Ajay Sharma on the Raw Deal of Ontario’s Cities

Jun 25, 2024
We planned on finishing our coverage of the Mississauga Mayor’s By-Election with our episode last week. However, something crossed our path that we couldn’t ignore. A column appeared in the Toronto Star, titled Good luck, Mississauga. With your new mayor, you’re going to need it. The column was written by Ajay Sharma, a university political science lecturer specializing in municipal governance. His column outlined many of the problems involved with the system we have for electing municipal politicians, and that the system itself does not reward change. A link to the column is below. We reached out to Ajay to invite him on to the podcast to let him elaborate on his column and how our current system of municipal government promotes a passing-of-the-buck culture, resulting in many of the real problems we have never been properly addressed. Ajay has been a lecturer at the University of Guelph since 2010, specializing in Municipal governance and Environmental Policy His column is here. It takes money and time to do this podcast. We love doing what we do, but please consider supporting us if you can so we can keep improving, and keep paying the bills. You can become a monthly or yearly patron on our website at 905er.ca. We didn’t like sharing your generosity with that other ‘patron’ website, so we created our patron system. Become a patron, get member benefits and our eternal gratitude, and know that you’re not mainly funding some crummy web company in the US. Win-win! Or, why not buy us a coffee? Nicholas Paul: sound editing. The Quadrafonics: fantastic opening and closing tunes!

Joel MacLeod

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