Today marks the start of what is, I believe, the 4000^th city council meeting Mayor Rob Ford has presided over since taking office back in 2010. (I use the mayor’s own arithmetical tools to arrive at that number.) Looking through the meeting’s agenda the thing that immediately jumps out at me is the complete and utter lack of positive input coming from the mayor and his Executive Committee. It’s almost as if he’s mayor in title only.

Where are the major initiatives? The bold going-forwards that will set out directions to deal with the city’s pressing problems? Mayor Ford? Oh right. It’s high school football season.

Anyone else? Councillor Ford? Deputy Mayor? QB Mammoliti? Anyone, anyone? Bueller?

Instead, this is what’s shaping up to be the defining moment of this week’s council meeting. “When Toronto city council kicks off its fall session this week,” Kelly Grant wrote in the Globe and Mail yesterday, “Mayor Rob Ford will have a real shot at a real win on a real issue. If the mayor’s allies succeed in postponing or reversing a plastic-bag ban that Mr. Ford has derided as ‘outright stupid,’ he will have something to celebrate after this summer’s gaffes.”

That, folks, is what you call setting the bar really, really low.

Reversing a vote which was the result of a vote that should’ve never happened in the first place as the key to rebuilding Mayor Ford’s relevance? Halting a ban on single-use plastic bags after successfully nixing the 5 cent fee that had been imposed and which many major retailers still charge can really be classified as ‘a real win on a real issue’? What next, maestro? Watch as our mayor drinks a glass of water while his dummy talks.

Read a list of the examples Mayor Ford will cite as his administration’s major accomplishments to date – cutting councillors’ office budgets, removing the VRT, contracting out waste collection, getting the TTC deemed an essential service, setting city workers’ contracts and avoiding any threat of a strike for 4 years – a pattern emerges. Under the guise of restoring fiscal sanity and respecting the taxpayers, it’s all been about cutting, reducing, eliminating. Getting government out of the business of governing.

I Cut, Therefore I Am.

Of course, none of this comes as much of surprise to anyone who watched Rob Ford during the decade he spent as a city councillor or crunched the numbers he casually tossed around as part of his mayoral election campaign platform. However else he tried to couch it in terms palatable enough to lure a plurality of Toronto voters to back him in 2010, it was always just about less. Less government. Less spending. Less taxes.

Then he ran smack dab into the hard, cold reality of municipal governance as set out in KPMG’s Core Services Review. It wasn’t really all that gravy laden down at City Hall. Efficiencies could be found certainly but nowhere near enough to offset the loss in revenues that Mayor Ford demanded in tax cuts and freezes. No matter how many different ways you tried to do the math, the answer was always the same.

Now comes the report from the outgoing Deputy City Manager and CFO, Cam Weldon, outlining a transit funding strategy. Requested in March by city council, it is chock full of ideas on revenue generation to pay for the massive investment in public transit that the city and region must undertake, and undertake ASAP. ‘Revenue generation’ you say? You mean, taxes!

Yep. It’s going to take a whole lot more than reversing the plastic bag ban for Mayor Ford to become relevant again. Transit is but the tip of the iceberg of infrastructure investment cities are facing. Ducking your head and clutching your wallet is no longer a viable option. More is the new less, and being the mayor of small things won’t be worth one lousy nickel.

— generously submitted by Cityslikr