Love It or Loathe It: The Qualities of Polarizing Foods and What They Reveal About Human Division

Posted on September 30, 2026 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary

Most foods produce a range of reactions: some people like them, some are indifferent, some would rather skip them. A smaller group of foods produces a split instead. Black licorice, okra, cilantro, blue cheese, olives, durian, natto, anchovies, oysters, and fermented yeast spreads have groups of devoted admirers and groups who find them close to intolerable, with few people in between. This paper looks at what these foods have in common, why reactions to them become so strong, and what the pattern shows about the ways people come to feel strongly about matters of preference.

The central finding is that polarizing foods sit where three kinds of difference meet: differences in bodily perception, differences in experience and memory, and differences in the categories people use to judge what food should be. When all three are present, disagreement stops feeling like a matter of taste and starts to feel like a matter of plain fact, with each side sure it is simply perceiving the food correctly.

1. The Shape of Polarization

Polarization is not the same as unpopularity. A food many people dislike, such as overcooked liver, produces a lot of mild aversion but few passionate defenders. A polarizing food has a two-humped distribution: strong affection at one end, strong aversion at the other, and a thin middle. Surveys of licorice, cilantro, and similar foods tend to show this shape repeatedly, and it is the missing middle that needs explaining. Why do some foods resist the usual drift toward mild opinions?

2. Qualities That Make a Food Polarizing

2.1 Intensity and Dominance

Polarizing foods are rarely subtle. Black licorice gets its flavor from anise-like compounds, especially anethole, along with glycyrrhizin from licorice root, a compound many times sweeter than sugar with a lingering aftertaste. Blue cheese, anchovies, fish sauce, durian, and fermented spreads all deliver concentrated flavors or aromas that dominate whatever they touch. A mild food can be ignored or tolerated. An intense one requires a verdict. When a single flavor note takes over the entire experience, the eater cannot focus on other parts of the dish, so the reaction to that one note becomes the reaction to the whole food.

2.2 Texture That Breaks Expectations

Texture aversions are often stronger and harder to overcome than flavor aversions. Okra is the clearest example. When cooked, especially boiled or stewed, it releases mucilage, a thick, viscous substance made of sugar-based compounds. The same property makes okra valuable in gumbo, where it thickens the stew, and makes it repellent to people who experience the texture as slime. Oysters, raw egg, natto, mushrooms, tapioca pearls, and custards produce similar splits.

Texture is especially divisive because the mouth is a guarded place. People accept a wide range of flavors, but textures associated with spoilage, mucus, or foreign matter trigger a protective reflex that can be close to gagging. Someone who enjoys okra experiences its texture as silky and substantial; someone who dislikes it experiences the same texture as a warning signal. Both are reacting to a real property of the food.

2.3 Real Differences in Perception

Some disagreements about food occur because people really do taste different things. Three documented cases stand out:

  • Cilantro. For a portion of the population, cilantro tastes like soap. Genetic research, including a large 2012 study of customer data from a consumer genetics company, linked this reaction to variation near a cluster of smell-receptor genes, including one called OR6A2, which responds to the aldehyde compounds that are also found in soaps and lotions.
  • Bitterness sensitivity. Research associated with psychologist Linda Bartoshuk showed that people vary widely in sensitivity to certain bitter compounds, with variation in the TAS2R38 receptor gene playing a major role. People with high sensitivity, sometimes called “supertasters,” often find broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kale, grapefruit, black coffee, and some beers harsh, while others taste them as pleasantly sharp.
  • Smell perception. Variation in smell receptors affects how people perceive compounds in foods such as asparagus and some meats, so part of the population cannot detect aromas that others find overwhelming.

These findings matter because they explain why food arguments so often go nowhere. When one person says cilantro is fresh and bright and another says it tastes like dish soap, neither is exaggerating or lying. They are reporting different experiences of the same leaf.

2.4 Category Violation

Many polarizing foods break the categories people use to judge food. Licorice is sold as candy, but its flavor profile is closer to an herb or medicine than to fruit or chocolate. Scandinavian salty licorice, flavored with ammonium chloride, goes further and combines sweetness, saltiness, and a sharp chemical tang in a single piece of candy. Someone who expects candy to taste like candy finds this confusing and unpleasant; someone raised with it considers it a perfectly normal treat.

Other examples: savory ice creams, pineapple on pizza, sweet foods in savory dishes, and cheeses that smell like something other than food. Category violation matters because the brain judges food partly by prediction. A food that meets expectations is judged by its quality; a food that violates them is often judged as wrong before it is judged at all.

2.5 Similarity to Warning Signals

Many polarizing foods share sensory features with things people rightly avoid. Blue and washed-rind cheeses contain compounds also found in body odor and spoilage. Fermented fish products smell like decay. Durian’s aroma has been compared to rotting onions or gas. Okra’s mucilage resembles mucus. Bitterness is also the taste of many poisons and medicines.

Those who love these foods have learned, usually through repeated safe exposure, to separate the signal from the danger. Those who dislike them are still reading the signal as it was originally meant. This is why the aversion often feels involuntary and physical, rather than a matter of choice.

3. How Experience Shapes Preference

3.1 Exposure and Familiarity

Research on children’s eating habits, including work by Leann Birch and colleagues, found that children frequently need many exposures to a new food, often eight to fifteen, before accepting it. The broader principle, sometimes called the mere-exposure effect, holds that repeated, uneventful contact with something tends to increase liking. Foods that are strong-tasting and texturally unusual are also the foods most likely to be rejected early, which means many people never reach the number of exposures required to learn to like them. The result is a sorting process: people who encountered the food often in childhood tend to like it, and people who tried it once or twice as a teenager or adult tend to hate it. That sorting produces the two-humped distribution described above.

3.2 Memory and Association

Food preferences are tied to memory more firmly than most other preferences. A single episode of illness after eating a particular food can create an aversion that lasts for decades, even when the person knows the food was not to blame. Positive associations are just as durable. Okra served at a grandparent’s table in the South carries the memory of that table with it, and licorice bought on childhood trips to a candy store carries those trips. When someone defends a polarizing food, they are often defending the people and places connected with it. When someone rejects it, they may be rejecting an unpleasant first encounter that the food never recovered from.

3.3 Regional and Cultural Roots

Many of the most polarizing foods are strongly regional. Okra is a staple of the American South, West Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and South Asia, but it is uncommon in other parts of North America. Salty licorice is common in the Nordic countries and the Netherlands but seems strange almost everywhere else. Natto is common in parts of Japan and rare in others. Marmite and Vegemite divide the British Commonwealth; the maker of Marmite built an entire advertising campaign on the phrase “love it or hate it.” Where a food is common, it is simply food. Where it is rare, it is often seen as a challenge, a curiosity, or a joke.

4. Why the Disagreement Becomes So Intense

4.1 Disgust Is a Moral Emotion

Psychologist Paul Rozin’s research on disgust showed that it is closely related to moral judgment. People feel disgust toward spoiled food and also toward behaviors they consider degrading or wrong, and the language used for each overlaps. When someone says a food is “revolting” or “an abomination,” the vocabulary is borrowed from moral condemnation. Because food aversions call on the disgust response, disagreements about food readily take on a moral tone, and admirers of a food can feel that their judgment or character is being questioned.

4.2 Taste as Identity

Food preferences also serve as social markers. Declaring a love of black licorice or a hatred of cilantro is a small way of telling others who one is. Online communities devoted to cilantro haters, pineapple-on-pizza debates, and regional food rivalries show how easily food preferences become badges of belonging. Once a preference becomes part of identity, changing it can feel like betraying a group, so people resist trying again even when their tastes might have shifted.

4.3 The Certainty of Direct Experience

Most importantly, taste is experienced directly and privately. A person cannot taste what someone else tastes, so each person naturally assumes that their own experience is the normal one. When the other person reports something completely different, the easiest explanation is that they are wrong, odd, or pretending. This is the same mistake people make in many other areas of disagreement, but food makes it especially obvious because the evidence is so immediate and so hard to share.

5. What Food Polarization Teaches About Human Division

First, strong disagreement does not always mean one side is wrong. Two people can perceive the same object honestly and still come to opposite conclusions because their perceptions differ. The cilantro case is the plainest example, but the principle extends further. Before concluding that someone who disagrees is foolish or dishonest, it is worth asking whether they are working from a different experience of the same facts.

Second, first encounters carry heavy weight. Many aversions come from a single bad introduction that was never followed by a better one. The same is true of attitudes toward people, places, and institutions. A poorly prepared first encounter with okra and an unpleasant first meeting with a community both tend to create judgments that last longer than they deserve.

Third, preferences are bound up with loyalty. Defending a food often means defending a family, a region, or a childhood. When that is understood, a critique of the food can be separated from a critique of the people who love it, and admirers need not hear every complaint about a food as an attack on their grandparents.

Fourth, moral language exaggerates matters of preference. Because disgust borrows the vocabulary of moral judgment, people treat matters of taste as though they were matters of right and wrong. Recognizing that shift helps keep small disagreements small.

Fifth, there is an old and sound principle for handling differences about food. Scripture addresses exactly this kind of division. In Romans 14, Paul writes that the one who eats should not despise the one who does not eat, and the one who does not eat should not judge the one who eats, because each stands before God, not before the other person’s plate. The disagreement in Rome concerned conscience rather than mere taste, but the principle applies all the more to matters of simple preference: they are not grounds for contempt. Scripture also shows how quickly appetite shapes attitude. In Numbers 11, Israel grew tired of the manna God provided and longed for the fish, cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, and garlic of Egypt, letting a craving shaped by memory override gratitude for what was in front of them. Food preferences are rarely just about food.

6. Conclusion

Polarizing foods share a recognizable set of features: intense and dominant flavors, unusual or protective-reflex-triggering textures, compounds that people perceive very differently, violations of expected food categories, and resemblances to warning signals. Around these features, experience does the rest. Early and repeated exposure pushes people toward affection, while rare or unpleasant exposure pushes them toward aversion, and memory, region, and identity lock those preferences in place.

The result is a disagreement that feels unusually certain on both sides, because each person is reporting a direct, private, and honest experience. Licorice lovers and licorice haters, okra devotees and okra skeptics, are not really arguing about the same thing. They are describing different encounters with the same food. Understanding this does not require anyone to change their tastes, but it does make it easier to disagree warmly and without contempt, which is a lesson worth carrying well beyond the dinner table.

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Laser Tag: A Beginner’s Explainer

Posted on September 30, 2026 by nathanalbright

What It Is

Laser tag is a team or free-for-all game in which players try to “tag” one another with handheld devices, usually called phasers or blasters, that fire invisible beams at sensors worn on the other players. It is often described as a cross between playground tag and paintball, but without projectiles, paint, or pain. Nobody gets hurt, nobody gets messy, and the scoring is handled by electronics rather than by honesty or argument.

Despite the name, most laser tag equipment does not use true lasers. The beam is infrared light, the same kind a TV remote uses. Many systems pair it with a visible red or green light, or a sound effect, so the player can see where they are aiming and feel like they fired something.

A Brief History

The game grew out of the 1980s fascination with space-age entertainment. The first commercial arena, Photon, opened in Dallas, Texas, in 1984, and it ran the game with players in helmets moving through a darkened, multi-level playing field. Around the same time, the toy company Worlds of Wonder released Lazer Tag, a home version that was popular with children in the mid-1980s. Dedicated arena chains such as Laser Quest followed, and by the 1990s laser tag was a common feature of family entertainment centers across North America, Europe, and Australia.

Where It Is Played

Laser tag shows up in several kinds of settings:

  • Indoor arenas. This is the classic version. The arena is typically a large, dim room lit by blacklight, often filled with light fog so beams and glowing surfaces stand out. It contains walls, ramps, catwalks, and obstacles painted with fluorescent designs, usually built around a theme such as a spaceship, a futuristic city, or a maze.
  • Family entertainment centers. Many arenas sit inside larger venues that also offer bowling, arcades, go-karts, trampolines, or mini golf. Laser tag is one attraction among several.
  • Outdoor fields. Some businesses run laser tag in wooded areas or open fields using longer-range equipment that resembles military-style gear. This version plays more like paintball and suits larger groups and longer games.
  • Mobile setups. Companies bring equipment and inflatable barriers to parks, schools, churches, camps, and backyard parties.
  • At home. Consumer kits are sold for children and families to play in yards and houses.

It is a popular choice for birthday parties, youth group outings, school trips, corporate team-building events, and family nights out.

The Appeal

Several things make laser tag enjoyable for a wide range of people:

  • It is physical but painless. Players run, crouch, hide, and dodge, which gives a real sense of action, yet no one gets bruised the way they might in paintball.
  • It is accessible. Children as young as about six or seven can usually play, and adults can play alongside them. Skill matters, but a newcomer can still score points and have fun in the first game.
  • The atmosphere. Darkness, fog, glowing walls, music, and sound effects make the arena feel like stepping into a movie or video game.
  • Teamwork and strategy. Teams can plan ambushes, guard bases, and cover one another, so the game rewards cooperation rather than just quick reflexes.
  • Instant, objective scoring. The system keeps track of every hit, and many venues print a scorecard afterward showing points, accuracy, and who tagged whom. This leads to plenty of friendly rivalry and rematch requests.
  • Short sessions. A typical game lasts about 10 to 20 minutes, which keeps energy high and makes it easy to fit into a party or outing.

How the Game Works

Equipment. Each player receives two main pieces of gear. The first is a vest or harness with infrared sensors on the chest, back, and shoulders, often with lights that show the player’s team color. The second is a phaser, usually connected to the vest by a cable, with its own sensor near the tip. Some systems use headbands or helmets with sensors instead.

Tagging. When a player pulls the trigger, the phaser sends a coded infrared signal. If that signal strikes a sensor on an opponent, the system registers a hit. The shooter earns points, and the player who was hit usually loses points.

Deactivation. A tagged player’s equipment typically shuts down for a few seconds, often with a sound or flashing lights. During that time they cannot fire or be tagged again. This keeps one player from being hit repeatedly and gives everyone a chance to recover and move.

Limits. Many systems give each player a set number of shots or “lives,” with reloading done by pressing a button, visiting a station, or waiting. Others allow unlimited shots but limit how quickly the phaser can fire.

Common game types:

  • Team battle. Two or three color-coded teams compete to score the most points.
  • Free-for-all. Every player competes individually.
  • Base capture. Each team has a target or base, a sensor mounted somewhere in the arena, and players score bonus points by tagging the opposing team’s base.
  • Special modes. Venues often offer variations such as one hidden “VIP” player to protect, limited lives with elimination, or modes where tagged players switch teams.

