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What, then, will councillors talk about next week when they sit down? Given the lack of carefully-considered policy, they will have little else to occupy themselves besides a stack of notices of motion - all, in one way or another, asking for more to do.

Six in particular are aiming at a push by Miller to change the City of Toronto Act so that his office has some new powers: small in themselves, but significant. Miller is drawing legitimacy for the request by pointing to the blue ribbon task force that he appointed last year to advise the city on ways to be more fiscally sustainable. That task force recommended that the mayor have those very powers: the ability to hire and fire city managers; to hold meetings with his Executive Committee in private and make decisions there; and to pay those Executive Committee members a bit more.

As I wrote in last week's column, those powers would still leave David Miller a few steps shy of omnipotence. But councillors, they worry. And for those who are already on the outside of Miller's centre-left tent, there is the very real fear and suspicion that a mayor thus empowered would leave them - well, politically impotent, for the remainder of the term.

In M20.8, the most delightfully droll of the six notices of motion, Ward 39 (Scarborough Agincourt) Councillor Mike Del Grande strips the issue to its apocalyptic bones. If the mayor is to have more powers through the City of Toronto Act, why not finish the job? In 2010, recommends Del Grande, why not just eliminate all the 44 councillors, let the mayor remain the sole elected official, and let him "unilaterally hire or fire the city manager, the deputy city managers, and anybody else he sees fit," and simply hire a dozen individuals to serve on a Cabinet Committee.

Del Grande and some others move more practical motions too, calling for public consultations, a simple status quo, and so on. But M20.8 speaks an unsettling truth about the state of democracy in a city that has already had a year and a half of a moderately strong mayor. That democracy is not, one might say, what it used to be.

In the first year, Miller and the Executive Committee pushed through the bulk of the policy that will inform his agenda: a climate plan and a garbage reduction plan; those two new taxes, on land transfer and vehicle registration; a lobbyist registry; and some pro-business property tax reforms. Some of those, like the climate change plan and the business tax reform, achieved consensus; others, like those new taxes, were messy. They all got through, pushed to the front of the queue as mayoral priorities.

Thanks to some changes in the way council and committees make decisions, much of the rest folded itself into the bosom of the city's bureaucracy - only seeing light during some awful mis-steps, such as the apparent attempt to obscure details of large recreation fee increases this past winter.

It raises some questions, the first being the literal one: what do you need 44 councillors, or 22 councillors, or even a single councillor, in a city that, in the interests of efficiency, has tied down opportunities for debate and amendment to such a degree? And another one (this one being the one that's really being posed by council satirists like Mike Del Grande): what have we lost, in finding such efficiency?

Does, in the long run, the city function better with the public, and even most councillors, kept largely in the dark while the mayor torques his legitimate mandate into a kind of autocracy?

These are important questions. Here's hoping that council takes some time to consider them.