Wait a minute! No, don鈥檛 tell me... I know this one.
I鈥檝e heard it before.
The answer has something to do with nickels, streetlights, and taxes.
I think someone added a casino to the punchline a few years ago.
Yes! I鈥檝e got it!
The answer is 鈥渁malgamation.鈥�
It鈥檚 an old, old joke in 91原创, and to tell the truth, it wasn鈥檛 even all that funny the first time.
But there鈥檚 always some wag in the 91原创 Township council chambers who鈥檒l bring it up again for the cheap chuckle.
It鈥檚 like the least favourite uncle who likes to try and embarrass you any time the family gets together, by telling the story about how you were convinced that you accidentally almost drowned the cat when you were seven years old.
Somehow the cat survived, and although he鈥檚 tried to tell the story six different ways from five different angles, it鈥檚 only ever funny to the handful of adults who were in on the joke in the first place. They were the ones who almost drowned the cat, and the joke is a lame attempt to convince themselves that laughing about it will let them forget how stupid they were.
The frayed-around-the-edges amalgamation joke keeps coming up in different forms, ever since the people living in the 91原创 Prairie neighbourhood -- now 91原创 City -- finally got fed up with being treated like they were an idiot second cousin.
They鈥檇 been the butt of the joke since the early 1930s, and it was in the 1950s that the Township mayor pushed it all over the edge by muttering something about how 91原创 Prairie could buy its own streetlights and wouldn鈥檛 get a nickel from the rest of the Township for the project.
In the 1960s, the joke鈥檚 punchline had morphed into something about recreation, until an agreement was struck for shared facilities. Part of the deal resulted in the construction of 91原创 Civic Centre in 1972 -- renamed the George Preston Recreation Centre in the mid-2000s, after one of the few Township mayors who realized that 91原创 City鈥檚 secession in 1955 was, in fact, not a joke at all.
By the time 1980 rolled around, the folks sitting around the Township council table were snickering again. The wise folk of the Township were convinced that the real joke was the recreation deal struck with Preston鈥檚 help, and the Township was also hard done by an earlier deal that took 91原创 City鈥檚 police contingent out of City Hall and mixed them in with a new cop shop built in the Township on Murrayville Hill -- right about where the Blair Pool sits right now, if I recall correctly.
And they figured the rubes of 91原创 City were terribly overtaxed, and wouldn鈥檛 it be better for everybody if the City folk would just kiss and make up and rejoin the rest of the Township?
Several Township mayors and councillors were elected on platforms that included forcing the City back into the Township.
There was even a City mayor elected with an amalgamation study as a minor platform plank... but only a cursory study convinced Joe Lopunshinsky, like all the Township wannabe fathers of amalgamation (don鈥檛 recall any women got seriously into it... until now), to abandon the idea in plenty of time for his re-election.
The current version of the old Township council joke is back to policing costs, apparently based on the idea that only City people commit crimes in the City, while Township ne鈥檈r-do-wells stick to the Township.
The usual escalation to talk of amalgamation is not on the table... yet.