House rules. Arenas almost always forbid running, physical contact, climbing on walls, lying on the floor, and covering one’s own sensors. Before each game, staff give a short briefing on the rules and the equipment.

A Few Tips for First-Timers

  • Keep moving; a stationary player is an easy target.
  • Use cover, and shoot around corners rather than standing in the open.
  • Aim for the chest and back sensors, which are the biggest targets.
  • Stay with teammates so you can cover one another.
  • Watch for the glowing sensors in the dark, since they give away other players’ positions, and your own as well.

Competitive Play

Beyond casual games, laser tag has an organized competitive scene. Leagues and tournaments run at many arenas, and some brands of equipment host regional and international championships where experienced teams play fast, highly tactical matches. For most people, though, laser tag stays what it has been since the 1980s: an easy, lively way for a group of friends or family to run around in the dark and try to outscore one another.

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Iceberg on Tap, Molson Absent: The Brewing Market Behind a St. John’s Pub Menu

Posted on September 29, 2026 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary

Visitors to St. John’s often find a short draft list: Quidi Vidi’s Iceberg lager, a few big-brand lagers that look American, and no Molson. The can itself says almost nothing about the beer or where it comes from. This looks like odd merchandising, but it follows from three features of the Newfoundland market:

  1. Three dominant brewers. Since 1962 the province’s beer market has been split between two national brewers with plants in St. John’s and, since 1996, one independent local brewer.
  2. The “American” beers are local products. Budweiser, Bud Light and Michelob Ultra are brewed in St. John’s by Labatt. A pub pouring those alongside Iceberg is most likely aligned with Labatt, and Molson’s absence reflects that alignment, not any shortage of Molson in the province.
  3. Iceberg’s marketing is carried by objects, not text. The brand has relied on its blue bottle, its source story and the brewery building. The words on the package were never its main tool.

1. The Observation

On the first day of a visit, a party at a pub near its hotel was approached by a brewery sales representative offering non-alcoholic beer before any server arrived. One diner asked for a Molson and was told the pub offered only Iceberg among the relevant choices. Several days later, a dinner group that included a retired media operations manager examined an Iceberg can closely. It carried almost no information beyond the brewery’s location, and even that was hard to find.

The presence of a brewery representative working the pub floor is itself a clue. On-premise beer sales in Canada are fought account by account, and draft lines are among the most contested pieces of territory.

2. How the Market Came to Have Three Players

For much of the twentieth century Newfoundland had its own brewers. Three independent brewers competed until 1962: Bavarian Brewing, Newfoundland Brewery and Bennett Brewing. In that same year each was sold to one of the three major Canadian brewers of the day. Because of that 1962 consolidation, both national brewers still operate plants in the city:

  • Labatt has brewed on Leslie Street since 1962, when it bought Bavarian Brewing.
  • Molson Coors bought the Circular Road brewery in the early 1960s from Newfoundland Brewery Ltd.

After that, no new independent entered for decades. Quidi Vidi was the first independent brewery to open in Newfoundland since 1962. It is generally described as the province’s third-largest brewer, after Labatt and Molson.

The province also treats local brewing as a protected industry. The Newfoundland and Labrador Liquor Corporation requires beer sold in convenience stores to be brewed within the province. In 2025 the provincial government initially held back from a national deal to loosen interprovincial alcohol trade. It said it wanted to avoid hurting its two biggest breweries, Labatt and Molson. This makes a market in which being brewed on the island is a real commercial advantage. Quidi Vidi has it, and so do the two national plants.

3. Why Molson Was Missing

Molson is not scarce in Newfoundland. The St. John’s plant brews 16 brands, including India Beer, Black Horse and Dominion Ale, along with Molson Canadian, Miller Lite and Coors Light. The company calls Coors Light the number-one beer in the province. A pub without Molson on tap has therefore chosen not to carry it.

The “pretty ordinary American beers” on the draft list point to the reason. Besides its own Labatt brands, the Leslie Street brewery makes Budweiser, Bud Light, Keith’s, Rolling Rock, Blue Star, Jockey Club and Michelob Ultra. In Newfoundland, a Budweiser on tap is a local Labatt product, not an import.

Tap lines are expensive to install and maintain, and national brewers compete hard for them. The most likely explanation for a draft list of Budweiser-family beers plus Iceberg, with no Molson Canadian or Coors Light, is that the pub has aligned its taps with Labatt and filled the local-craft slot with Quidi Vidi. The terms of any particular pub’s arrangements are not public, so this is an inference from the product mix. Still, it accounts for both what was on the list and what was missing.

4. Why Iceberg Is Everywhere

Several factors put Iceberg on so many local menus:

  • It is the default “local” choice. Once a pub has its national-brewer lines, it usually wants one beer that signals Newfoundland. Iceberg is the best-known candidate, and it is also a light North American lager, the same style as the macro beers it sits beside. A pub can offer “local” without asking customers to try anything unfamiliar.
  • The brewery handles its own distribution. In a 2014 interview, the brewery said it delivered everything itself by van, to bars, restaurants, convenience-store agents and the NLC. Direct contact with accounts is how a small brewer wins taps in a market held by two giants.
  • It is large enough to supply consistently. By 2014 the brewery was described as Newfoundland’s largest craft brewery, producing about 7,500 hectolitres a year. That is small next to Labatt’s St. John’s output, about 150,000 hectolitres a year, but enough to keep kegs flowing reliably to many accounts.
  • Tourism reinforces local demand. The brewery sits in a picturesque former fishing village and has become a destination in its own right. Visitors who tour it, or who encounter the blue bottle, then look for the beer in pubs.

5. Why the Marketing Seems So Poor

The dinner party’s reaction is fair if marketing means informative packaging. The brand has worked differently, carrying its message through three things other than printed copy.

The bottle. Iceberg’s identity rests on a royal-blue bottle. The brewery’s co-owner said the distinctive bottle, not only the iceberg water, is what makes the beer sell. He also said some restaurants sell customers the empty bottle after they finish the beer. The bottles have at times been scarcer than the beer. In one summer the brewery ran out of bottles and stopped making Iceberg for several months, and in 2018 it again appealed publicly for returns because it had no Iceberg bottles left. When the container is itself the advertisement, the copy printed on it matters much less.

The can is a later adaptation. The design agency that refreshed the brand explained that consumers increasingly wanted cans, so the bottle’s appeal had to be carried over to a new format. The redesign centered on an illustration based on the iceberg that drifted into Ferryland in 2017, with a new serif wordmark. The can therefore relies on an image that local buyers recognize. It was not designed to explain the product to someone from outside the province.

The story is told in person and through the press. Most of Iceberg’s promotion has come from tours, travel writing and news coverage, not from the package. The brewery’s origins supply much of that story:

  • It was founded in 1996 by two engineers who had worked in the offshore oil industry.
  • It occupies an old fish plant that was converted after the cod industry collapsed in the early 1990s.
  • One account says the beer’s idea came when an iceberg grounded at the mouth of Quidi Vidi Harbour and blocked it until wind and waves broke it up.

The brand’s own details are not always consistent, which fits a marketing approach that is loose and anecdotal:

  • Age of the ice. Sources give different figures: 20,000 years in one account, 25,000 years in another.
  • Strength. The NLC listing describes it as a light lager at 4.5% alcohol, not the 4.9% figure seen elsewhere. The difference may reflect a formulation change or packaging variation.
  • Launch date. Some reference sources list Iceberg as a 1996 product. A 2012 visitor’s account instead describes it as a recent release at that time.

6. Conclusion

The story behind the draft list is structural. Newfoundland’s beer market was consolidated into two national breweries in 1962, and provincial policy has sheltered brewing on the island ever since. Quidi Vidi entered in 1996 as the only local independent, operating out of a fish plant emptied by the cod collapse. Pubs in St. John’s commonly pair one national brewer’s lines with a single local beer, and Iceberg has become that local beer through direct delivery, adequate volume and tourist appeal.

The “American” beers that appeared alongside it are Labatt products brewed in St. John’s, which is the most likely reason Molson was absent. The can says little because Iceberg has never depended on printed copy. Its advertising has been the blue bottle, the iceberg itself, the village brewery and the stories people tell about all three.

Sources:

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The Amalgamation Impasse: Efficiency, Local Identity, and a Development Model for the Northeast Avalon: A White Paper

Posted on September 28, 2026 by nathanalbright

1. Summary

For more than half a century, the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador has periodically tried to reduce the number of local governments, especially around St. John’s and other service centres. The reasoning has usually been administrative efficiency: fewer councils, less duplication, and better coordinated services. Again and again, those efforts have met durable local identities. Communities that trade with their neighbours daily, share their water, fire, and sewer systems, and send commuters across municipal lines every morning have still refused to merge. This paper argues that the resistance is not simply sentiment or parochialism. It reflects real concerns about taxation, representation, and service delivery, and the Goulds experience after 1991 is the clearest local example. The evidence from other Canadian provinces also shows that amalgamation rarely delivers the savings promised for it. The model best suited to the Northeast Avalon is a federated service region: a statutory body, governed by member municipalities, responsible only for services where scale truly matters, and bound by explicit safeguards against the Goulds problem. Local councils, local names, and local identities would remain intact.

2. The Pattern in Newfoundland and Labrador

The record shows a consistent pattern of proposals, studies, and refusals.

  • The Northeast Avalon, 1991. The provincial government ran a feasibility process and recommended several amalgamations in the region. Opponents in the Legislature argued that, by placing fire, water, and solid waste under the City of St. John’s, the minister had effectively made St. John’s a regional authority, creating what they called a “super city by the back door.” Wedgewood Park and the Goulds were merged into St. John’s. Mount Pearl was not.
  • Corner Brook. Massey Drive separated from Corner Brook in 1971 and remains an enclave surrounded by the city. A 1991 proposal to merge Massey Drive, Corner Brook, and Mount Moriah did not proceed. Service relations later became strained enough that Corner Brook threatened to cut off Mount Moriah’s water over an expired agreement.
  • Stephenville. In 1973, a study concluded that Stephenville, Harmon, and Kippens were indistinguishable except on paper and recommended a single municipality. Kippens is still separate more than fifty years later.
  • Labrador West. In 2017, a consultant recommended merging Labrador City and Wabush. Amalgamation was considered and rejected in both 2009 and 2019.
  • Province-wide regionalization. In 2023, the province abandoned its plan for about 25 regional governments. It cited geography, low population density, and especially the difficulty of designing a regional tax system.

Across these cases, the provincial logic has stayed the same while local answers have also stayed the same. The heritage record puts it plainly: Mount Pearl and fast-growing Paradise are very reluctant to give up their independence, even though they are closely connected to and in many ways dependent on St. John’s.

3. Why the Efficiency Case Is Weaker Than It Appears

The central argument for amalgamation is that larger units cost less to run. Canadian research has repeatedly failed to confirm this.

  • Ontario in the 1990s. Ontario carried out the most extensive amalgamation program in Canadian history, cutting the number of municipalities by half between 1996 and 2001 with the aim of improving efficiency and reducing spending. When Kushner and Siegel studied three mid-sized amalgamated cities, they found few savings. Central Elgin’s spending fell somewhat after amalgamation, but Kingston and Chatham showed no reduction.
  • Fewer politicians, little money saved. Cutting councils is often presented as the obvious saving. In the Ontario cases studied, the number of elected officials fell from 158 to 42, yet councillors’ pay and benefits made up less than one percent of total municipal spending.
  • Toronto. A ten-year review of the Toronto amalgamation concluded that the evidence did not support the view that combining units lowers costs. It found that amalgamation had made local government more complicated and more expensive, and that the region’s underlying coordination problem remained unsolved.
  • Rural amalgamations. A later study of Kawartha Lakes, Essex, and Haldimand-Norfolk found that property taxes, employee pay, and long-term debt rose in amalgamated and non-amalgamated communities at similar rates. That suggests amalgamation produced no measurable benefit. It also found that rural residents joined to urban areas began demanding the same services and amenities as urban residents.

Two mechanisms explain these outcomes. The first is upward harmonization: once municipalities merge, everyone expects the highest existing service level, and the new council tends to match the highest wage scale. The second is loss of fit between taxes and services: smaller governments can tailor their tax-to-service mix more closely, and that flexibility is lost when one uniform standard applies across a large merged area.

4. The Goulds Problem

The Goulds shows how these general mechanisms play out locally. After it joined St. John’s in 1991, residents saw property taxes nearly double, while the expected improvement in services arrived slowly. Water and sewer did not reach all areas until about 15 years later, which led to dissatisfaction and protests.

The Goulds problem has three parts that tend to reinforce each other:

  1. Taxes rise immediately. Absorbed areas move quickly to the larger municipality’s tax rates.
  2. Services arrive late. Capital spending on water, sewer, and roads is spread out over years and competes with the needs of the established core.
  3. Political voice shrinks. A formerly self-governing community becomes one ward, or part of one, on a much larger council, with limited ability to push its own priorities forward.

Any resident of Paradise, Mount Pearl, Kippens, or Wabush can see this history. Their resistance is a reasonable reading of it, not simple attachment to a name.

5. What the Quebec Demergers Show

Quebec provides the clearest Canadian test of whether forced mergers hold. After the 2002 Montreal-area mergers, a new provincial government allowed demerger referendums in 2004. A demerger required a majority of votes cast, representing at least 35 percent of eligible voters. Many referendums failed that turnout threshold even when a majority voted yes. On the island of Montreal, 22 former municipalities held referendums, and 15 regained most of their independence.

What happened next is especially instructive. The reconstituted cities did not recover all their former powers. They became part of a new urban agglomeration and continued to share certain municipal services with Montreal. Common services, including fire protection, were placed under an agglomeration council in which the central city and the reconstituted municipalities are both represented.

The lesson is that local identity and shared services can be separated. Residents who voted to restore their own municipality were not rejecting regional services. They were rejecting the loss of their community as a self-governing unit. The Northeast Avalon already reflects this distinction in practice. Mount Pearl and Paradise share fire, water, wastewater, and transit with St. John’s, but neither wants to become part of it.

6. Available Models

The main models can be compared on four points: efficiency where scale matters, protection of local identity, fairness in taxation, and reliability of development and service delivery.

