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Councillor Michael Thompson was no doubt having a very bad day this week when an unsuspecting emissary from Scarborough Community Council chair Norm Kelly's office brought him an invoice for one-tenth the cost of the community council's group portrait.

It wasn't even much of an invoice: just more than $26 plus tax, assuming that Thompson and his nine east-end colleagues all ponied up for the cost of enlarging and framing their grinning mugs for the good people of Scarborough. But Ward 37 (Scarborough Centre) Councillor would have none of it.

"Dumbfounded!" Thompson exclaimed. "Ridiculous!"

That Thompson made the comments just after, as he described it, helping a local pastor deal with a flooded church basement, no doubt added to his jaundiced perspective about the boosterish move that Kelly called for last year when he gathered councillors from Scarborough together to pose for a cordial and good-natured photo. It was a bald contrast to the hijinks that surrounded Toronto Council's several embarrassing attempts to take its own group photograph in the winter of 2007. It was one element among many of Kelly's multi-front campaign to boost Scarborough's self-esteem in a big and, from his perspective anyway, frequently sneering amalgamated Toronto.

Kelly's strategy could best be called a quaint offensive. There's the aforementioned picture, of "the guys" who represent Scarborough; a moment of reflection at the beginning of each community council meeting, by some Scarborough figure or another; a "Scarborough moment," in which enthusiastic boosters of the many neighbourhoods making up the east end could make a little presentation. On more substantive points, he hired some university students to determine whether Scarborough really was hard done by in the amalgamated city (turns out it isn't), and he tried to establish a media protocol to encourage news organizations to name the intersection rather than the former municipality when describing crime east of Victoria Park.

Through it all, his colleagues in the east end have nodded politely and solemnly as, for instance, when a local science fiction aficionado from the south end of town told them all to "live long and prosper" - and seemed sanguine about it all. Until Thompson, ankle-deep in water in a church basement, called it like he saw it this week.

"Quite frankly, I think it's ridiculous. There's no real value in it. It wastes our time and it becomes fairly - lethargic, quite frankly. We should be spending our time on the business of the day," he fumed.

It's not just the boosting. Thompson is a pretty big Scarborough booster himself when it comes down to it and it's not even that he's afraid to be goofy about it: last year, he pulled off an enormous, record-challenging salad to promote a local BIA's street food festival.

What it is is this: at some point, the east end of the city has to recognize that the work in building and sustaining community is not finished in defending and promoting that community's good name. Scarborough, like many parts of Toronto, has come into amalgamation with warts and highlights intact. There are parts of Scarborough that need real attention - some neighbourhoods where poverty and transportation are a serious challenge - and others, like the Rouge and the Guild Inn and the Toronto Zoo, that would welcome some celebration and preservation.

It might, suggests the clench-jawed Thompson, be that the time has come to stop condescending to Scarborough residents with shadow councils and media protocols, and start pumping out some basements.