It’s odd for some people to learn that our city’s motto, “Diversity our strength,” wasn’t originally intended as a reference to multiculturalism. After Scarborough, North York, Etobicoke, East York, York and Toronto were made into one big municipality in 1998, the slogan was adopted to celebrate the coming together of formerly independent cities.

These days, you often have to adopt a “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” view of strength to embrace that amalgamating spirit. Even then, many people are pretty sure the shotgun marriage of former suburbs and inner city is killing us, or at least weakening us.

“De-amalgamate!” you can hear some people cry. A minority of people, to be sure, but a persistent and vocal one.

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They said it after the elections in 2010, when Rob Ford won the vote in all the old inner suburban municipalities and his leftier, urbanist opponents won old Toronto. They said it after every bike lane and subway debate, and even some budget debates, when city council votes divided mostly along urban-suburban lines. They’re saying it now, after the map of the recent election results still showed high support for Doug Ford in Etobicoke and Scarborough.

“We’ve let this amalgamation experiment run for 16 years. It hasn’t worked. Time to end it,” a friend of mine said over lunch recently.

It’s understandable, because amalgamation — which scrapped the old Metro system of having overlapping regional and local governments — was a mistake. But I’m not sure it’s a mistake that it’s worthwhile to undo.

Partly because, as the urban planner Astrid Idlewood has said, trying to separate the municipalities now would be like unmixing paint. Amalgamation was a logistical nightmare that led to years of chaos, but undoing it would lead only to more of it: trying to divide our fire department back into six separate organizations would be expensive and confusing and mostly pointless, for example, as would trying to run separate social housing agencies, or even just re-establishing six different finance staffs.

And it’s hard to see what exactly would be accomplished beyond the symbolic satisfaction of getting separate mayors, because we’d need to re-establish some sort of larger coordinated government to run things like the TTC and police and maintain the Gardiner — responsibilities once handled by Metro, and ones that it would be nonsensical to break up since the services provided are regional.

Moreover, as more than a decade of research has shown, increasingly, visible-minority populations and poorer people are concentrated in the inner suburbs, and separating the tax bases and services at this point would look like a rich, established, white core abandoning the vulnerable to fend for themselves. Which isn’t a proposition that appeals to me, no matter how much I may disagree with those residents about bike lanes.

But bike lanes are a good example of where we’re being poorly served by the oppositional divided council we have. It’s so big, and the lifestyles and interests of the population it serves are so diverse, that when it votes on local issues, essentially neighbourhood issues, it doesn’t feel much like democracy.

There are ways to address that — and we should. Rather than a formal de-amalgamation, city council can devolve powers to it’s own existing local community councils — sub-committees of city council — which more or less represent the old municipalities.

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What’s more, council can and should set up more local governance groups — perhaps neighbourhood or ward councils. In New York City, there are 59 volunteer “community boards” that debate and advise on local issues. In London, England, there are 33 elected borough and city councils providing local representation.

If Toronto followed such a model, it could give local volunteer councils not just advisory powers, but possibly some budget authority over local parks and other neighbourhood items, as they have done in at least one ward in Chicago and in other parts of the world. Right here in Toronto, we give business improvement area organizations actual powers of self-taxation — a concept we could even investigate extending to resident organizations, too.

The aim of all this would be to keep the big, citywide issues (including income inequality, housing, transit, policing and major roads) handled at the citywide level, where they make sense — as thorny as the debates become — while allowing real local democracy and responsiveness from government, and engagement with it, at the local level.

There’s nothing I’m aware of stopping the city from implementing these kinds of suggestions right away — no constitutional amendments or provincial legislation prevents it from delegating authority to bodies it creates to make government work better. And lord knows, whichever side of this divided city narrative you find yourself on, getting government to work better is something we can agree on.

Ideally, more involvement of all the people in this city in making their own neighbourhoods work better — real local democracy — would make the city stronger, and better. And that can only lead to a less bitterly divided city in the future. Perhaps then, we could actually start living up to our motto.