Amalgamation (single-tier).
Provides a single decision-maker, but the research shows few savings. It is the model that produces the Goulds problem, and it has been politically unachievable in the region for over thirty years.

Two-tier regional government (the 2022 working group model).
An elected regional council with its own tax sits above local councils. It gives regional services a clear line of accountability, but the province dropped the model over taxation design. It also creates a new level of elected government that residents may see as extra cost.

Voluntary service agreements (the current Northeast Avalon arrangement).
Protects identity completely and has delivered shared fire, water, wastewater, and transit. It is fragile, however. Participation varies by service, agreements expire, and disputes arise, as the Corner Brook–Mount Moriah water standoff showed. It also leaves the central city as both service provider and dominant partner. That is exactly what opponents objected to in 1991.

Municipal service corporations.
The 2023 towns law already allows towns, cities, local service districts, and unincorporated areas to jointly create a corporation to deliver water, sewer, and other services. This makes shared ownership more formal but still relies on case-by-case agreement.

A federated regional district (the British Columbia model).
British Columbia’s regional districts are federations of member municipalities, with boards made up of representatives from the member councils. Metro Vancouver is the largest example. It delivers regional water, liquid waste, and solid waste services while its 21 member municipalities keep considerable control over their own affairs. Its own description emphasizes economies of scale while allowing each member to retain its own character. A key feature is that residents generally pay only for the services they actually receive. The model has weaknesses. Critics have recently pointed to problems controlling infrastructure costs and serious governance concerns identified in an independent review. Even so, those critics argue that amalgamation would not solve the problems and could make them worse.

7. Recommended Model: A Federated Service Region for the Northeast Avalon

The model that best balances efficiency, identity, and fair taxation is a federated service region. It would formalize and strengthen the arrangements the region already uses rather than replace them with a new layer of government or with mergers.

7.1 Structure

  • Statutory basis. Provincial legislation would create a Northeast Avalon Regional Services Authority. Participation would be compulsory for services that are regional by nature. Governance would rest with member councils.
  • Board. The board would be made up of mayors or councillors appointed by each member council, with weighted voting based on population. The regional body would have no separate election, which avoids creating a new level of politicians.
  • Double majority. Major decisions, such as new services, capital plans above a set threshold, and cost-allocation formulas, would require both a population-weighted majority and a majority of member municipalities. This protects smaller members from domination by the core, which was a central concern in 1991. It reflects the protections built into Quebec’s agglomeration councils and the supermajority rules that give smaller members leverage in the BC system.

7.2 Functions (scale-sensitive services only)

  • bulk water supply and treatment, building on the existing Regional Water Services Committee;
  • wastewater transmission and treatment, building on the Regional Wastewater Committee;
  • fire and emergency services, building on the Regional Fire Services Committee;
  • regional transit, taking over Metrobus from St. John’s and expanding it to all member municipalities that want service;
  • regional land-use planning, including completion of the long-delayed Northeast Avalon Regional Plan; and
  • regional economic development, building on Advantage St. John’s.

Everything else would stay local. That includes local roads, recreation, local planning and zoning within the regional plan, community events, heritage, and each municipality’s name, council, and status.

7.3 Safeguards against the Goulds problem

This is the core of the proposal. Each safeguard addresses one part of the Goulds pattern.

  1. Benefit-based cost allocation. Members pay for the regional services they actually receive, based on usage, connections, or service level. There is no single regional tax rate. A community without transit service does not pay for transit.
  2. Service before tax. No member’s charges for a regional service may rise to full rates until that service is actually delivered at the regional standard. Charges phase in as service arrives. This reverses the Goulds sequence, in which taxes rose first and services came much later.
  3. Binding capital commitments. The authority must adopt a multi-year capital plan with scheduled completion dates for extending services to each member area, publish annual progress, and report to the province on any delay.
  4. Protected local representation. Every member keeps its own council, so no community loses its voice by becoming a single ward in a larger city.
  5. Voluntary amalgamation only. The law would permit amalgamation only when requested by the councils involved and approved by residents in a local plebiscite. The province would give up forced mergers in exchange for guaranteed regional service participation.
  6. Periodic review. A statutory review every five to ten years would examine the authority’s cost control, governance, and fairness to members. This responds directly to the governance and cost problems that have arisen in Metro Vancouver.

7.4 Why this model fits the region

  • It captures efficiency where scale actually matters: water, wastewater, fire, transit, and regional planning. These are the services where the region already cooperates and where fragmentation causes real problems.
  • It does not depend on savings that amalgamation research has not found, such as reductions in politicians or administrative staff.
  • It protects local identity completely. Paradise remains Paradise, and Mount Pearl remains Mount Pearl.
  • It addresses the Goulds problem directly through benefit-based charges, a service-before-tax rule, and binding capital schedules.
  • It resolves the 1991 objection. Regional services would be governed jointly rather than administered by St. John’s on behalf of everyone else.
  • It builds on existing institutions instead of replacing them, which lowers the cost and risk of transition.
  • It leaves room for civic ambition. A federated structure is compatible with any future pathway for large towns such as Paradise or Conception Bay South to seek city status, because city status would not change their role in the regional authority.

8. Applying the Model Elsewhere

The same principles apply at smaller scale in other parts of the province.

  • Corner Brook and the Bay of Islands. A regional services authority covering water, fire, and planning for Corner Brook, Massey Drive, Mount Moriah, and nearby towns would replace one-off agreements that have led to repeated disputes. Waste management and policing are already organized regionally.
  • Labrador West. A joint services board for recreation, fire, and water could deliver many of the efficiencies the 2017 study identified. It would not require the merger that residents have twice rejected, and it would help end recurring disputes over the recreation centre.
  • Stephenville and Kippens. A service agreement with benefit-based charges would reflect the practical integration that studies identified more than fifty years ago, while leaving Kippens a separate town.

9. Risks and Limitations

  • Accountability. Board members are appointed from member councils rather than directly elected, so residents may find the authority remote. Open meetings, published capital plans, and annual public reporting would be needed to address this.
  • Cost control. Metro Vancouver’s recent problems show that federated bodies can lose control of infrastructure costs. The periodic statutory review and member double-majority rules are meant to guard against this, but they will not eliminate the risk entirely.
  • Provincial commitment. The model requires enabling legislation and transition funding. The province dropped regionalization in 2023 and has not yet completed its rewrite of the city acts. Without clear provincial leadership, the region will stay with its current voluntary arrangements.
  • Complexity. A layer of regional services makes governance more complicated than a single merged city. The evidence suggests, however, that merged cities have not been simpler or cheaper in practice.

10. Conclusion

The long conflict between provincial efficiency goals and local identity in Newfoundland and Labrador is not a failure of local vision. It reflects a genuine flaw in the amalgamation model. Canadian research shows that mergers rarely deliver the promised savings, and the Goulds experience shows what absorbed communities stand to lose: higher taxes right away, delayed services, and reduced political voice. The communities of the Northeast Avalon have already shown what they will accept, which is shared services without surrendering identity. A federated service region, established in law and protected by benefit-based charges, a service-before-tax rule, binding capital commitments, and double-majority governance, would give the region the efficiencies that matter while leaving its communities intact. It would formalize a system that is already working informally and would end a debate that forced amalgamation has not been able to win.

Sources:

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“As Certain Also of Your Own Poets Have Said”: Greek Poetic and Philosophical Truth in Scripture and Its Implications

Posted on September 28, 2026 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary

On at least three occasions, the apostle Paul quoted Greek poets, and his words, including those quotations, now stand in the inspired text. In Athens he cited two lines associated with Epimenides and Aratus (Acts 17:28). Writing to Titus, he quoted a Cretan poet, generally identified as Epimenides, and added, “This witness is true” (Titus 1:12–13). Writing to the Corinthians, he used a line found in the comic playwright Menander (1 Corinthians 15:33). In addition, the risen Jesus Christ, speaking to Paul on the Damascus road, used a proverb about kicking against the goads that also appears in Greek tragedy (Acts 26:14).

This paper, a companion to “Judging Righteous Judgment: A Biblicist Framework for Rock and Pop Criticism,” examines these passages from a biblicist perspective. It argues that they establish a scriptural pattern for recognizing truth spoken outside the covenant community, while also setting clear limits on how that truth is received. Paul’s method was selective, redirecting, and subordinate: he took true statements from pagan sources, detached them from false frameworks, pointed them toward the true God, and placed them in service of a call to repentance. The paper then draws out implications for how inspiration relates to quoted material, how general revelation functions, how popular as well as elite culture may carry truth, how insider testimony carries weight, and how believers may engage the art and thought of their surrounding culture, including popular music.

I. The Passages

Acts 17:28: The Areopagus

Paul’s address in Athens came after he had been disputing in the marketplace with Epicurean and Stoic philosophers (Acts 17:18). Standing before the Areopagus, he began from an altar inscribed “TO THE UNKNOWN GOD” (Acts 17:23) and proclaimed the God who made the world and all things in it. He then said: “For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring” (Acts 17:28).

The second clause is a near-exact quotation from the opening of the Phaenomena of Aratus, a poet from Soli in Cilicia, the same region as Paul’s hometown of Tarsus, writing in the third century before Christ. A similar line appears in the Hymn to Zeus by the Stoic philosopher Cleanthes. Paul’s plural, “certain also of your own poets,” fits the fact that the idea circulated in more than one source.

The first clause, “in him we live, and move, and have our being,” is commonly attributed to Epimenides of Crete, a semi-legendary poet and seer of the sixth century before Christ, though the attribution depends on a later Christian commentator and is less certain than the Aratus quotation. Ancient tradition also connected Epimenides with Athens: Diogenes Laertius records a story that he ended a plague there by having sacrifices offered at altars to an unnamed god. Whether or not that tradition lies behind the altar Paul saw, the setting shows Paul working deliberately with the religious and literary memory of his audience.

Titus 1:12–13: The Cretan Prophet

Instructing Titus about the churches on Crete, Paul wrote: “One of themselves, even a prophet of their own, said, The Cretians are alway liars, evil beasts, slow bellies. This witness is true” (Titus 1:12–13). Clement of Alexandria and later writers attributed the line to Epimenides, a Cretan. The first phrase, calling Cretans perpetual liars, also appears in the Hymn to Zeus by Callimachus, where the poet accuses Cretans of lying because they claimed to possess the tomb of Zeus.

Two features stand out. Paul calls the poet “a prophet of their own,” using the Cretans’ own estimation of him, and he explicitly affirms the observation: “This witness is true.” This is the most direct scriptural endorsement of a pagan poet’s statement.

1 Corinthians 15:33: The Comic Stage

In his defense of the resurrection, Paul warned: “Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners” (1 Corinthians 15:33). The line appears in Menander, the leading playwright of Athenian New Comedy in the fourth and early third centuries before Christ, in a play titled Thais that survives only in fragments. By Paul’s time the line may have become a proverb, and some ancient writers linked it to Euripides as well. Paul gives no attribution here; he simply uses it.

The source is notable. Menander wrote popular comedies about romance, family misunderstanding, and social manners. This was not philosophy or sacred poetry but mainstream entertainment.

Acts 26:14: The Goads

Recounting his conversion before King Agrippa, Paul reported that a voice spoke to him “in the Hebrew tongue, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks” (Acts 26:14). The image of an ox kicking against the goad appears in Greek literature, including Aeschylus and Euripides, and was widely proverbial in the Greek world. Here the saying comes from the mouth of the risen Jesus Christ. The phrase was not a quotation from a specific author but a proverb shared across cultures, yet it shows that the Lord Himself used language whose currency extended into Greek literature.

II. Paul’s Method

These passages are not casual borrowings. Taken together, they show a consistent method with four features.

Selection

Paul quoted specific true statements, not entire works or systems. Aratus’s Phaenomena is an astronomical poem framed within a Stoic understanding of Zeus as the divine force pervading the cosmos. Paul did not endorse Stoic cosmology. He took one line that was true about the relationship between God and humanity and left the rest.

Redirection

The lines Paul quoted were originally addressed to or about Zeus. Paul applied them to “God that made the world and all things therein” (Acts 17:24), the Creator who is “not far from every one of us” (Acts 17:27). He did not pretend the poets had known the true God. He took a true perception about divine nearness and human dependence and pointed it to its proper object. The Athenians had been worshipping ignorantly; Paul declared the one they had been groping toward (Acts 17:23, 27).

Subordination

The quotations always serve Paul’s argument; they never govern it. In Athens, the quotation leads directly to a conclusion the poets did not draw: “Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device” (Acts 17:29). Paul turned the pagans’ own poetry against their idols, and then proclaimed repentance, judgment, and the resurrection (Acts 17:30–31). The poets supplied a true premise; Scripture supplied the conclusion and the call.

Limitation

Paul’s use of Greek sources sits alongside strong warnings about Greek wisdom. “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ” (Colossians 2:8). “Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?” (1 Corinthians 1:20). The Greeks sought after wisdom, yet Christ crucified was foolishness to them (1 Corinthians 1:22–23). The same apostle who quoted Aratus and Menander insisted that human wisdom could not reach God by its own power and could not save.

The method, then, is neither wholesale rejection nor wholesale acceptance. Pagan sources could perceive and state particular truths, but they could not supply the gospel, and their truths needed rescuing from the frameworks in which they were embedded.

III. Inspiration and Quoted Material

A biblicist reading must address what it means for a pagan line to appear in Scripture.

Inspiration attaches to the scriptural text as Paul wrote it, including the quotation in its new setting. When Paul writes “This witness is true,” the Holy Spirit affirms, through Paul, that the observation is true. When Paul uses Aratus in Athens, the inspired text affirms that humanity is the offspring of God in the sense Paul intends. This does not canonize Aratus, Epimenides, or Menander, nor does it endorse the rest of their works or the religious frameworks behind them. The quoted words become Scripture as Paul uses them, not as their authors used them.

This distinction guards against two errors. One error treats the quotations as an embarrassment to be explained away, as if Scripture could not contain words first spoken by pagans. The other treats them as an opening to elevate pagan philosophy to a status alongside revelation. Scripture itself sets the boundary: the truth of a statement can be affirmed without affirming its source’s authority.

A parallel exists within Scripture’s handling of other non-canonical material. Jude quotes a prophecy attributed to Enoch (Jude 14–15) without making the book that preserved it part of the canon. The pattern is consistent: the inspired writer can affirm a true statement from an outside source without endorsing the source as a whole.

