May 6, 2026
A framework for shared services, regional cooperation, and the governance this region actually deserves
My Learning
When I started writing these articles, my argument was straightforward. Amalgamate Collingwood and The Blue Mountains. The geography makes sense. The economics make sense. The shared infrastructure makes sense.
But what I learned was that the resistance also makes sense.
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Amalgamation means tearing up collective agreements. It means consolidating councils, eliminating positions, shutting down parallel operations built over decades. It means asking elected officials to vote for their own redundancy.
However compelling my logic, the human and institutional cost is real — and it is precisely what makes full amalgamation politically difficult to achieve in a single election cycle.
This paper is about my shift in direction.
But let’s take a moment and understand why resistance exists. Stay with me I can’t help it. I am a professor…. Take a minute and do the survey at the end.
Boundaries
We live within boundaries. Townships. Towns. Hamlets. Counties. The lines on the map feel permanent — natural, even — but they aren’t. Someone drew them. Someone decided that this side of the river was one thing, and that side another. I live in TBM and you live in Collingwood.
Boundaries are a management tool. Nothing more. They reduce complexity by reducing scale. Divide the pie into smaller pieces, and each piece becomes governable. That’s the logic. That’s always been the logic.
But boundaries have a side effect. Once drawn, they develop constituencies. Bureaucracies form inside them. Careers depend on them. Identities attach to them. The line that was drawn to simplify governance becomes, over time, a reason to resist changing it.
The boundary stops being a tool. It becomes a fixture and change becomes difficult.
A System Doesn’t Care About Your Boundary
A system is different. A system is a set of interdependent parts that function as a whole — indifferent to the boundaries drawn around them. And unlike a boundary, a system evolves. It flows across the lines on the map, grows through them, strains against them.
Sounds complex but it is not.
Southern Georgian Bay is one system.
Growth has been relentless. Collingwood, The Blue Mountains, Wasaga Beach, Clearview — the entire corridor has absorbed waves of migration, tourism pressure, and seasonal load that paid no attention to physical boundaries. The watershed doesn’t partition itself by township. Wastewater generated in one jurisdiction moves through infrastructure that serves another. Capacity decisions made — or deferred — in one council chamber create consequences felt region-wide.
Water and wastewater are the clearest proof. The wastewater that spewed out of the mouth of the Collingwood harbour is going to pollute your beach in Craigleith, that is just a brutal fact.
You cannot build a treatment plant for a boundary. You build it for a catchment area, a flow rate, a population curve. And that population curve, across this region, has been running well ahead of the infrastructure built to serve it. Which is why we have a systems problem, not a boundary problem.
Rigid Boundary Management is Expensive
Rigid boundary management is not free. Every structure built inside a boundary — every org chart, every procurement function, every HR department, every IT system — has a price tag. And when two adjacent municipalities run parallel versions of the same structure, that price tag doubles. The numbers are not theoretical. In this region, they are precise.
Using 2026 population projections:
· The Blue Mountains carries 192 full-time equivalent staff for approximately 12,000 residents — 16.0 FTE per 1,000, one staff member for every 62 residents.
· Collingwood runs 270 FTE for approximately 29,000 residents: 9.3 per 1,000.
· Wasaga Beach, comparable population, same county services: 216 FTE for approximately 30,000 residents — 7.2 per 1,000.
TBM’s ratio is not an outlier. It is an indictment. The town pays at P60 — the 60th percentile of the Ontario municipal compensation market, highest of the three. Most expensive pay grid. Most staff per resident. Smallest population served.
And what does it buy? The Craigleith Main Sewage Lift Station, Mill Street Sewage Pumping Station, and Bay Street–Grey Street Linear Works Project was estimated at $34.79 million. It escalated to $53.56 million — an $18.77 million overrun — with no alarm raised at any project milestone, no council notification until the damage was done. TBM is paying for an A team. It has a C team. Council, however, seems to have been asleep at the switch. This wasn’t the first project to run over budget, yet they did not establish any formal project reviews for milestones. If you want to establish blame for this mess, the buck stops with Council. If the admin team is playing C ball, I think Council is probably not even capable of playing in the minors. Shame on them!
Collingwood is not exempt. At 9.3 FTE per 1,000 it runs 29 percent above Wasaga’s ratio — approximately 61 excess positions, roughly $7 million per year in structural overspend.
Benchmark both towns against Wasaga Beach and the combined excesses in the administration structure exceed $19 million annually. Just overhead.
