Note: This article has been edited from a previously published version.

The Big Smoke is a big city, getting bigger all the time. That’s not exactly a revelation, but you can mark another milestone on the growth chart with the news this week that the Census Metropolitan Area of Toronto has surpassed 6 million population (reaching 6,055,724, to be exact) for the first time.

Among other things, I suppose it adds new resonance to the nickname Drake bestowed on his hometown last year when he announced the title of his new album Views From the Six.

We’re not the fastest growing city in Canada, but you can add the populations of all six of the swelling cities ahead of us on that list together — Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatchewan, Regina, Kelowna, and Winnipeg — and still be well short of our current size. Since 1986, Toronto has grown by the equivalent of the entire population of Vancouver.

We are now larger than Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Winnipeg combined. If Toronto was a province, it would be the third largest, after Quebec and the rest of Ontario, larger than the populations of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and New Brunswick put together. The fun comparisons could go on — there are almost the same number of people in Toronto as there are francophones in Quebec! — but the point of each is the same: Toronto’s metropolitan area is a metropolis.

Yet oddly, Toronto has no metropolitan government. There’s a big provincial government that juggles our priorities against those of places a two-day drive away, and there are city governments within the region that compete against each other. But there is no government representing the interests of the metropolitan Toronto area. And we suffer for it.

Statistics Canada, like agencies around the world, counts metropolitan area populations because they make sense together: they represent the urban population that shares one economy, one job market and, more or less, one set of cultural attractions. Often, they share more interests than not.

Toronto’s census area includes the cities from Oakville to Ajax, from the lake up to Newmarket and Caledon. Roughly, it’s the Toronto commuter zone.

Some people’s standard definition of the Greater Toronto Area would include Whitby and Oshawa in the east and Burlington in the west (some people, for good reasons, would go so far as to include Hamilton as part of the same economic region) but Statistics Canada (for equally good reasons) counts those areas as separate metropolitan cities.

But wherever you want to draw the precise boundaries, it’s pretty obvious that the Greater Toronto Area functions as one big collective economy: people live in Markham and work in Mississauga, drive down to King St. on weekends to see a play, head to Scarborough to visit the zoo.

Real estate across greater Toronto is one big market, influenced by our shared highway and transit networks, and our collective job market. We all root for the same sorry-ass hockey team (and since Markham has killed its NHL arena plans, we will continue to do so for the likely sorry-ass future).

At Toronto city hall recently, there’s been a lot of talk about the level of local representation that was lost when the former municipalities were amalgamated. But what’s equally obvious, especially recently, is the lack of a larger regional government to represent obviously regional concerns.

I’ll give you a simple example: A budget mini-crisis in Toronto was recently caused by the end of “pooling funds” for social housing delivered to Toronto from the “905” cities (in the past directly, recently by the province, in future years not at all).

Three-quarters of all social housing units in the GTA are in Toronto, and the province has forced the city to take responsibility for paying for them. Since this is really a service to those in poverty across the region, and one that provides a social safety net that benefits the entire region, it’s absurd that the costs should fall on one area.

This absence of a regional government charged with regional planning and co-ordination appears most obviously pronounced in the transit discussion, where the provincial Metrolinx agency was set up to act as that regional body. It has turned out to be a bit of a mess: beholden to the whims and demands of both their provincial masters and their varied municipal stakeholders, all with their own local democratic mandates that constantly mess with bigger-picture plans.

Highways, transit, housing, immigration settlement, social services, economic development and jobs — these are among the truly regional concerns that would best be made (and paid for) by an administration whose mandate is the health of the region as a whole. Instead, our local municipal governments compete with each other — for provincial and federal dollars, for businesses and jobs, for residents — instead of allowing us to compete together against different cities.

Greater Toronto government is not a new idea. As far back as the 1990s, the GTA Task Force headed by Anne Golden suggested the need for a metropolitan regional government. In a 2012 speech to the Toronto Board of Trade, Golden stressed that the need for such an entity had only grown. “While our city-region has many advantages, they are being undermined by our failure to think and act like a region,” she said.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

The idea of more government administration bodies is never one that sets the heart aflame — understanding city decisions is already complicated and frustrating enough. But there are a lot of reasons to wish Toronto’s metropolis was served by a metropolitan government. A growing number of reasons. More than 6 million of them now.