Jim Algie and James Wallace have filed a report on the growing disappointment over municipal amalgamations across Ontario and even here in South Bruce Peninsula.

The “harsh reality” is that in many cases, the promised efficiencies haven’t materialized, said Pat Vanini, executive director of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario.

“I've not seen one case where it doesn’t result in ratcheting up costs,” she said.

Amalgamations also created some ungainly communities in which squabbles appear to grow louder with each passing year, not to mention the downloading of provincial responsibilities which went with them — something that remains a sore point among many municipal officials.

Closer to home, Vince Artuso, former reeve of the Amabel township that includes Sauble Beach, claims to have support for his plan to secede Sauble from South Bruce Peninsula and align instead with the Lake Huron shoreline community.

South Bruce Peninsula council dismissed Vince's Sauble Seperatist Party as "rhetoric", but is it completely unthinkable to align the tourism-oriented beach with the tourism-oriented shoreline instead of the agriculture/quarry core in SBP? Can we even ponder the undoing of the forced amalgamations legacy of the Harris government?

Two ratepayer groups and even the first mayor of the municipality now including Meaford questions enforcing an eastward alignment instead of the prior westward binding of Meaford to Owen Sound; mayoral candidate Wally Reif calls almagamation a "failed experiment" citing increased costs for decreasing services as the result of abandoning the community-tuned decentralized management for big-bucket government of the new, larger and demographically diverse townships.