The Regional Municipality of Ottawa–Carleton was a regional government area and census division in Ontario, Canada, which existed from 1969 until 2001. It was created in 1969 from the former Carleton County plus Cumberland Township, previously part of Russell County.
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Constituent municipalities
The Regional Municipality originally consisted of the Cities of Ottawa and Eastview, the Villages of Rockliffe, Richmond and Stittsville, and the Townships of Torbolton, Fitzroy, Huntley, March, Goulbourn, Nepean, Osgoode, Marlborough, North Gower, Gloucester and Cumberland. At the same time as the creation of the Region, the City of Eastview was renamed the City of Vanier.
Chronology
Purpose of Regional Government
The Region, known as an "upper-tier" level of municipal government, was created to manage municipal services that crossed municipal boundaries and were more efficiently provided to residents on a regional, as opposed to local, basis. Over time, more and more services were transferred from the "lower-tier" municipalities to the Region and, by the end of the 1990s, 85% of municipal services were delivered by the Region. This included mass transit, policing, arterial roads, sewage, water, social services, garbage collection and Regional planning. Periodical reorganization (e.g. rural townships acquiring city status, as in 1974 and 1978) did not impede the process.
However the constituent municipalities of the RMOC were unified in a single City of Ottawa in 2001 by the Fewer Municipal Politicians Act of Ontario (1999), by the government of Premier Mike Harris, re-elected promising a "Common Sense Revolution." Several other Ontario conurbations were also unified under the Act, listed at. Ottawa thus became in sheer area one of the largest municipalities in Canada, roughly 65 kilometers by 32, much of this farmland, although 90 per cent of the population live in urban concentrations.
On formation in 1969, the RMOC was a Council of members selected by the municipal councils, who elected among themselves a Regional Chairman. In 1991, the Regional chairman was for the first time directly elected by the people of the Region, which municipal mayors earlier resisted, fearing the chairman would effectively become a "super mayor". In 1994, Regional councillors were directly elected to represent Regional wards, rather than being appointed from the lower-tier municipal councils. Many of the new Regional wards crossed municipal boundaries, which in the eyes of many local residents undermined local or historical differences. Generally in Ontario regional government reforms of the 1990s were sometimes mistrusted as preparation for eventual creation of unified "mega-cities", but this was not before 1999 a topic of local political anxiety in Ottawa-Carleton, (see discussion in.)
Regional Chairs
See Regional Chair of Ottawa-Carleton.