Sunday Special: A history of the humble

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Goldsborough, a wetland ecologist in his regular job, is especially interested in heritage photos. He has collected more than 1,000 of them, dating from the 1870s to the early 1900s.

About four years ago, when Goldsborough's father brought him a photo showing a group of serious-looking whiskered men in overcoats - taken in Brandon in 1905 - he had to find out who they were.

"I was immediately intrigued," the part-time historian remembers.

The picture commemorated the founding meeting of the Union of Manitoba Municipalities.

Goldsborough's great-grandfather, John Fletcher Goldsborough, a farmer who represented the RM of Macdonald, was one of the 50 delegates.

The discovery sent the 49-year-old scientist on a research odyssey. In 2006, he wrote a short article about the 1905 meeting for Manitoba History magazine. He is one of the magazine's editors, as well as being past president of the Manitoba Historical Society, webmaster for the MHS's extensive website, and a member of the committee that manages Dalnavert Museum.

He dug up more about the early days of the UMM than he could possibly pack into one article. It was not unlike the time his wife dug up a 1912 licence plate in their backyard, and he ended up spending thousands of hours attempting to document every licence plate issued in Manitoba that year.

"I'm an obsessive personality, I guess," says the Charleswood father of two, who devotes at least 25 hours a week to historical pursuits.

When the Association of Manitoba Municipalities, today's version of the UMM, decided it wanted to publish a book, Goldsborough eagerly stepped forward to write it -- as an unpaid volunteer. The result is the recently published With One Voice: A History of Municipal Governance in Manitoba.

The 150-page hardcover, which sells for $24.95, displays the 1905 photo on its cover. It took Goldsborough a year to do the research, poring over more than 1,000 pages of resolutions passed by the UMM and its successors in the course of a century.

The book chronicles many hard-fought battles waged by councillors, reeves and mayors, who traditionally get so little respect that Goldsborough dubs them "the Rodney Dangerfield of politicians."

"A hundred years ago," he says, "most homes in Manitoba didn't have running water, they didn't have sewers, they didn't have electricity, and those services have all been created by municipal politicians."

But because they're so visible in their communities, local politicians seem to get none of the glamour and all of the hassle. "You're standing in the grocery aisle and somebody taps you on the shoulder: 'I've got a bone to pick with you. My road needs plowing. There are dogs running loose.'

"They get it from all sides, and it's not like they're getting well-paid to do this."

As the author points out, all services were originally local, including health care, education, infrastructure and old-age pensions. Manitoba's early local officials had to figure out how to tax their communities for such basics as roads, doctors and drinking water.

Local officials have always believed their level of government is underfunded. The book reproduces a 1947 editorial cartoon from the Winnipeg Tribune. It depicts the federal government and the provinces as huge pigs at the revenue trough, crowding out the poor little municipality piglet. The caption read: "But this little pig had none!"

"It just goes to show how little things have changed," Goldsborough says. "It's 50 years later, and almost without exception (today's local politicians) look at that cartoon and go, 'That's exactly what we face.' They love it."

The issue that galvanized Manitoba municipalities to band together for political clout in 1905, says Goldsborough, was the aggressiveness of telephone companies.

The federal government had given the Bell Telephone Company a virtual monopoly that allowed it to install equipment wherever it wanted without compensating municipalities. Other phone companies were seeking similar sweeping powers.

"They would literally run poles down the middle of sidewalks or roads," Goldsborough says.

So the municipalities fought back. The first resolutions passed by the UMM stated that municipalities should have full control of their roads, and that provincial or federal bills affecting railways, telegraph and utility lines should be vetted by the affected municipalities.

In the decades that followed, the municipalities found that some issues polarized rural and urban interests. An example was the war waged over margarine. Farmers who wanted to protect the dairy industry insisted that margarine could not look like butter, but had to be sold in a clear or white form, with a colour packet to tint it yellow.

Urban Manitobans didn't care about dairy revenues and wanted manufacturers to be free to produce margarine that masqueraded as butter.

With his zeal for research, Goldsborough says he went a little overboard on a subject dear to his heart as an ecologist: Manitoba's history of putting bounties on gophers, wolves, foxes and coyotes and trying to eradicate other "pests" such as crows, cormorants, magpies and muskrats, all in the name of agriculture and fishing.

"Staggering numbers of animals were killed. I don't think there was necessarily a basis for it," he says.

He found so much material about "Manitoba's war on wildlife" that he's got an article about it in the latest issue of Manitoba History.

The UMM may have gotten a little big for its britches with some of its resolutions. In 1975, delegates voted to apply pressure on the federal government to reinstate capital punishment. And in 1979, they voted to pressure the feds to reverse Canada's conversion to the metric system.

The stark reality now facing the association is the emptying of rural Manitoba. Young people are moving to urban centres, leaving ghost towns behind. At the current rate of population shift, Goldsborough writes, by the year 2050, 43 of Manitoba's 198 municipalities will have a population of zero.

The only places showing significant population growth are Winnipeg and its bedroom communities, Brandon and area, the southern shores of Lake Winnipeg, and a few municipalities in the Morden-to-Altona axis along the U.S. border.

Manitoba will have to "find ways of maintaining basic municipal infrastructure and services in depopulated areas as efficiently and humanely as possible," he writes.

Ferndale, the community that was closest to Goldsborough's great-grandfather's farm in 1905, is emblematic of the shift.

"It was midway between Sanford and Starbuck," he says. "There's nothing there now -- just an old, abandoned school and an old. abandoned church."

With One Voice: A History of Municipal Governance in Manitoba is available at McNally-Robinson Booksellers. For a list of rural bookstores carrying it, see www.mhs.mb.ca/news/withonevoice.shtml

alison.mayes@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition January 18, 2009 A8