that there aren’t any counties may end up with populations that demand a different system) or if they are all going to gradually disappear.
Bah! Eventually they will all be Toronto suburbs governed by Mayor Mel. (The horror! The horror!) :wally
Is a “regional municipality” (I’ve seen the border signs in Ontario) something different, then?
Since much of northern Canada is so sparsely populated are these areas also divided into counties, or are they just treated as one large county in each province? Do places like the Northwest Territories and the Yukon have individual counties as well?
Does Quebec have counties? I’ve never heard of them in Canada before!
Yes and no. “Regional municipality” seems to be the word of the day. It is taking preference over the term “county” largely because of changing demographics. County lines were drawn up geometrically in an age when most of the populus was agrarian and the population more widespread. As urban centers have tended to dominate in the last century or so, some counties have prospered while others have dwindled in relative proportion to one another.
The end result has been that some people in some counties have found themselves being serviced by government agencies outside of their county. By creating a “regional municipality” the gov’t can more effectively service population centers. School board amalgamations have tended to follow this pattern. The Board I work for is 3 times the size of the province of PEI, encompassing a half dozen or so full and partial counties. The capital city has politically amalgamated with the whole county (making it until recently the largest city- geographically - in the country), however, it has a city and county school board.
If all of this is confusing, welcome to Nova Scotia. In the last decade or so to trim municipal budgets, the old county divisions have tended to mean less while “regional municipalities” have sprung up where effective use of dollars makes sense. Well they are supposed to anyway. The dissolution of the old county board here was supposed to save millions as we became a “regional” board. Just the opposite happened. It cost more to amalgamate than it saved, plus for some things we still use the old county board association.
So in recent years, many civil service employees - including whole police forces - have changed employers several times. Each new gov’t feels the need to undo the work of its predecessor and undertake its own screwball subdivision of the province. Guess thats why we pay them.
So pay no attention to the sign. The signs they are a changin’
“Regional municipalities” (or Regions, for short) are what replaced the counties immediately surrounding Toronto in the early 1970s. They are a fourth level of government, sitting between the towns/villages/cities, and the province.
This was done about twenty years after Metropolitan Toronto was created (with its regional governemnt over the group of cities immediately surrounding Toronto). I have heard that the Regions were created as a counterbalance to the increasingly-powerful Metro Toronto organisation, which otherwise might have expanded to cover all the suburban cities, and then effectively rival the provincial government in power.
Of course, recent provincial governments have changed quite a few things. There has been a wave of amalgamations of municipalities forced by the province: the Regions of Ottawa-Carleton, Hamilton-Wentworth, and Metro Toronto (and their subsidiary city/town/borough governments) were replaced by new unified cities of Ottawa, Hamilton, and Toronto, respectively.
Many other counties and towns have been amalgamated; I was surprised one day to find the Town of Lindsay and its surrounding counties and municipalities erased from the map and replaced by the City of Kawartha Lakes. At least one of the amalgamated municipalities is busily trying to un-amalgamate from this new city.
This is the same government that decided to ‘download’ financial reponsibility for many provincial highways by turning over the responsibility to municipal governments.
Unfortunately it decided to symbolise this by removing the roads’ designation as numbered provincial highways. The roads now bear county or regional numbers. A logical system of route numbering between population centres has been destroyed, making navigation for visitors and the giving of directions significantly more difficult.
I tell you, mapmakers are having so much fun here…
I was raised in the town Niagara-on the Lake, surrounded by the rural Township of Niagara (a sort of rural type municipal administration headed by a “reeve”) in the county of Lincoln in southern Ontario. Following “Regionalization” in the sixties, Niagara-on- the -Lake absorbed the township, the County of Lincoln was no more, and the Regional District of Niagara was formed for a much larger area than just Lincoln County to administer “regional” affairs. It was a truly radical aministrative change.
“Regional Municipality” and “County” is very similar in that they are federations of the local municipalities within their boundaries. The subtle differences are mainly just with respect to the administrative ways they deal with services and how they divvy up the responsibilities. “Counties” tend to be slightly more rural in nature.
Examples:
The Niagara Region is comprised of 5 cities, 5 towns, and 2 rural townships.
Dufferin County is comprised of 3 towns and 5 rural townships
“Local Municipalities” are cities, towns, villages, and rural townships.
If a city gets big enough, they may separate from the region or county in which they are located geographically and become a single-tier municipality wherein they take care of all their own stuff and have just their one level of municipal government.
Example:
London, Ontario geographically resides in Middlesex County, but with a popluation over 300 000 have separated and manage all their own municipal services. Middlesex County still takes care of 7 other townships and a village.
Oh, and just to make things confusing, sometimes “district” refers to a geographic area and not a municipal government.
The definition and function of “counties,” “regions” and “districts” may also vary from province to province.
LaurAnge actually Québec is divided into 17 “Regional Counties” a.k.a. “Régions Administratives.” Like Bas-St Laurent, Saguenay-Lac St Jean, Montréal, Outaouais. There is a map on the Gov. QC website.
Hmm… I’m guess I’m just not used to hearing that word. I’ve obviously heard of the Montérégie before, never knew it was considered a county.
You learn something new every day!
LaurAnge I don’t know about you, but I’d suspect it’s probably because our concept of “county” is embedded in our brains as being like the one in “The Dukes of Hazard”…
So what I can understand from this thread is that the “counties” or whatever they may be called are either losing their authority or changing their administrative ways,and that they have always been fundamentally different from U.S., U.K., and Irish counties.
Originally posted by Eats_Crayons
This seems very simple in theory. A large city used to dominating the surrounding area seperates itself from the next-highest governmental tier so that it no longer has to deal with the small county or what around it. In reality it doesn’t seem to make a difference.