In October 2026, residents of both towns elect new councils. Those councils will inherit bloated org charts built to serve the administrations that run them, not the residents who fund them.
The first act of serious governance is to ask two questions that neither current council has been willing to put:
• what services do residents actually require, and
• how many people does it genuinely take to deliver them?
The answers will not be comfortable. They will be necessary. What is important is that this is not an exercise in cutting for the sake of cutting, it is about using the found money to provide new and better services to the regional communities.
A Regional Solution
The case for regional collaboration is not ideological. It is arithmetic. Two towns, side by side, attempting to solve — ineffectively — the same problems, paying twice, and delivering less.
But regionalization is not a single act. It is a two-step, sequential process.
· The first step is addressing infrastructure. Until the wastewater crisis has a plan for containment and amelioration, has the capability to professionally project manage complex new investments and contain capital overruns, there is no bandwidth for anything else.
· The second step — building regionalized services across transit, recreation, planning, procurement, and more — only becomes possible once the first is in process.
Sequence matters. You cannot build on a foundation that is collapsing.
Step 1: A Municipal Services Corporation
Our MPP, Brian Saunderson, has been working diligently on a solution to the infrastructure problem. It is called a Municipal Services Corporation.
As Parliamentary Assistant to the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, he is positioned inside the Ministry to advance the enabling legislation that will establish a Simcoe County Municipal Services Corporation. That legislation is projected to pass before the House rises this summer.
A Municipal Services Corporation is a jointly-owned utility created under Section 203 of the Ontario Municipal Act. It extracts water and wastewater operations from the municipal organization and reconstitutes them as a standalone entity with its own board, its own debt capacity, and a single mandate: run the infrastructure professionally.
Once the legislation passes, The Blue Mountains can join the MSC by a single council vote.
There are three distinct advantages an MSC delivers that no municipality, acting alone, can replicate.
1. Long-Term Capital Financing
The first advantage is financial — and it is the one that makes everything else possible. To finance a capital project a municipality must issue a debenture, but Ontario law limits those debentures to a maximum term of 15 to 20 years. An MSC, structured as a utility corporation, can issue infrastructure debentures over 40 years.
If each of the four municipalities addresses its own infrastructure independently, the math is straightforward and brutal. Six new wastewater treatment plants would cost $200 million each — $1.2 billion in total regional spend, each financed separately at a maximum 20-year debenture term.
Annual debt service across the region: approximately $90 million. Each municipality carries its own plant at roughly $15 million per year — on top of every other budget pressure it already faces.
The regional alternative: one plant at $500 million, $200 million in connectors, $700 million total. Financed through an MSC at 40 years, annual debt service drops to approximately $40 million for the entire region. That is a $50 million annual saving across the region.
The MSC doesn’t make the infrastructure cheaper. It makes it fundable.
2. Professional Talent, Quality and Focus
A municipality of 12,000 or 29,000 people cannot attract, afford, or retain the calibre of engineering and project management talent that water and wastewater infrastructure demands. What it gets instead is a young engineer learning on the job — practicing, on a $50 million capital project, skills they have never applied before. The overruns are not surprising. They are inevitable.
An MSC changes that equation entirely. A regional utility of scale recruits differently. It attracts the 50-year-old project manager who has built treatment plants, managed contractors, and delivered complex infrastructure projects a dozen times over. It creates the conditions for mentorship — where junior engineers learn from seasoned professionals rather than from their own expensive mistakes. Talent follows the mandate. And the mandate of an MSC is singular: run the infrastructure competently, nothing else.
3. Scalability and Regional Infrastructure
Municipal councils don’t think about infrastructure. They defer it, underfund it, and hope the problem belongs to the next council. The evidence in this region is unambiguous — overruns, bypasses, aging pipes, and treatment plants running at capacity while the population keeps growing. There is no plan.
The first mandate of an MSC is to build a ten-year regional infrastructure plan that maps every asset, assesses every failure point, and sequences the investment required to fix what is broken and build what the region needs. Not a study. Not a report for a shelf. A plan with capital commitments, engineering timelines, and accountability to a board whose only job is to execute it.
This region is not standing still. Between 2016 and 2021, The Blue Mountains was the second fastest-growing municipality in Canada at 33 percent. Collingwood grew 13.8 percent in the same period — nearly triple the national average. Simcoe County projects Collingwood alone at 33,400 residents by 2031. The infrastructure has to be built for where this region is going, not patched for where it has been.
