Toronto is bigger than its mayor

The Grid:

A new coalition of councillors rewrote the budget over the mayor's objections. It could represent a new era of democracy at City Hall.

It all seems kind of inevitable, now that it’s done: How city council took control of the budget presented by Rob Ford and his budget chief Mike Del Grande yesterday and rewrote it, restoring close to $20 million worth of cuts to services that had provoked the rage of Torontonians.

Politically, it represented a thundering defeat for the mayor (despite his insistence that he carried the day)—a vote of non-confidence in his government, really—and a recalibration of the governing math at City Hall. Policy-wise, it represented a shift in the momentum, a slowing down of the childish, intentional crapification of the city, hinting perhaps at a deliberate turn towards city building. On the process front, it represented a victory for democracy, the culmination of a months-long protest effort by citizens to get the message through the uncomprehending skulls of Team Ford that the people of Toronto considered some—in fact most—services provided by the government to be sacrosanct, and that the mayor did not have a mandate (as another poll overwhelmingly demonstrated yesterday) to cut services, since he had explicitly campaigned on a guarantee he would not cut services.

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