Mayor Rob Ford has made a lot of history this past week.
On the weekend, the Ford administration made labour history. Using tough tactics that were unprecedented by the city at the bargaining table, they extracted a tentative agreement from the union representing Toronto's outside workers. While details of the deal are under wraps until the CUPE Local 416 membership can ratify, it seems as though Mayor Ford and the new team extracted concessions that no other mayor had been able to, all without a job action.That would have been cause for celebration in the mayor's office and among its allies.But three days later, everything changed, and Ford made another kind of history. He has become the first mayor to lose control of his council, his agenda and his mandate. Council rose up, under the leadership of his transit lieutenant Karen Stintz, and effectively destroyed his subway-only transit plan. It is a defeat that no other mayor in the history of this city has had to face. It may be something from which Ford never recovers.Perhaps predictably, the very attributes that led Ford to power in the first place proved his undoing. He has always shown a certain contempt for the institutions of Toronto's civic democracy. As a councillor, he characterized his colleagues as self-serving and foolish - and he has never felt that the normal rules of council ought to apply to him.So, of course, when he was elected and he wanted to stop the Transit City light rail system from taking root, he simply decreed it. He didn't attempt to sell it to council, even when he had a signed memorandum of understanding with Premier Dalton McGuinty insisting that he do so.When faced with the impossibility of having the private sector pick up the entire $4-plus billion in costs for a Sheppard subway - the only way to pay for it seemed to be road tolls and more taxes - Ford shook his head, no. But he still insisted he would get it done anyhow. Somehow. When council finally rose up and applied its own reason to the problem, reinstating parts of Transit City on its own, Ford shocked the room by declaring the meeting "technically irrelevant." But no one should have been surprised; Ford has viewed council as an irrelevancy for more than a year. He favours public opinion - although only that public opinion which shares his own values. It is a blind spot many of us have in our lives. But for a mayor who has no veto power over his council, it is crippling. It left the mayor unable to maneuver - unable to even recognize the need to move and compromise on his vision to maintain majority support on council. And his office's behaviour towards councillors over the past year, meant that few were feeling charitable enough to simply hold their nose and vote with him.This is worse for Ford because it comes on the heels of the defeat-through-amendment of his 2012 budget. In the space of a month, councillors have twice now seen that they can effectively organize on their own, cross party lines and forge compromises that will carry the day on the floor of council.A good portion of the power of the mayor in Toronto comes from being the only effective broker of those compromises. When council learns it can do the same thing on its own - well, it's the mayor's office and not council that becomes "technically irrelevant."So the future of the mayor's transformative agenda is in doubt. It's hard to imagine council agreeing to phase out the Land Transfer Tax, as Ford had hoped to accomplish. The 2013 budget will likely be a council budget rather than the mayor's budget. The real question now is what happens with transit? The Stintz plan, as it's been called, is something that the province will have to consider and it will probably proceed. Ford's subway plan along Sheppard will be coming back to council, but with a report written by a task force whose membership is already predisposed toward light rail, it's unlikely it will garner enough support to pass.So the city will see $8.4 billion in rapid transit expansion over the next decade.But it will be hard to move much beyond that for some time. With a mayor who's shown himself to act capriciously and without regard for the limits of his authority, and a council who will be not only ruling but also leading by an ever-shifting majority, Toronto will have no effective advocate for either more transit or other city-building initiatives that require other orders of government to participate.The city government is effectively headless. That's not irrelevant, but it's sure close.