The Georgian Bay Compact
The second act of serious governance is to think outside the box. We don’t need to tear up the boundaries. We need to bridge them. The tool for that is neither amalgamation nor another study. It is a simple, deliberate, politically achievable concept: shared services through what I have called The Georgian Bay Compact.
A compact isn’t a committee. It isn’t a study. It’s an agreement between parties who have decided to act like adults. The name does quiet work — it reframes the conversation from municipal politics to regional statecraft.
The Georgian Bay Compact begins with Collingwood and The Blue Mountains. It doesn’t end there. Wasaga Beach and Clearview can and should join. But for the near term, the focus is on the two adjacent towns.
Phase 1: Proof of Concept
The first phase of the Compact focuses on two shared service domains: transit and a multi-use recreation facility. Both are visible. Both are resident-facing. Both are things this community desperately wants and needs — and both build the trust that deeper collaboration requires.
Transit
Southern Georgian Bay has a workforce problem. And it starts with eleven kilometres of highway.
Collingwood has a transit system — Colltrans — three routes, extended hours, a terminal on Second Street. It is better than nothing. It is not a system designed around the actual movement patterns of a growing community. The Blue Mountains has no transit system of its own — but it does have the BLINK, a dedicated route along Highway 26 into the Village at Blue Mountain, operated by Colltrans under a cross-municipal agreement. The BLINK is proof of concept. It is also not enough.
Blue Mountain is one of the largest employers in the region. The people who staff it — restaurants, hotels, lift operations — are working service industry jobs. Many don’t own cars. They are precisely the workers this region needs to retain, and precisely the people for whom the difference between staying and leaving is whether they can get to work.
Transit is infrastructure in the literal sense. It is the thing that makes the other things work — the recreation centre, the affordable housing, the workforce retention. None of it functions as intended if the people who need it most cannot move through it.
A regional transit authority, jointly governed, with routes designed around actual travel demand rather than municipal boundaries, is not a complicated idea. It has simply never had the political will behind it.
Multi-Use Recreation Facility
Wasaga Beach has the RecPlex and a twin-pad arena that opened in 2024. Owen Sound built the Julie McArthur Regional Recreation Centre in 2012 — twin NHL ice pads, a 25-metre pool, a gymnasium, and an indoor walking track — for $39 million. Fourteen years ago. These are our neighbours.
Collingwood and The Blue Mountains have been deferring a shared recreation centre for years. The deferral ends here. Build it between the two communities, on Mountain Road.
This is not just a building. It is swimming lessons for children who have nowhere to learn. It is hockey, basketball, gymnastics — the activity that gives young families a reason to stay. It is aquafit and walking tracks for a senior population growing faster than almost anywhere else in Ontario.
The funding streams exist. The Canada Community-Building Fund. Provincial recreational infrastructure grants. Federal health infrastructure programs. This community has simply never had the leadership willing to pursue them.
The numbers are straightforward. A full-service regional facility costs $80 to $110 million. Call it $90 million. At a 30-year debenture, annual debt service runs approximately $5.5 million. Net of membership and program revenue, the total annual commitment is roughly $7 million — split proportionally between two towns. External funding reduces that further.
Phase 2: Where the Real Savings Are
Phase 1 builds the foundation. Phase 2 is where the economics of regional collaboration become transformative. Fire and emergency services, planning and development, IT and cybersecurity, human resources, procurement, and communications and economic development — these are the domains that eliminate structural duplication, reduce overhead, and free the financial capacity to invest in what this region actually needs.
Phase 2 does not launch on a schedule. It launches on results. When the transit authority is operating, when the recreation facility is under construction, when two councils have demonstrated they can govern together — that is the moment. Not before.
Where Do We Go From Here
The timeline is clear. MPP Brian Saunderson’s legislation establishes a Municipal Services Corporation for Simcoe County. It is projected to receive final reading before the House rises this summer. When it does, the framework is in place.
The new councils elected in October 2026 will inherit an opportunity no previous council has had. With the infrastructure crisis uploaded to the MSC, the agenda clears. For the first time in a generation, two councils can turn their attention outward — to building a regional vision, creating shared services, delivering the recreation and transit infrastructure this community has been promised and denied, reshaping bloated bureaucracies into efficient ones, and investing the savings in what residents actually need.
That is what good governance looks like. This region has never had it. October 2026 is the moment to demand it.
The South Georgian Bay Project
Ron Shulman
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