IV. Implications

1. General revelation reaches the nations

Paul’s use of the poets confirms what he wrote in Romans. God’s eternal power and Godhead are “clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made” (Romans 1:20), and Gentiles without the written law can show “the work of the law written in their hearts” (Romans 2:14–15). Pagan poets perceived real truths because creation and conscience testify to all people. Aratus perceived that humanity depends on and derives from the divine. Menander observed that corrupt company corrupts character. These are not accidental hits; they are what one would expect if God has not left Himself without witness (Acts 14:17).

The same passage in Romans warns that those who knew God did not glorify Him as God, and “became vain in their imaginations” (Romans 1:21). General revelation produces true perceptions and also suppression and distortion. The believer should expect to find both in any culture’s literature, and should not be surprised by either.

2. Truth can come from popular culture, not only from elite thought

Menander was a comic playwright. His plays were popular entertainment, closer in social function to modern film and popular music than to philosophy. Paul’s use of a line found in Menander shows that Scripture does not restrict the recognition of truth to high culture. A true observation about human behavior is true whether it appears in a treatise or on the comic stage.

This undercuts a snobbery found both in academic culture and in some religious circles: the assumption that serious truth comes only from serious-seeming sources. Popular art, including popular music, can carry true observations about human nature, and the believer may recognize them as Paul did.

3. Insider testimony carries weight

Paul emphasized that the critique of Cretan character came from “one of themselves, even a prophet of their own” (Titus 1:12). A culture’s self-criticism has a particular force. An outsider’s accusation can be dismissed as prejudice; an insider’s confession is harder to dismiss.

This has direct relevance for cultural criticism. When artists within a scene, genre, or community expose its failings, their testimony often carries more credibility than external condemnation. The believer may affirm such testimony where it is true, as Paul did, without thereby endorsing the rest of the artist’s views.

4. Common ground serves proclamation

Paul’s approach in Athens followed his stated principle: “I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some” (1 Corinthians 9:22). He began from what his audience already knew and valued, including their altars and their poets, and moved from there toward what they did not know. He did not flatter them; he told them plainly that they worshipped in ignorance and must repent. But he spoke in terms they recognized.

The implication is that knowledge of a culture’s art and literature is not a distraction from faithful witness but can serve it. A believer who knows what a culture’s songs and stories say, and can recognize the truths and errors within them, is better equipped to speak to that culture than one who knows nothing of it.

5. Redirection, not mere agreement

Paul never simply agreed with the poets and stopped. He took their true statements and followed them to conclusions they had not reached. “We are his offspring” became an argument against idols. “Evil communications corrupt good manners” became a warning to believers tempted by those who denied the resurrection.

For the believer engaging a culture’s art, this suggests that recognizing truth is the beginning, not the end. The question is not only “Is this true?” but “Where does this truth lead, when followed honestly in the light of Scripture?” A song that truthfully expresses despair points toward the need for hope it may not itself supply. A story that truthfully depicts the self-deception of a fool points toward the need for a vantage point outside the self.

6. Discernment remains necessary

Paul’s warnings against philosophy and vain deceit apply alongside his quotations. Not everything in a culture’s art is true, and even true observations may be embedded in false frameworks that distort them. The Stoics’ truth about divine nearness sat within a pantheism that confused God with the world. The believer must separate the true statement from the false system, just as Paul did.

This requires knowing Scripture well enough to recognize truth when it appears in unfamiliar places, and to recognize falsehood when it appears in attractive forms. Without that grounding, engagement with a culture’s art tends to drift into either uncritical adoption or reflexive rejection.

7. Truth owes its authority to God, not to its source

The deepest implication is that truth does not belong to the one who first spoke it. If Aratus spoke truly that humanity is God’s offspring, the truth was God’s before Aratus perceived it. The poet did not create it; he noticed it. This frees the believer to receive true observations from any source without fear of contamination, because the believer is receiving something that belongs to God, not borrowing the authority of the one who said it.

It also means that a source’s flaws do not cancel its true statements. Epimenides was, by the Cretans’ own estimation, a prophet of their religion; Menander wrote comedies whose moral world was far from Scripture’s. Yet their true words remained true. This matches the pattern noted in the companion paper, where truth comes through David, Solomon, and Balaam despite their failures.

V. Application to Popular Music and Criticism

The companion paper argued that a biblicist criticism of rock and pop should judge by truthfulness rather than appearance. Paul’s use of the Greek poets supplies scriptural precedent for several of its principles.

First, it establishes that truthful observation can come from outside the covenant community, including from popular entertainment. A songwriter who truthfully depicts the self-deception of a fool, as in “What a Fool Believes,” or who honestly confronts the grim circumstances of his own life, as in “Alive,” may be stating something true, whatever his broader beliefs.

Second, it models how such truth should be received. The believer may affirm what is true, as Paul affirmed the Cretan prophet’s witness, without endorsing the artist’s life, worldview, or entire body of work.

Third, it demonstrates redirection. A believer writing about popular music need not stop at recognizing a song’s truth but may follow that truth to where it leads in the light of Scripture: from honest lament toward hope, from recognition of folly toward wisdom, from depicted despair toward the need for deliverance.

Fourth, it shows that engagement with popular culture is compatible with, and can serve, faithful witness. Paul knew his audience’s poets. Believers who know their culture’s songs are positioned to speak to that culture in terms it recognizes.

Finally, it preserves the necessary limits. Paul quoted the poets but did not preach them. The quotations served an argument whose premises and conclusions came from God’s revelation. Popular art can testify to truth, but it cannot replace Scripture as the standard by which that truth is recognized and completed.

VI. Conclusion

Paul’s quotations of Aratus, Epimenides, and Menander, and the risen Jesus Christ’s use of a proverb found across Greek literature, place pagan words inside the inspired text. Read carefully, these passages neither embarrass a biblicist view of Scripture nor open the door to treating pagan thought as revelation. They show a disciplined practice: selecting true statements, detaching them from false frameworks, redirecting them toward the true God, and subordinating them to the proclamation of repentance and resurrection.

The implications extend well beyond the first century. Truth belongs to God wherever it is found. General revelation reaches every culture, producing both real perception and real distortion. Popular art can carry truth as well as elite thought can. A culture’s self-criticism carries particular weight. And the believer who knows both Scripture and the surrounding culture can recognize, affirm, redirect, and, where necessary, correct what that culture says, as Paul did before the Areopagus when he told the Athenians that their own poets had glimpsed what they had not yet understood.

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Regional Government on the Northeast Avalon: Hopes, Plans, Prospects, and a Pathway to City Status: A White Paper

Posted on September 27, 2026 by nathanalbright

1. Summary

The St. John’s metropolitan area is by far the most populous and economically integrated part of Newfoundland and Labrador. For decades, municipal leaders, researchers, and the municipal association have argued that its many local governments should plan and deliver services together. In practice, a great deal of regional cooperation already exists through shared fire, water, wastewater, transit, and economic development arrangements. What has not come about is a formal regional government with its own elected council, taxing authority, and legal mandate. The province studied such a model in 2022 and rejected it in 2023. A replacement for the region’s 1976 land-use plan was begun but has not been completed. Formal regional government therefore appears unlikely in the near term. Continued and deeper partial regionalism, built on shared services, is very likely. Any pathway to city status for large towns such as Paradise and Conception Bay South would have to fit within whatever regional direction the province chooses. That pathway currently does not exist in law and would have to be designed.

2. The Region

The St. John’s census metropolitan area had 212,579 residents in the 2021 census. It includes St. John’s, Mount Pearl, and eleven towns, from Conception Bay South and Paradise to small communities such as Bauline and Petty Harbour–Maddox Cove. For land-use purposes, the province defines a somewhat broader St. John’s Urban Region, covering 15 municipalities and the Butterpot/Witless Bay Environs Development Control area.

Three communities dominate the region after St. John’s: Mount Pearl, Paradise, and Conception Bay South. By the 2021 census, Conception Bay South had about 27,000 residents and Paradise about 23,000, while Mount Pearl had 22,477. The region’s only two cities are therefore not its second- and third-largest communities by population.

3. Regional Cooperation Already in Place

Although no regional government exists, the metro area already runs several core services jointly.

  • Fire and emergency services. The St. John’s Regional Fire Department was run by the province from its founding until 1992, when it was transferred to the City of St. John’s with a mandate to protect both St. John’s and Mount Pearl. It now provides full service to St. John’s, Mount Pearl, and Paradise, and has service agreements with other Northeast Avalon municipalities. A Regional Fire Services Committee made up of St. John’s, Mount Pearl, and Paradise oversees it. Logy Bay–Middle Cove–Outer Cove disbanded its own fire department in 2013 and contracted with St. John’s.
  • Wastewater. A Regional Wastewater Committee provides wastewater transmission and treatment to St. John’s, Mount Pearl, and Paradise.
  • Water. The Regional Water Services Committee oversees water services for St. John’s, Mount Pearl, Paradise, Portugal Cove–St. Philip’s, and Conception Bay South.
  • Transit. Metrobus is owned by the City of St. John’s and serves St. John’s, Mount Pearl, and Paradise. It is governed by a commission appointed by St. John’s council. Demand exceeds capacity: in 2025, Mount Pearl’s mayor said local businesses need more routes, but Metrobus lacked the buses and drivers to extend service further.
  • Economic development. Conception Bay South, Paradise, and St. John’s formed Advantage St. John’s to support businesses in the capital region. Mount Pearl chose not to join.
  • Trails and tourism. The Grand Concourse Authority board includes St. John’s, Mount Pearl, Paradise, Conception Bay South, and several smaller towns. Eleven Northeast Avalon municipalities also formed a partnership to develop coordinated wayfinding signage.

This pattern, often called functional regionalism, is the region’s actual form of regional governance today. It relies on committees and contracts, usually anchored by St. John’s. It has no directly elected regional body, and participation varies from service to service.

4. The History of Hopes and Plans

4.1 Amalgamation

The oldest form of regionalization in the area has been absorption into St. John’s. Wedgewood Park and the Goulds were amalgamated with the city in 1991. The Goulds experience made later communities cautious. Residents saw property taxes nearly double after amalgamation, and full water and sewer service took about 15 years to arrive, which led to protests.

The provincial heritage site observes that Mount Pearl and Paradise in particular are very reluctant to give up their independence, even though both are closely tied to St. John’s. Tensions have occasionally surfaced openly. In one annexation dispute, Mount Pearl sought land held by St. John’s, St. John’s called the request a land grab, and St. John’s mayor Andy Wells said he hoped the province would consider merging the two cities entirely. The two cities remained separate.

4.2 The regional land-use plan

The legal backbone of regional planning is the St. John’s Urban Region Regional Plan, adopted in 1976. It still governs development on the Northeast Avalon and Bell Island. Every municipal plan in the region must conform to it.

Fifteen municipalities, including St. John’s, agreed with the province to review it and replace it with a Northeast Avalon Regional Plan. That plan was meant to address population growth, development pressure, economic opportunity, regional services, coastal lands, environmental protection, and regional transportation. The Town of Paradise’s description of the effort names governance, shared services, fire services, and joint financing among the issues to be addressed.

The replacement has not been completed. The 1976 plan is still being amended piece by piece. In 2024, the province directed public consultation on a regional plan amendment to allow a rezoning in St. John’s. In 2026, Mount Pearl sought public feedback on Amendment No. 110, which would update land-use designations within the city.

4.3 Province-wide regionalization

The municipal association has pushed for regional government for years. Around 2016, its president argued that with 276 municipalities the province needed some sort of regional system. Premier Dwight Ball said he would support municipalities that wanted to work together but would not force regional government.

In 2022, a joint working group of the municipal association, municipal administrators, and government proposed about 25 regional governments. Boundaries would be set that year and implementation completed by late 2024. Each region would have an elected 15-member council, while existing municipalities would keep their own councils. The minister at the time said the province would move on it as soon as possible.

In 2023 the province reversed course and said it would not implement formal regionalization. The minister cited low population density and large geography, said no version of the model could be made sustainable, and identified taxation as the central problem. She also acknowledged that some communities had pushed back.

Even so, the municipal association continued to urge the province before the 2025 election to return to the table and build a formal approach to municipal cooperation within a regional framework.

4.4 The legal tools that now exist

The 2023 towns law contains one tool that could support regional service delivery without regional government. A town, city, local service district, unincorporated area, or any combination of them may incorporate a corporation to deliver water and sewer or other municipal services. Towns may also enter joint ventures with the province, a city, a regional service board, or other bodies to build, own, and operate facilities together. These provisions allow deeper shared services by agreement, without creating a new level of elected government.

5. What a Regional Government Would Involve

The options for the Northeast Avalon fall into four broad models, listed here from least to most change.

Model A: Functional regionalism (the present system, expanded).
Municipalities keep full independence and add services to regional committees or contracts. The likely next candidates are transit, economic development, and land-use planning. This model preserves local identity but leaves regional decisions dependent on St. John’s as service provider and on each town’s willingness to join.

Model B: Regional service corporations.
Municipalities place a service, such as water, wastewater, fire, or transit, in a jointly owned corporation under the 2023 service-delivery provisions. Governance would come from a board appointed by the member municipalities. This would move regional services out of St. John’s departments and give member towns a formal ownership stake, which could address a long-standing complaint by smaller partners about how shared services are controlled.

Model C: A two-tier regional council.
This is the 2022 working group model. A directly elected regional council would sit above existing municipalities and take on regional functions such as planning, major infrastructure, transit, and possibly fire and emergency services. It would need its own revenue, most likely a regional tax or levy. Taxation was the issue the province found most difficult in 2023. For the Northeast Avalon it would also raise questions about representation, since St. John’s alone contains roughly half of the region’s population.

Model D: Amalgamation.
Some or all municipalities would be merged into a larger city. This produces the simplest governance structure but the strongest local resistance, as the Goulds experience and the long-standing positions of Mount Pearl and Paradise show.

Whatever model is chosen, the functions most often discussed for regional handling are:

  • land-use and growth planning, including completion of the Northeast Avalon Regional Plan;
  • water, wastewater, and stormwater;
  • fire and emergency services;
  • regional transit;
  • economic development and investment attraction; and
  • regional trails, parks, and tourism assets.

6. How Likely Is Success?

This section gives an assessment based on the record above. It is analysis, not a report of any announced plan.

