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Get our heads out of the sand

The outrage was easy to visualize while reading Lisa Perry’s Amalgamation won’t work, in the March 20 Peninsula News Review.

The outrage was easy to visualize while reading Lisa Perry’s Amalgamation won’t work, in the March 20 Peninsula News Review.

The tone was down right combative at the mere suggestion of entertaining the idea of amalgamating some districts.

To me, amalgamation of the Victoria area doesn’t mean we should just amalgamate in the same way that Toronto or Halifax did or for the same reasons. For the people whose task it is to look at what can be gained or lost, they should be looking at those cities as examples to be learned from.

Although it is interesting to note in the case of Halifax that each of the districts were given five years to reject the amalgamated city and go back to being their own district either singly or wholly.

Wouldn’t you know, it is still amalgamated into one city today.

The analogy I like to think of is aviation. Just because William Henson’s ‘Ariel steam carriage’ of 1843 failed to achieve the desired effect of flight, does that mean we should blindly trod down the road of having little fiefdoms and incomplete communities on the peninsula or the rest of Victoria for that matter?

I would say, emphatically, no.

The editorial of the PNR in that same issue made a good point.

It should be thought of as more of an identity question.

We won’t know if amalgamating Victoria will result in cost savings, perhaps it wont materialize, but what if: what if we could make a better whole community or communities by including the parts of that make it or them such a nice places to live instead of balkanizing and remaining ignorant to the possibilities.

Let’s at least get our heads out of the sand and look at it.

Eric Diller

North Saanich