When the Mayor Rob Ford-unfriendly budget motions started passing at last week's council meeting, it seemed clear that the mayor had lost a certain amount of influence. But it seemed last Tuesday evening that we'd be waiting awhile to see just what the quantum of that loss would be.
That was then. By Monday of this week, it became clear that losing the thrust of the 2012 budget vote was just the beginning of the losses for the mayor.Karen Stintz, Mayor Ford's own pick for chair of the Toronto Transit Commission, made a public and clear divergence from the mayor's transportation plan. Ford had campaigned hard on stopping Transit City's planned network of on-street light rail, and building a subway to Scarborough instead. After much negotiation, Ford convinced Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty to put all the provincial money allocated for Transit City into burying the Eglinton-Scarborough Crosstown Line, and letting the city build a subway rather than light rail on Sheppard Avenue into Scarborough.Stintz told reporters that it might make sense to build the Eglinton line that former mayor David Miller championed - which is to say, running in dedicated lanes on Eglinton where the road is wide enough, and put the money saved to that new Sheppard subway.Ford stayed quiet on Stintz' musings, but other councillors didn't. Scarborough Centre Councillor Michael Thompson, a member of Ford's executive committee, went farther than Stintz and said that he wouldn't be averse to simply bringing the Sheppard LRT back on line and abandoning the costly subway plan.It's not too far-fetched to suppose that Thompson's position - which is to say, a complete repudiation of Ford's transportation plan - could prevail should council decide to deal with the matter in the next few months. Certainly the mayor's office is counting votes a lot more carefully, and by the look of things coming up short. By Monday night of this week, Ford announced he'd be deferring a controversial plan to sell off Toronto Community Housing's stock of single family homes until February. Unlike the transportation plan, the housing sell-off is not something that Ford ran on in 2010. But doing so is very much a part of the mayor's agenda and council had, until very recently, supported him on it. Last year, about this time, council voted in support of the extraordinary measure of firing the Toronto Community Housing Corporation's board and replacing it with former city councillor Case Ootes.Mayor Ford just can't rely on that kind of support any more - at least not for now, and not for the foreseeable future.
David Nickle's column on City Hall appears regularly.