Formal regional government (Model C), full implementation: unlikely in the near term.
The province rejected formal regionalization in 2023. The present government has not publicly revived it. The cost and taxation questions that stopped it remain unresolved. It is worth noting, however, that the province’s main objection was low population density across a large territory. That objection applies far less to the Northeast Avalon, which is compact and urban. A future government could therefore choose a region-specific approach for the capital area even without a province-wide plan. This is the most plausible route by which Model C could return.

Amalgamation (Model D): unlikely.
No recent government has shown willingness to force mergers in the metro area. Local resistance is well documented, and the Goulds experience is still cited as a cautionary example.

Partial regionalism (Models A and B): very likely, and already underway.
Shared fire, water, and wastewater services are stable and established. Transit demand is pushing toward broader regional coverage. The 2023 law provides a ready legal vehicle for jointly owned service corporations. The most likely future is gradual expansion of shared services, possibly with more formal joint ownership, while each municipality keeps its own council.

Completion of a new regional plan: moderately likely over the longer term.
The 1976 plan is visibly out of date and is being amended repeatedly. Sooner or later the province will face pressure to replace it rather than continue patching it. The timing is uncertain.

Main obstacles:

  • how to fund a regional body and share costs fairly;
  • representation, given St. John’s size relative to its neighbours;
  • local identity and mistrust shaped by past amalgamations and boundary disputes;
  • uneven participation, such as Mount Pearl’s decision to stay out of Advantage St. John’s; and
  • limited provincial capacity and competing priorities, including the still-unfinished rewrite of the three city acts.

7. A Pathway to City Status for Towns with Civic Ambitions

7.1 The current situation

As discussed in earlier papers, Newfoundland and Labrador law provides no procedure for a town to become a city. The towns law defines “city” as only St. John’s, Corner Brook, and Mount Pearl, and cabinet’s powers cover incorporating, merging, and changing towns, not converting them. Mount Pearl became a city on July 21, 1988 through its own statute, and that remains the only precedent in the region.

Paradise and Conception Bay South are both now larger than Corner Brook, which had 19,333 residents in 2021, and are comparable to or larger than Mount Pearl. They also sit at the centre of the regional question. Paradise shares fire, water, wastewater, and transit with St. John’s and Mount Pearl. Conception Bay South shares water and economic development arrangements. Any change in their status would affect the regional balance.

7.2 Three possible routes

Route 1: Individual city acts, following the Mount Pearl precedent.
A town requests its own charter, and the House of Assembly passes a “City of Paradise Act” or “City of Conception Bay South Act.” This requires no change in general law, but it adds more stand-alone statutes at the very time the province has said it wants to modernize and simplify city legislation. It is the least likely route under current policy.

Route 2: A general cities act with a qualification process.
When the province rewrites the three city acts, it could replace them with a single cities act that includes a process for other municipalities to qualify. This is the most coherent option. It would treat the three existing cities consistently and give towns like Paradise and Conception Bay South a clear, rules-based path.

Route 3: City status within a regional framework.
If the province creates a regional body for the Northeast Avalon, city designation could be tied to a municipality’s role in that framework. For example, a municipality that anchors certain regional services or meets defined thresholds could be designated a city. This would link civic ambition to regional responsibility rather than setting them against each other.

7.3 What a qualification process might contain

The following is an illustrative framework drawn from mechanisms already in provincial law. It is not an existing or proposed government policy.

  1. Population threshold. A minimum population, set with reference to the smallest existing city. Corner Brook’s population of about 19,000 suggests a threshold near 20,000, which both Paradise and Conception Bay South exceed.
  2. Fiscal capacity. Evidence of stable finances, such as audited statements, a sustainable debt level, and the capacity to take on any added responsibilities without provincial support.
  3. Governance capacity. Professional administration, including a town manager, clerk, and department structure, which the towns law already allows.
  4. Local consent. A council resolution followed by a plebiscite. Towns can already hold plebiscites by a two-thirds council vote.
  5. Independent review with public hearings. A feasibility report modelled on the process used for incorporations, amalgamations, and boundary changes. That process appoints commissioners with inquiry powers and requires a public hearing in the affected area.
  6. Regional impact assessment. Consultation with neighbouring municipalities and the regional service committees, confirming that city status would not disrupt shared fire, water, wastewater, or transit arrangements.
  7. Designation by legislation or order. Either a short amendment adding the municipality to the cities act, or authority for cabinet to designate a qualifying municipality by order.

7.4 Practical steps for a town now

A town with civic ambitions could prepare for any of these routes without waiting for new legislation:

  1. Have council formally state its intention and the reasons for it. The key question is what a city could do that a town under the 2023 law cannot.
  2. Commission a costing and governance study, including effects on taxation, grants, and shared services.
  3. Consult residents, possibly through a plebiscite.
  4. Coordinate with neighbouring municipalities and regional service partners so the request is not seen as a move against regional cooperation.
  5. Ask the province, directly and through the municipal association, to include a qualification process in the rewrite of the city acts.
  6. Engage the area’s members of the House of Assembly, since any change ultimately requires legislation.

7.5 The central tension

Civic ambition and regional integration can pull in opposite directions. Creating more cities could strengthen local identity and lock in existing boundaries just when regional planners want closer integration. On the other hand, a clear and rules-based pathway could make large towns more willing to commit to regional arrangements, because their status and identity would be secure. The province’s choices on the cities act and on regional governance will largely determine which of these outcomes prevails. Taking those decisions together, rather than separately, would give the region a more coherent result.

8. Conclusion

The Northeast Avalon already functions as a region in many practical ways. Residents of St. John’s, Mount Pearl, and Paradise are served by the same fire department, water system, wastewater system, and bus service. What the region lacks is a formal regional government. The province considered one in 2022 and rejected it in 2023, and the replacement for the 1976 regional plan remains unfinished. The most realistic near-term future is continued expansion of shared services by agreement, possibly through jointly owned service corporations. A full regional council is possible only if a future government takes a region-specific approach to the capital area.

For Paradise, Conception Bay South, and any other town with civic ambitions, no legal pathway to city status exists today. The best opportunity to create one is the province’s planned rewrite of city legislation. A general cities act with clear qualification criteria, local consent, independent review, and attention to regional impacts would give growing towns a fair route to city status while keeping the region’s cooperative arrangements intact.

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Cities and Towns in Newfoundland and Labrador: What the Three City Acts Establish and Where Provincial Municipal Law Is Heading: A White Paper

Posted on September 27, 2026 by nathanalbright

1. Summary

Newfoundland and Labrador has three kinds of general-purpose local government: cities, towns, and local service districts. The distinction between a city and a town is not based on population. It rests on where each municipality’s authority comes from. Each of the three cities (St. John’s, Corner Brook, and Mount Pearl) is governed by its own statute, passed specifically for it. Every town is governed by one general statute, the Towns and Local Service Districts Act of 2023. A close reading of the three city acts shows that the practical differences between cities and towns now involve council structure, historical property holdings, specialized services, and taxation more than any sweeping grant of extra autonomy. In several respects the 2023 towns law is more modern and permissive than the city acts, which date mostly from the 1970s and 1980s. The province has said the city acts will be rewritten next, using the towns law as the model. That work has not yet been completed.

2. The Legal Framework

Cities. The province’s own review materials describe the arrangement directly: each city has its own legislation which governs how it functions and operates (City of St. John’s Act, City of Mount Pearl Act and City of Corner Brook Act).

Towns. The 2023 towns law defines “city” as a closed list: the City of St. John’s, the City of Corner Brook, and the City of Mount Pearl. Everything else incorporated as a general municipality is a town. The provincial cabinet may, on the minister’s recommendation, incorporate an area as a town, amalgamate towns, annex areas, establish and alter boundaries, and disincorporate a town. That list includes no power to create a city.

Historical meaning of the distinction. Traditionally, a “city” in this province meant a municipality with greater autonomy from the provincial government than a “town” of similar size. St. John’s was incorporated as Newfoundland’s first city, and as a city it had more autonomy on the raising and spending of money.

Chronology of the city acts. The province’s legislative history records that Corner Brook’s first city act came into force in 1955 and was replaced in 1985, and that the City of Mount Pearl Act came into force in 1988. The St. John’s act is older still. Its current consolidation cites provisions carried over from the 1970 revised statutes.

3. What the Three City Acts Establish

3.1 Corporate identity and boundaries

All three acts continue the city as a corporation under its own name. St. John’s residents are continued as a corporation by the name of the City of St. John’s, and its boundaries may be enlarged or reduced by cabinet order. Mount Pearl and Corner Brook follow a more procedural model. In Mount Pearl, cabinet may alter boundaries, amalgamate towns with the city, or annex areas only subject to a feasibility report. Corner Brook’s act requires the minister to order a feasibility report before any boundary recommendation, and the person preparing it must hold public hearings. The towns law uses a similar feasibility-report process but makes it discretionary: the minister may order such a report before recommending a change.

3.2 Council size and structure

This is one of the clearest differences.

  • St. John’s has a council fixed by statute. It consists of a mayor, deputy mayor, and nine councillors, and the council may reduce the councillors to seven by a two-thirds by-law, subject to cabinet approval. Both the mayor and deputy mayor are elected offices.
  • Mount Pearl and Corner Brook use a shared model. Each council consists of a mayor and not fewer than six councillors as prescribed by the minister, and the mayor must be elected at large in a separate election. In Corner Brook, the deputy mayor is chosen by council from among the councillors.
  • Towns must have an odd number of councillors, not fewer than five and not more than nine, though a town may exceed the maximum with ministerial approval. A town has a separately elected mayor only if the minister directs it or the council chooses it by a two-thirds vote. Otherwise council elects the mayor from among its members.

A guaranteed, separately elected mayor is therefore a defining feature of all three cities. In towns it is optional.

Wards. All three city councils may create wards. St. John’s council may do so by a two-thirds by-law and may also fix at-large seats. Towns may also create wards, but the towns law adds constraints. Wards cannot be changed within 12 months after or 6 months before a general election, and at-large councillors must outnumber ward councillors.

3.3 Law-making authority

The city acts and the towns law grant power in different ways.

The St. John’s act gives council power to make by-laws to carry out the powers and functions the act assigns, provided they are not contrary to provincial law. By-laws take effect on publication in the Gazette. Corner Brook’s council adopts “regulations” by resolution and must send certified copies to the minister within 14 days.

The 2023 towns law moved to a broader model. A town now has the capacity, rights, powers and privileges of a natural person for town purposes. Its powers are to be interpreted broadly, on the stated basis that a town is a responsible and accountable level of government. The law also lists wide-ranging discretionary by-law subjects, from public safety and business regulation to parks, heritage, and environmental protection.

The result is somewhat ironic. On paper, the general grant of authority to towns is now more modern and flexible than the enumerated-powers structure in the older city acts. This is one reason the province has committed to rewriting the city acts.

3.4 Finance and provincial oversight

On routine financial oversight, cities and towns look very similar.

  • Budgets. Corner Brook must adopt its budget by December 1 in a form the minister prescribes and send a copy to the minister. Towns must do the same, and proposed expenditures may not exceed anticipated revenues.
  • Short-term borrowing. Mount Pearl’s current-account borrowing may not exceed 20% of its estimated tax yield, grants-in-lieu, and assured revenue. Corner Brook has the same cap and may exceed it only with the minister’s prior written approval. Towns have exactly the same 20% rule.
  • Long-term borrowing. Corner Brook’s capital borrowing is subject to the approval of the minister, as is capital borrowing for towns.
  • Deficit intervention. Where Corner Brook has incurred major deficits, the minister may require it to submit its budget for approval. Towns are subject to the same provision.

For Corner Brook and Mount Pearl, and for towns, city status has not meant freedom from provincial financial supervision. The main financial difference lies in taxation and in St. John’s unusual arrangements.

3.5 Taxation

  • St. John’s has its own taxation statute. Its act refers to the City of St. John’s Municipal Taxation Act, for example in authorizing business improvement area levies. The act’s table of contents still lists historic headings such as a court of revision, a ground landlords’ tax, a fuel oil tax, and an entertainment tax. It is not clear from the table of contents alone how many of these are still in active use.
  • Corner Brook must impose a real property tax and may set different rates for residential and commercial property. It must also impose an annual business tax on everyone carrying on business in the city. Its act still contains a poll tax provision allowing an annual tax of not less than $50 on residents 18 and older.
  • Towns must impose a real property tax and may create classes and subclasses of property for that purpose. The 2023 law also gives towns a direct sellers tax and a tourist accommodation tax. It removed the poll tax, which the minister said still existed in more than 40 communities, and noted that Newfoundland and Labrador was the last province with such taxes.

Here too the towns law has moved ahead of at least one city act. Corner Brook’s statute still carries a poll tax provision that the province abolished for towns.

3.6 Property, services, and institutions unique to a city

The city acts differ most sharply from the towns law in their long lists of particular assets, services, and institutions. This is especially true of St. John’s.

  • Vested lands and waters. All streets and roads within St. John’s are vested in the city. The waters of Quidi Vidi Lake and the land beneath them are vested absolutely in the city, and the act names specific parks, such as Bannerman Park.
  • Regional water supply. St. John’s has a statutory duty to convey a sufficient supply of wholesome water from Windsor Lake and other lakes. It has possession and control of named water bodies, including Petty Harbour Long Pond, and may impound water to supply areas outside the city.
  • A regional fire service. The St. John’s act contains a full part on the St. John’s Regional Fire Department, including provisions on the firefighters’ association, a no-strike clause, and binding arbitration.
  • Offices of the mayor. The St. John’s mayor is by virtue of office a justice of the peace within the city limits.
  • Commissions and development powers. St. John’s may appoint a traffic commission to exercise powers delegated under the Highway Traffic Act. It may also designate urban development or renewal areas and expropriate, demolish, or lease land within them.

Corner Brook’s act includes its own powers over a public transportation system and transportation commission, libraries, cemeteries, heritage areas, and receivership. Many of these now have counterparts in the towns law, which gives towns heritage, business improvement area, and economic development powers.

4. The Essential Differences in Summary

Based on the three statutes, the differences between a city and a town in Newfoundland and Labrador come down to the following:

  1. Source of authority. A city exists under a charter written for it alone. A town exists under a general law applied to every town. Changing a city’s powers requires amending its own act in the House of Assembly. A town’s powers change whenever the general law changes.
  2. Council structure. Cities are guaranteed a separately elected mayor. St. John’s has a fixed council of eleven. Towns have five to nine councillors and may or may not directly elect their mayors.
  3. Specific assets and services. The city acts hand particular lands, waters, parks, utilities, and institutions to the city by name. St. John’s is the extreme case, with a statutory role in regional water and fire services.
  4. Taxation. St. John’s has a separate taxation statute. Corner Brook’s act retains older taxation forms. Towns now operate under a newer and more uniform tax framework.
  5. Oversight. Provincial financial oversight of Corner Brook and Mount Pearl is largely the same as for towns, including borrowing limits, ministerial approval of long-term debt, and budget intervention in deficit situations.

