This past Monday I went down to city hall to witness the beginning of the debate at city council over big cuts to city services.

As you may know, there was also a large protest against the cuts taking place in the plaza in front of city hall.

Mayor Rob Ford had framed the situation in unncessarily simplistic terms of either accept the cuts or see huge property tax increases.

This development has to be contrasted with the situation back in 1997, before our forced amalgamation, when we were about to see our property taxes decrease here in East York.

Let's consider the fact again that not only did we have the lowest taxes in all of Metro Toronto, we also had our own dedicated civil service, a fleet of brand new garbage trucks, our own municipal vehicles, eight part-time councillors and our own mayor.

On top of all that we also had the highest rate of satisfaction with the delivery of municipal services in all of Metro Toronto.

Amalgamation was supposed to be better than all that, its supporters claimed, and we would see even greater savings, lower taxes and more efficiency in service delivery.

Well it's 14 years later, and what I witnessed down at city hall was a city government that was tearing itself apart along ideological lines and the city's citizens being very unhappy with far too many services either deteriorating or disappearing.

It's no secret that amalgamation hasn't brought any savings for the simple reason a big city costs more to operate than a small one.

Likewise if you think that any greater efficiency has been achieved, just try to find your way through the maze of our current government structure to get to the right civil servant.

Today the people who pushed amalgamation upon us still believe that the "promise" of amalgamation can be achieved through big cuts to staff and services.

The truth, however, is that everything had been cut to the bone to begin with back in the early 1990s; something that Mayor Rob Ford discovered when he found no "gravy" at city hall.

So now rather than trying to make the city work with what it has, Ford and his supporters are playing a dangerous game of wasting city council's time by attacking unions and quality of life programs.

Time that should be spent building the city's infrastructure that is in danger of collapsing due to age and neglect.

During the council meeting on Monday Councillor Paula Fletcher (Ward 30 Toronto-Danforth) put forward the proposal that the city seriously study what benefits would come from de-amalgamation.

She was not being sarcastic, for as she pointed out each municipality was working well before amalgamation but since then the city has lurched from one crisis to another.

We need to know, she said, if it would be cheaper in the long run to return to the successful Metro Toronto we once had or risk incuring more costs with less and less return under an obviously dysfunctional amalgamation.

It's a question that needs an answer.