In practical terms, city status in this province functions as a statutory identity and a set of inherited arrangements more than a broad class of added powers. Since 2023, towns have in several respects received the more modern grant of authority.

5. What the Province Is Seeking to Do

5.1 The 2023 reform of town law

The provincial government described the Towns and Local Service Districts Act as modern and enabling, replacing the Municipalities Act, 1999. Its stated aims included:

  • broad by-law powers and more flexibility for towns in enforcing them;
  • fewer situations requiring ministerial approval;
  • more public oversight of open and closed meetings;
  • eliminating or minimizing regressive taxes;
  • more flexibility in raising tax revenue, along with tools for tax affordability; and
  • more tools for economic development.

The minister said the law moves towns into a permissive frame in which their by-laws can be wide-ranging. He also noted that towns could now operate recreational facilities, something larger communities had long wanted but were not allowed to do.

5.2 The next step: rewriting the three city acts

The government stated from the outset that the towns law would inform the drafting of new legislation for Mount Pearl, Corner Brook and St. John’s. The cities themselves were not affected by the 2023 changes, since they have their own pieces of legislation with the province.

That second phase has not been completed. Ahead of the 2025 provincial election, Municipalities Newfoundland and Labrador stated that the three Cities Acts governing St. John’s, Mount Pearl, and Corner Brook still require an update. Public reporting located for this paper does not show a replacement cities bill tabled since then. The evident direction is to bring the cities under a framework resembling the 2023 towns law: natural-person powers, broad interpretation of municipal authority, updated taxation, and modern meeting and accountability rules. The unresolved question is whether that happens through three rewritten acts or through a single general cities statute.

5.3 Regional governance

Alongside the legislative rewrite, the province has returned repeatedly to the question of regional government. In 2022, a joint working group recommended about 25 regional governments, with final implementation in late 2024. Each region would have an elected council of 15 members, and municipalities would keep their own councils. That timeline was not met. By 2025 the municipal association was urging the province to return to the table and continue developing a formalized approach to municipal cooperation within a regional framework. The department’s current planning work includes consultation on a St. John’s Urban Region Regional Plan, which covers the capital area where all three cities except Corner Brook, and several of the largest towns, are located.

5.4 The present government

A Progressive Conservative government under Premier Tony Wakeham took office after the October 2025 election. Barry Petten now serves as Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs, having taken the portfolio in 2026. Government statements during 2026 have been general. For example, during Municipal Awareness Week the government said it is committed to working with municipal leaders, listening, and solving problems together. Specific commitments on the timing or form of new cities legislation have not been publicly identified. The department’s website links to the minister’s mandate letter, which would be the most direct source for the government’s current priorities.

6. Implications and Open Questions

  • For the existing cities. St. John’s, Mount Pearl, and Corner Brook currently operate under older charters, while their neighbouring towns operate under newer and more flexible law. Updating the city acts would remove that mismatch.
  • For large towns. No statute sets criteria for a town to become a city. Any future cities framework could either keep the closed list of three or create a general pathway, such as a population threshold or a petition-and-feasibility process, by which a large town like Paradise or Conception Bay South could apply. Whether the province includes such a pathway is one of the more consequential choices ahead.
  • For regional governance. If regional governments are revived, the city/town distinction may matter less than how municipalities relate to the regional tier. This is especially relevant in the St. John’s area, where regional water and fire services already cross municipal lines.

7. Conclusion

The three city acts show that a city in Newfoundland and Labrador is defined above all by having its own charter. With that come a guaranteed, directly elected mayor, a set of named properties and institutions, and in St. John’s case a distinct taxation regime and a statutory role in regional services. In day-to-day financial oversight, Corner Brook and Mount Pearl are treated much like towns. The 2023 reform gave towns a modern, permissive grant of authority that in several respects surpasses the older city charters. The province’s stated next step is to modernize the city acts along the same lines. The municipal sector continues to press for that work, and for a renewed approach to regional cooperation, but no replacement legislation has yet been introduced.

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City Status for the Town of Paradise, Newfoundland and Labrador: Where the Question Stands: A White Paper for Residents

Posted on September 27, 2026 by nathanalbright

1. Summary

Paradise is now one of the largest municipalities in Newfoundland and Labrador. By population it is larger than two of the province’s three cities, yet it is still legally a town. The main reason is not size. Newfoundland and Labrador has no general procedure that turns a town into a city. Each of the province’s cities exists because the House of Assembly passed a separate law for that city alone. For Paradise to become a city, the provincial government would have to write, introduce, and pass a new “City of Paradise Act.” As of this writing, the public record shows no such bill and no formal application from the town. The town studied the idea about a decade ago. The province has also still not finished modernizing the laws of its three existing cities. Those two facts go a long way toward explaining why nothing has happened.

2. How Large Paradise Has Become

Paradise was a farming and railway-side area for most of its history. It grew into a commuter community for St. John’s. The 2021 Census counted 22,957 people in Paradise, up 7.3% from 21,389 in 2016. A 2025 CBC report described it as Newfoundland and Labrador’s third-largest municipality. The town also says it has the youngest average-aged population in Newfoundland and Labrador.

The three cities for comparison:

  • St. John’s is by far the largest, with 110,525 residents in 2021.
  • Corner Brook is the smallest city by population in the province, with 19,333 residents, which is well below Paradise.
  • Mount Pearl had roughly 22,500 people in 2021, which is about the same as Paradise or a little fewer. It is also the smallest by land area, with 15.65 km2, while Paradise covers nearly twice that area.

Population is clearly not what separates Paradise from Mount Pearl. The difference is legal history.

3. What the Law Requires

Cities are created one at a time by statute. The province’s own background material explains that each city has its own legislation which governs how it functions and operates (City of St. John’s Act, City of Mount Pearl Act and City of Corner Brook Act). Corner Brook became a city in 1955, and a replacement Corner Brook act followed in 1985. The City of Mount Pearl Act came into force in 1988.

The general municipal law covers towns only. Paradise is governed by the Towns and Local Service Districts Act, which received assent on November 16, 2023 and replaced the Municipalities Act, 1999. That Act defines “city” as a closed list: the City of St. John’s, the City of Corner Brook, and the City of Mount Pearl. Under it, the Lieutenant-Governor in Council, on the minister’s recommendation, may incorporate an area in the province as a town or amalgamate towns. It says nothing about promoting a town to a city. The minister can make certain changes by order, such as change the name of a town, but “town” to “city” is not something an order can do.

There are no written criteria. When Paradise first looked into the question, the provincial Department of Municipal Affairs noted that it’s been 25 years since a town has become a city in the province, and a spokesperson said there were no specific criteria. No population threshold, tax base test, or service checklist in provincial law automatically qualifies a town. The decision is political and legislative.

What city status has meant historically. The provincial heritage site describes the traditional distinction: a city has greater autonomy from the provincial government than a “town” of similar size, and in St. John’s case that meant more autonomy on the raising and spending of money.

In practical terms, city status for Paradise would require:

  1. A decision by Paradise town council to seek it, ideally after public consultation and a costing study.
  2. A formal request to the Minister responsible for municipal affairs.
  3. Policy work by the department on what powers, council structure, taxation rules, and transition terms a Paradise city charter would contain.
  4. Drafting of a City of Paradise Act by the province’s legislative counsel.
  5. Passage of the bill through the House of Assembly (first, second, and third reading, committee stage) and royal assent.
  6. Proclamation and a transition period covering by-laws, contracts, staff, and possibly the timing of the next municipal election.

4. What Has Actually Happened

The 2015 study. Around 2015, under Mayor Dan Bobbett, the town looked into the question. CBC reported that chief administrative officer Rodney Cumby is looking into the question with the intention of bringing a recommendation back to council. Bobbett suggested there might be some benefit for governance and enforcing regulations from a municipal enforcement point-of-view. He also acknowledged that approval for city status will have to be granted by the provincial government, but Bobbett says there’s no rush to apply. He denied that the change would bring tax increases.

No public follow-through. Public reporting does not show that council ever adopted a formal resolution to apply, that an application went to the province, or that a bill was drafted. Some ceremonial or internal steps may exist that were not publicly reported, but no visible process is underway.

Leadership change in 2025. Bobbett led the town for twelve years and then stepped away from municipal politics to run as a Liberal candidate in the provincial election. His successor, Patrick Martin, said his priorities were traffic congestion, water pressure concerns in the Elizabeth Park subdivision and illegal ATV use on town roads. City status was not among the stated priorities.

5. Why It Has Not Happened Yet

(a) The province has not finished updating its existing city laws. When the new towns law was introduced in 2023, the minister said it would inform drafting of new legislation for the cities of Mount Pearl, Corner Brook and the City of St. John’s. By the 2025 provincial election, Municipalities Newfoundland and Labrador was still pointing out that the three Cities Acts governing St. John’s, Mount Pearl, and Corner Brook still require an update. A government that has not yet rewritten three existing city charters is unlikely to write a fourth from scratch. It is more likely to settle the model for cities first, whether that means three updated acts or one general cities act, and then decide whether Paradise fits it.

(b) The practical gap between towns and cities has narrowed. The 2023 Act gave towns much broader authority. The minister described it as moving towns into a permissive frame in which they can make wide-ranging by-laws. Towns also gained the ability to operate recreational facilities, which larger communities had wanted for years. Many of the practical advantages Paradise might once have gained from a city charter are now available to it as a town. That weakens the case for spending political effort on a new statute.

(c) The regional question on the Northeast Avalon is unsettled. Paradise shares borders with St. John’s, Mount Pearl, Conception Bay South, and Portugal Cove–St. Philip’s. The municipal association has urged the province toward a formalized, planned approach to municipal cooperation within a regional framework. Any government considering a new city in the capital region would have to think about how it affects regional services, cost-sharing, and future amalgamation debates. Creating a fourth city could be seen as locking in the current boundary pattern before those questions are answered.

(d) No sustained push from the town itself. The province has no application to act on. The 2015 inquiry was described as exploratory, and the present council has focused on growth-related infrastructure problems.

(e) Changes in government at both levels. Paradise changed mayors in 2025. The province held a general election in October 2025 that brought a change of governing party. New governments usually spend their early years on their own platform commitments, and municipal charter work has lower priority.

6. Issues That Would Need to Be Resolved

  • Purpose. Council would need to state clearly what city status would let Paradise do that the 2023 towns law does not. Otherwise the change is mainly symbolic.
  • Cost. A study would need to cover new legal, administrative, signage, and branding costs, plus any change in provincial grant or cost-sharing formulas.
  • Taxation powers. The existing cities have their own taxation provisions. The province would need to decide whether Paradise would receive similar powers.
  • Council structure. A decision would be needed on whether to keep at-large councillors or move to wards, and how many councillors a city of this size should have.
  • Regional fit. The province would need to be satisfied that a new city does not complicate regional service arrangements on the Northeast Avalon.
  • The model for cities. Paradise would benefit from waiting to see whether the province adopts a single modern cities act. That would make adding a new city far simpler than drafting a stand-alone charter.
  • Public support. Residents would need to be consulted. When the idea first arose, residents disagreed about whether it would change anything besides the name.

7. A Realistic Timeline

Because no formal process exists, any timeline is an estimate. It is based on how municipal legislation has moved in this province, not on any announced schedule.

  • Near term (1–2 years): The most likely activity is the province continuing work on updated legislation for the existing cities. Paradise could use this period to decide by council resolution whether it wants city status, and to ask the province to consider Paradise when the cities framework is redesigned.
  • Medium term (3–5 years): If the province produces a general cities act or a clear template, and Paradise formally applies, a City of Paradise Act or an amendment adding Paradise could move through the House within one or two legislative sessions.
  • If nothing changes: If neither the town nor the province takes the first step, Paradise will remain a town indefinitely, however large it grows. Nothing in current law changes its status automatically.

A reasonable expectation is that city status is at least several years away, and that it depends mostly on two decisions: Paradise council formally asking for it, and the province deciding how cities should be governed in the future.

8. Conclusion

Paradise is not a town because it is too small. It is larger than Corner Brook and about equal to Mount Pearl. It remains a town because city status in Newfoundland and Labrador comes only through a special act of the legislature. Paradise has not formally requested one, and the province has not yet finished updating the laws of the cities it already has. The 2023 towns law also gave Paradise much of the practical authority a city charter once represented, which has reduced the urgency. Residents who want to see progress should raise the question with the mayor and council and with their Members of the House of Assembly. Those are the two places where the process would have to begin.

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Imported Capacity: Staffing and Coordination at Small Feast of Tabernacles Sites

Posted on September 27, 2026 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary

Feast of Tabernacles sites differ widely in size, from large gatherings of several hundred people to small sites where fewer than a hundred worshipers meet in a rented hall. This paper examines a small site near St. John’s, Newfoundland, where about fifty people meet in a Lions Club hall. The local host congregation there has nine members, and more attendees are connected to the Tampa area than to the host congregation.

At this site, skilled responsibilities are concentrated heavily on a few experienced people, while generic volunteer roles are oversubscribed and go unused. Registration data on volunteer skills, though collected, overstated the capacity actually available. The paper argues that these conditions follow from a structural fact: the need for skilled roles at the Feast is largely fixed, while the supply of people able and ready to fill them grows with attendance. Below a certain size, a site cannot meet that fixed need without overloading whoever is available, and inaccurate skill data makes the shortfall harder to see in time. The paper estimates where the relevant thresholds lie and recommends practices for sites operating below them.

Scriptural Framework

The Feast of Tabernacles is a commanded assembly (Leviticus 23:33–43; Deuteronomy 16:13–15), and it was always meant to include people who were not permanent residents of the place where it was kept. The command to rejoice includes the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow “within thy gates” (Deuteronomy 16:14). Hosting and receiving guests is built into the festival itself.

Scripture also treats the concentration of burden on a few capable leaders as a problem to be corrected. Jethro warned Moses that carrying the judging of the people alone would wear out both Moses and the people (Exodus 18:17–23). God later spread the burden of leadership among seventy elders (Numbers 11:16–17). The apostles appointed seven men to handle the daily distribution so the Twelve could keep to prayer and the ministry of the word (Acts 6:1–6). Paul described the church as a body in which every member has a function and no member can say it has no need of the others (1 Corinthians 12:14–25). Paul also expected that preparation precede service, instructing that those who serve first be proved (1 Timothy 3:10).

Together these passages set the standard used below: a well-ordered assembly spreads its responsibilities according to the abilities God has provided, confirms that those abilities are ready for use, and neither overloads its most visible servants nor leaves willing members without a place to serve.

Case Description

The Newfoundland site shows the following features.

Attendance and venue. About fifty people meet in a Lions Club hall in a small town outside St. John’s. The hall’s size limits how many people are needed in some roles at once.

Host congregation. The local congregation has nine members. Two of them hold the keys to the building. The host congregation makes up less than a fifth of those attending.

Visitor composition. Eleven attendees are connected to Tampa, more than the host congregation. Most other attendees are also transfers from elsewhere.

Coordinator assignment. The festival coordinator, who serves on the church’s Canadian board, told the local pastor he planned to attend and was then assigned to coordinate the site.

Assignment by inquiry. One attendee who asked who was coordinating special music was given that role.

Registration data. Registration for the Feast includes checkboxes for the ways a member can volunteer. At this site, four registrants were listed as able to play keyboard. Only two could play, and both needed far more practice time than was available to learn the music scheduled for services.

Equipment lead time. No keyboard was available at the site until shortly before the Feast.

Special music concentration. The special music coordinator took on three vocal solos to make sure every special music slot was filled. The same person also led songs, was asked to give an opening prayer, is scheduled for a sermonette, is preparing a duet, and is choosing the music, supplying sheet music, distributing practice recordings, rehearsing, and performing three pieces with a small festival ensemble. That amounts to about ten skilled slots, plus the work of coordination.

Songleading concentration. Most songleading assignments fell to two people: one local member and one visiting minister. That minister, a pastor from the church’s Kelowna congregation taking a rare year off from organizing a Feast site, was also placed in charge of the sound crew and given speaking assignments.

Speaking concentration. All three ministers present carry several speaking assignments along with backup assignments.

Prayer concentration. Most names on the prayer list are people who are also speakers or songleaders. One of the few exceptions was a visiting member recruited for an opening prayer by another attendee.

Unused volunteers. Other attendees signed up as ushers and greeters. The site needed only a few such helpers, and the extra volunteers were never told their help would not be needed.

Venue schedule friction. The keyholders had to be told to arrive at least an hour before services so sound checks and music rehearsals could take place. A nine-member congregation never needs such a schedule during the rest of the year.

Analysis

Two labor markets at one site

The case reveals two separate volunteer markets at the same site.

The first covers skilled and trust-dependent roles: coordination, sound operation, songleading, instrumental accompaniment, special music, prayers, sermonettes, and sermons. These roles require either a specific ability, such as running a sound board or leading congregational singing, or standing in the church, as with preaching. At this site, that market was badly short of supply.

The second covers generic roles: ushering, greeting, and similar help. These roles require only willingness. Conscientious visitors who want to serve without taking a leading role naturally gravitate to them. At this site, that market had more supply than demand.

The two markets do not balance each other. A surplus of willing ushers does nothing to relieve a shortage of songleaders or keyboardists, because the skills do not transfer on short notice.

Fixed demand, variable supply

The central structural fact is that demand for skilled roles depends mainly on the number of services, not the number of attendees. Every service at a site of fifty needs a songleader, prayers, a message or messages, special music, and someone running sound, just as it would at a site of five hundred. Demand for generic roles, by contrast, grows with attendance and hall size. A site of fifty needs few ushers; a site of five hundred needs many.

The pool of people qualified for skilled roles, however, is a fraction of attendance. Small sites therefore face a fixed load of skilled responsibility spread across a small qualified pool, while their need for generic help stays small. This one relationship accounts for both the overloaded specialists and the idle ushers.

The reliability of self-reported skills

Registration checkboxes measure what a member believes about their own ability, often shaped by past experience and good will. They do not measure whether that ability is ready for use at a given site. The keyboard case illustrates three separate gaps.

  1. Capability versus readiness. A person who plays keyboard at home may be unable to play hymn arrangements for congregational singing without extensive practice.
  2. Readiness versus lead time. Even a capable player needs to know the music in advance. If song selections and a working instrument are not available until close to the Feast, capability cannot turn into service.
  3. Skill versus equipment. A skill that depends on equipment is only as available as the equipment. A site without a keyboard effectively has no keyboardists, however many boxes were checked.

Self-reported data therefore tends to overstate capacity in exactly the roles where a shortfall is hardest to fix on short notice. Organizers who trust the checkboxes may believe a gap is covered until it is too late to cover it another way. The shortfall then falls on whoever is present and willing to absorb it, which in this case meant the special music coordinator taking on additional solos and ensemble work.

Assignment by proximity

When organizers cannot know until late which experienced people will actually travel to a remote site, and cannot rely fully on registration data, formal sign-up processes lose their usefulness for the scarce roles. Organizers fill gaps face to face with whoever is present, visible, and evidently capable. At such a site, announcing plans to attend, asking about a role, or showing competence is treated as volunteering. That explains how both the festival coordinator and the special music coordinator came to their roles, and why the sign-up process for generic roles was left unmanaged. Organizers’ attention went to the critical gaps, and closing the loop with surplus volunteers was a courtesy that fell away.

Concentration across role types

The concentration at this site is not limited to the most demanding roles. It extends to prayer, which has the lowest barrier of any skilled role. Opening and closing prayers need no special training, no equipment, and no rehearsal, yet the prayer list is drawn mostly from people already speaking or songleading.

That points to a recruiting pattern, not just a supply shortage. Once organizers have identified a small set of dependable people, they return to that set for every kind of assignment, including those that others could easily fill. The dependable few become the default for everything, which compounds their load and keeps the rest of the attendance at the edges of participation.

The exceptions at this site, a local member among the songleaders and a visiting member recruited for prayer, show that the pool can be widened when someone makes a deliberate effort to reach beyond the usual names.

The host-minority problem

When the host congregation is a small minority of attendance, the site stops being a local congregation hosting guests. It becomes a temporary congregation assembled from elsewhere, using the host congregation’s building access and local relationships. The host’s contribution becomes mostly custodial and relational: keys, venue arrangements, knowledge of the town, and continuity from one year to the next. That contribution is essential, since there is no site without it. The organizing capacity of the Feast, however, has to be imported.

This creates a knowledge gap in both directions. The hosts know the building and the town but have no experience of the demands of an eight-day festival with rehearsals and sound checks. The visiting organizers know those demands but depend on the hosts for access. The keyholders’ arrival time reflects that gap. The local routine was reasonable for a weekly congregation of nine and had no reason to anticipate the schedule of a larger event.

Year-to-year volatility

Because the organizing capacity arrives by airplane, it changes every year. In a year when a board member, an experienced pastor, and a willing music coordinator happen to attend, the site is in capable hands, even if those individuals are overworked. In a year without them, the same site could have similar attendance and very little ability to run services well. A site below the threshold is therefore not just strained; its capacity is unpredictable, and unreliable registration data makes that unpredictability harder to anticipate.

Estimating the Threshold

The following estimate is illustrative. It rests on stated assumptions rather than measured data, and any site can substitute its own figures.

Assumptions

  • Services. An eight-day Feast including the Last Great Day, with some doubled services on holy days, runs about ten services.
  • Skilled slots per service. Each service requires roughly seven skilled slots: a songleader, an opening prayer, a closing prayer, a sermonette, a sermon, special music, and a sound operator. That totals about seventy skilled slots, plus standing roles such as coordinator, sound lead, and music coordinator, and additional rehearsal-dependent work such as ensemble pieces.
  • Qualified fraction. About one in five attendees is qualified, ready, and willing to fill at least one kind of skilled slot. The fraction is lower for speaking roles, which are limited to ordained men and approved sermonette speakers, and lower for instrumental roles, which depend on both equipment and preparation time.
  • Sustainable load. A person can carry about three or four skilled slots over eight days without the Feast becoming a work assignment instead of a festival.

Result

Under these assumptions, seventy slots at three or four per person requires about twenty qualified participants. With a qualified fraction of one in five, that implies attendance of roughly eighty to one hundred twenty.

At fifty attendees, the qualified pool is about ten people, each averaging six or seven skilled slots if the load were spread evenly. In practice it is not spread evenly. At this site at least one participant carries about ten skilled slots plus coordination duties, and several others carry heavy loads in speaking and songleading. Observed concentration is therefore two to three times the sustainable level, which suggests the model’s threshold estimate is, if anything, conservative.

Three regimes

  1. Fragile sites (below roughly 60 attendees). Skilled responsibilities fall on a handful of people. Capacity depends on who happens to come. Generic volunteers go largely unused.
  2. Transitional sites (roughly 60 to 150 attendees). The skilled load can be spread reasonably if assignments are planned and skills verified in advance. Without planning, these sites still drift toward overloading their most visible members.
  3. Established sites (above roughly 150 attendees). Skilled roles are easy to spread. Generic roles grow enough to absorb volunteers usefully. Friction does not disappear at this size, since lodging, transportation, and administrative layers bring their own problems, but the particular strain described in this paper largely goes away.

The host threshold

A second threshold applies to the host congregation independently of total attendance. A Feast site has perhaps eight to ten standing roles that benefit from familiarity with the venue and local area: building access, setup and teardown, equipment, venue liaison, local transportation knowledge, and similar tasks. A host congregation of roughly twenty to thirty active adult members can fill these roles from its own people and supply continuity from year to year. Below that size, standing roles fall to visitors who do not know the venue, or to one or two locals who become bottlenecks, as the keyholders did.

The smoothest coordination occurs when a site clears both thresholds: enough total attendance to spread the skilled load, and a host congregation large enough to staff venue roles. The Newfoundland site falls short of both, which is why its strains are so visible.

Recommendations

For sites operating below either threshold, the following practices can reduce friction without requiring the site to grow.

  1. Verify and schedule self-reported skills. Registration already collects volunteer information. Organizers should follow up before the Feast with each person who indicates a musical or technical skill, confirm what that person can realistically do, and send music selections early enough for practice. Registration can also ask more precise questions, such as whether a person can play hymn accompaniment given a stated number of weeks’ preparation, instead of simply whether the person plays.
  2. Secure equipment early. Treat skill-dependent equipment, such as a keyboard or sound gear, as a precondition for assigning the related roles, and confirm it is in place well before the Feast.
  3. Track total load per person. Keep a single list showing every assignment each person holds across speaking, songleading, special music, ensemble work, prayer, sound, coordination, and backup roles, so concentration is visible before the schedule is finalized instead of after.
  4. Cap assignments per person. Set a maximum number of skilled slots for any individual, especially for ministers and organizers attending in a year off. Where the cap cannot be met, the shortfall itself is useful information for the next year’s planning.
  5. Reserve low-barrier roles for new participants. Assign prayers, and where suitable Scripture readings or similar duties, first to attendees with no other skilled assignment. That spreads participation, lightens the load on the most heavily assigned people, and helps organizers identify future songleaders and speakers.
  6. Close the loop with generic volunteers. When sign-ups for ushering and greeting exceed need, tell the extra volunteers promptly. Where possible, offer an alternative: setup, teardown, hospitality, or apprenticeship in a skilled role such as sound.
  7. Use the Feast to train. Pair an experienced sound operator, songleader, or accompanist with a willing learner. That turns the surplus in generic roles into a future supply of skilled help, following the pattern of proving before serving.
  8. Give keyholders a written venue schedule. Provide the host congregation’s keyholders with the arrival times required for sound checks and rehearsals well before the Feast, together with a short checklist of setup needs.
  9. Recruit a core transfer team. When a sizable contingent from one area, such as the Tampa group, attends regularly, the site’s organizers can ask that group in advance to supply a core team for particular skilled roles, with skills confirmed before travel. That turns an informal pattern into dependable capacity.
  10. Consider regional arrangements deliberately. Where a site consistently falls below both thresholds, church leadership can weigh whether to keep it as a small site with a deliberately recruited and verified team, or combine it with another site. Small sites have real value for their local members and for those who seek a quieter Feast, so this is a stewardship judgment, not a verdict of failure.

Conclusion

The strains at the Newfoundland Feast site are not signs of poor character or unwilling members. They follow from the arithmetic of a festival whose skilled responsibilities stay nearly fixed while its attendance and host congregation are small, made worse by registration data that overstated the skills actually ready for use. The overloaded minister, the voluntold coordinator, the special music coordinator carrying ten slots, the prayer list drawn from the same few names, the keyboard that arrived late for players who needed more practice time, and the ushers left without instructions are all expressions of the same structure.

The pattern Scripture sets out from Exodus 18 through Acts 6 applies directly: responsibilities should be spread according to the abilities available, those abilities should be proved before they are relied upon, and no willing member should be left without a place to serve. Small sites cannot change the arithmetic, but verification, early preparation, deliberate distribution, and clear communication can bring them much closer to that standard.

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Sorting Without Sufficient Evidence: The Structural Failure of Team Evaluation in NCAA FBS Football: A White Paper

Posted on September 26, 2026 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary

Every competitive league has to answer one basic question: which teams were better this season? Most professional leagues answer it by letting results on the field decide, through balanced schedules, heavy game volume, or fixed rules that turn win-loss records into standings without anyone exercising discretion. NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) football answers it differently. Final standing is set by committee judgment applied to evidence that is thin, clustered, and chosen by the teams themselves. Under those conditions, judgments about the current season lean heavily on reputations built in earlier seasons.

This paper argues that the FBS sorting problem is not caused by the number of teams as such. It comes from a combination of four structural conditions that no other major American league has all at once:

  1. Games per team fall far below the number of possible opponents.
  2. The schedule is organized into tight conference clusters.
  3. The few games linking those clusters are chosen by the schools themselves.
  4. Final placement depends on subjective ranking rather than on a fixed rule.

When all four are present, the evidence from a single season cannot overturn what evaluators believed before it started. Reputation then becomes self-reinforcing, and the sport sorts teams in large part by where they sorted before.

The paper sets out what fair sorting requires, compares FBS with other leagues, traces the mechanisms through which reputation takes over, and closes with reform options graded by how much structural change each demands.

1. The Sorting Problem

A league’s standings make a claim: teams placed higher performed better than teams placed lower. That claim holds up only if the evidence behind it is adequate. Three conditions determine adequacy.

  • Comparability. Teams must be measured against the same or comparable tests. When everyone plays the same opponents, records compare directly. When schedules differ, the records must be adjusted for opponent quality, and the adjustment is only as good as the information connecting the schedules.
  • Volume. Each result in a sport contains some randomness. The fewer the games, the more a record reflects bounces, injuries, weather, and officiating rather than underlying quality. Low-scoring or high-variance sports need more games to separate teams of similar strength.
  • Rule-based conversion. Evidence has to be turned into standings somehow. A fixed rule (win percentage, points, published tiebreakers) is transparent and cannot be swayed by who is doing the evaluating. Discretionary judgment can in principle weigh context better, but it also lets prior beliefs, brand strength, and audience appeal into the result.

A league sorts fairly when it meets these conditions, or when it compensates for a weak one by strengthening another. Leagues differ mainly in which conditions they sacrifice and how they make up for it.

2. How Other Leagues Solve the Problem

Round-robin leagues. European domestic soccer leagues of 18 to 20 clubs use a double round robin: every club plays every other club home and away. Comparability is complete, volume is moderate, and a points rule converts results to standings. When more clubs want top-level competition, the systems add divisions linked by promotion and relegation instead of enlarging the top league. The pyramid is a way of keeping each tier small enough that results on the field can decide it.

High-volume leagues. Major League Baseball has 30 teams playing 162 games. Schedules are unbalanced, but the sheer number of games washes out most differences in schedule strength, and records decide placement.

Rule-bound leagues with partial coverage. The NFL’s 32 teams play 17 games, so each team faces only about half the league. The NFL does not try to fix the resulting incomparability through judgment. It simply accepts it: playoff spots are assigned by record and published tiebreakers. A weaker team from a soft division sometimes gets in ahead of a stronger team from a hard one. The league tolerates that local unfairness in exchange for a process in which no evaluator’s opinion decides anything.

Large-field college sports with brackets. Division I men’s basketball has more than 360 teams and about 30 games each. Evaluation is hard there too, and judgment matters for the at-large bubble. But the tournament bracket is large enough that play on the court, not a committee’s ranking, determines the champion. Judgment is confined to the margins of the field.

Swiss-system competitions. Chess tournaments and the reformatted UEFA Champions League league phase use a different approach. Each participant plays only a fraction of the field, but pairings are assigned by rule according to current results or seeding tiers. Every game is chosen to be informative. A sparse schedule can sort a large field adequately when the pairings are designed for that purpose rather than negotiated.

Each of these systems gives up at least one of the three conditions and makes up for it elsewhere. FBS gives up all three and makes up for none of them.

3. The Structure of FBS in 2026

The 2026 season shows the problem at its largest scale so far. The FBS lists 138 teams for the 2026 season, which runs from August 29 to December 12. The field has grown through repeated FCS promotions. North Dakota State moved from the MVFC to the Mountain West, and Sacramento State from the Big Sky to the MAC. These follow Delaware and Missouri State, which joined Conference USA from FCS in 2025.

Conferences vary widely in size. The Big Ten has 18 members, the Big 12 has 16, the American has 14, the MAC has 13, and Conference USA and the Mountain West each have 10, while Notre Dame and UConn remain independent. None of these conferences plays a full round robin within its own membership, let alone across the subdivision.

The postseason is decided by committee. The CFP Management Committee announced on January 23 that the field would stay at 12 teams for 2026-27, the third straight year at that size. Automatic bids go to the champions of the ACC, Big 12, Big Ten, and SEC, plus the highest-ranked team from the American, Conference USA, Mid-American, Mountain West, Pac-12, and Sun Belt. That last spot is based on ranking, so the team selected need not be a conference champion. The seven remaining spots go to the highest-ranked remaining teams, with no limit per conference, and the top four teams overall receive first-round byes.

So even the one automatic bid set aside for the six lower-resourced conferences depends on the committee’s ranking, not on winning a title on the field. The structure hands nearly every consequential decision to evaluators.

4. The Schedule as a Sparse, Clustered Network

The core of the problem shows up when the FBS schedule is treated as a network: teams are nodes and games are links.

With 138 teams, there are 9,453 possible pairings. Twelve regular-season games per team produce at most 828 games, and fewer involve two FBS teams, because many schools schedule an FCS opponent. Well under a tenth of possible pairings are ever tested. That density falls far short of the standard set by round-robin leagues, where every pairing is tested at least once.

Sparseness alone would be manageable. If each team’s twelve opponents were drawn at random from the whole subdivision, almost every team would be linked to almost every other within two or three steps of shared opponents. Rating models could then compare teams in different regions and conferences with reasonable confidence. Size is not the decisive problem.

The decisive problem is clustering. Most of each team’s schedule is played inside its conference. Typically only three or four games per team fall outside it, and one of those is often against an FCS opponent. As a rough estimate, that leaves two or three FBS nonconference links per team, or a few hundred games in total, to connect ten conferences and two independents. Those links are spread unevenly, concentrated among geographic neighbors and traditional rivals. Some pairs of conferences meet only a handful of times in a season, and some meet only through intermediaries.

In a clustered network, rankings within a conference can be fairly well grounded, because conference members share most of their opponents. Comparing teams across conferences depends entirely on the thin set of links between clusters. Every judgment of the form “a one-loss team in Conference A is better than an undefeated team in Conference B” rests on those few games. Early-season results carry a disproportionate share of the weight, since they are played before teams have settled into form, rosters are fully tested, or injuries have accumulated.

5. Self-Selected Bridges

The links between clusters are not only few. They are chosen.

In most leagues the schedule is imposed by a central authority. In FBS, nonconference schedules are negotiated years in advance by the schools themselves, under incentives that often work against the sport’s need for information. A program worried about its record has reason to schedule opponents it expects to beat. A program worried about its schedule-strength rating has reason to schedule one prominent opponent and several weak ones. Schools from lower-resourced conferences often agree to road games at powerful programs for the guaranteed payment, which produces lopsided results that reveal little about either team.

This creates a selection bias. The games carrying the burden of cross-conference comparison reflect budgets, contract cycles, stadium capacity, and risk management rather than any effort to measure relative strength. A rating model that treats these games as a representative sample treats a curated sample as if it were a random one.

The bias also works against programs trying to build a reputation. A team from a smaller conference that wants to prove itself needs games against highly regarded opponents. Highly regarded opponents gain little from scheduling a dangerous team with a small reputation: winning earns little credit, and losing costs a great deal. The teams with the most to prove get the fewest chances to prove it.

6. Volume and Noise

Football has an unusually small number of games per season, and each game is a noisy measure. Turnovers, special-teams plays, officiating decisions, weather, and injuries to key players can swing a result between teams that are close in quality. Twelve games cannot reliably separate teams of similar strength, even when schedules are identical.

This interacts with the clustering problem in a damaging way. Because cross-conference comparison already rests on few games, the randomness in those specific games carries directly into conference-level reputations. One bad afternoon in September for a conference’s leading team can depress how evaluators view that conference for the whole season, and that view is then applied to every team in it.

7. How Reputation Takes Over

When current-season evidence is thin, evaluators fall back on what they already believed. This is not a character flaw. It is what reasoning under uncertainty looks like. A weather forecaster with limited data relies on seasonal norms, and a committee with limited data relies on its sense of which programs and conferences are strong. The prior belief dominates because the evidence is too weak to move it.

In FBS, that prior is formalized. Preseason polls are published before any game is played. Ohio State was No. 1 in the 2026 preseason AP poll. Such rankings reflect previous seasons, recruiting classes, returning players, and program history. They are reasonable forecasts, but they shape the season they are forecasting in several ways:

  • Anchoring. Teams that start high tend to fall slowly after a loss. Teams that start low or unranked climb slowly after wins. Voters and committee members adjust from where teams began rather than evaluating each season from scratch.
  • Credit transfer through opponents. A loss to a highly ranked team counts as a “quality loss” and costs little. A win over a lowly ranked team counts for little. Because opponents’ rankings themselves reflect preseason reputation, reputation passes from team to team through the schedule.
  • Conference reputation. Teams in conferences considered strong are credited with a hard schedule, often before the opponents have shown they deserve that label. Teams in conferences considered weak must be undefeated to be considered at all.
  • The eye test. Evaluators justify their judgments by talent visible on film, margin of victory, and style of play. These are real indicators, but they correlate with recruiting resources, and recruiting resources correlate with prior success.

The reinforcing loop. Reputation is not static. High rankings bring better recruits, more television exposure, more revenue, and better access to prestigious opponents and postseason games. Those advantages produce stronger teams in later seasons, which confirm the original reputation. Low rankings bring the reverse. The system rewards past standing, and past standing produces future results. Over time the loop can hold the hierarchy of programs in place in ways that on-field results have trouble dislodging.

8. Historical Illustrations

FBS history includes repeated cases where results and judgment diverged in ways a rule-based league would not have allowed:

  • 2004: Auburn went undefeated through an SEC schedule and was left out of the BCS championship game, which matched two other undefeated teams. Utah, also undefeated, had no route to the title game at all.
  • 2017: UCF finished undefeated, won its bowl game against an SEC opponent, and was never seriously considered for the four-team playoff. The school’s claim to a national title highlighted how completely the system had closed off a path for its conference.
  • 2023: Florida State won the ACC unbeaten and was left out of the four-team playoff. The committee cited the injury to its starting quarterback and its weakened performance, an example of discretion overriding the record entirely.
  • 2024: Under the first 12-team format, conference champions received the top four seeds, which gave byes to teams ranked well below No. 4 in the committee’s own rankings. This case shows the opposite problem: a rule tied conference titles to seeding without regard for how strong the conferences were.
  • 2025: The 12-team format produced a champion in Indiana, which beat Miami 27-21 in Miami Gardens, and it sent a No. 10 seed to the title game. A tenth seed reaching the final is evidence that the committee’s rankings and the teams’ actual quality diverged. When a bracket lets teams play each other directly, it can expose errors in the rankings that sparse regular-season evidence could not.

The pattern is consistent: whenever FBS has let results on the field speak through direct competition, it has shown that the rankings were not reliable. The difficulty is that direct competition is available only for a small fraction of the field and only at the end of the season.

9. Why FBS Is Unusually Poor at Sorting

FBS is not the only league with sparse schedules, uneven conferences, or discretionary selection. What sets it apart is that it has all of them at once and nothing to offset them:

ConditionRound-robin soccerMLBNFLD-I basketballFBS
Share of possible opponents facedCompleteHigh (repeated series)About halfLowVery low
Schedule clusteringNoneModerateModerateHighHigh
Cross-cluster games set centrallyYesYesYesMostly noNo
Games per season34–3816217~3012
Placement by fixed ruleYesYesYesPartly (bracket)No
Champion decided mainly by direct playYesYesYesYes (68-team bracket)Partly (12-team bracket)

The last row matters most. The 12-team playoff lets games on the field decide the champion from among twelve teams. Deciding which twelve, and who gets byes, still depends on committee ranking built on the sparse, clustered, self-selected evidence described above. For the roughly 126 teams outside the bracket, a season’s success is judged almost entirely by ranking, not by any rule applied to results.

10. Reform Options

The reforms below are grouped by how much they would change the sport’s structure. Each targets one or more of the four conditions identified earlier.

A. Improve the connecting games (changes to scheduling)

  • Rule-based nonconference scheduling. Some or all nonconference games could be assigned centrally rather than negotiated by the schools. Assignments could follow a Swiss-style principle, pairing teams by the previous season’s ratings across conference lines, so that each cross-conference game is chosen to carry as much information as possible.
  • Late-season crossover games. A set of games scheduled in the final weeks could pair teams across conferences by their current standings. This is similar to Swiss pairing, and it would provide evidence about cross-conference strength at the point in the season when teams are most fully tested.
  • Limits on FCS games. Counting FCS games at a reduced value, or restricting them, would free up spots on the schedule for games that link FBS clusters.

B. Change how evidence is converted to standing (changes to evaluation)

  • Published formula. A transparent rating formula built on results alone, applied without discretion, would replace committee judgment for selection. The formula would still depend on the schedule network, so it works best alongside reform A.
  • No preseason rankings. Holding any official or media rankings until several weeks into the season would weaken anchoring. It would not change the reinforcing loop through recruiting and resources, but it would reduce the direct effect of prior reputation on in-season judgment.
  • Blind review. Committee members could be asked to evaluate résumés with team and conference names removed, at least as a check on their final rankings.

C. Let more of the answer come from direct play (changes to the postseason)

  • Larger bracket with automatic bids. A bracket large enough to include every conference champion with automatic entry, as FCS does with its playoff, would move the decisive comparisons onto the field.
  • Seeding by record within conference. Tying seeding to conference results rather than committee ranking would protect conference champions from judgments of conference strength, at the cost of the problem seen in 2024, when weaker champions received byes.

D. Divide the field (structural change)

  • Tiered divisions. FBS could split into divisions of manageable size, with promotion and relegation between them, following the European model. Each division would be small enough to approach a round robin. This is the most thorough solution and the least likely to be adopted, since it would require programs to accept the risk of relegation and give up the ability to set their own schedules.

Each option involves trade-offs. Central scheduling limits the autonomy and revenue arrangements schools value. Fixed formulas can be gamed and cannot account for injuries or context. Larger brackets lengthen the season for players who are also students. Tiered divisions would undo more than a century of institutional arrangement. The choice among them depends on what the sport values most: fairness of sorting, autonomy of the member institutions, tradition, or revenue.

11. Conclusion

FBS football sorts poorly not because it is large but because its structure prevents a season from producing enough evidence to overturn prior belief. Twelve games, mostly within conferences, linked by a few hundred cross-conference games the schools choose themselves, and converted to standing by discretionary ranking: this combination all but guarantees that reputation fills the gaps evidence leaves open. Reputation then generates the resources that sustain itself, so the hierarchy reproduces itself from year to year.

Other leagues show that large fields can be sorted fairly when a league commits to at least one of these: complete schedules, heavy game volume, rule-based conversion of results, informative pairings, or brackets large enough to decide questions by direct play. FBS has adopted a partial version of the last approach, and the results of its 12-team playoff already suggest how much the committee’s rankings miss. Until the sport addresses how its regular season connects teams and converts results into standing, success in FBS will continue to be judged largely by what was believed before the season started.

Sources:

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