One of these days, Shelley Carroll is going to run for mayor. A lot of people on the left side of council would like her to, because they see the budget chief from Don Valley East as an electable successor to outgoing Mayor David Miller. Suburban where he is urban, a history with the Liberals to cancel out his history with the NDP. Carroll is for many the best hope for the left-of-centre crowd currently in power to retain that power after 2010.
One day, Carroll will take the plunge. But it won't be for awhile, judging from the meeting she had with reporters outside her councillor's office, to kick off the "dialogue" on Toronto's financial future and not answer questions about whether she favoured a new sales tax to help fund the City of Toronto.
The questions arose because of reports Carroll was ruminating on just that, a day before, during a talk at a posh breakfast meeting downtown.
The idea of a new sales tax was not received warmly by the morning talk radio crowd. Reporters wondered, unkindly, whether she felt she had committed political suicide.
And to those and other questions, she replied: "I'm not running for mayor today - I'm the budget chief."
And then she proceeded to deliver a stern lecture to Torontonians, and "the men" who are seeking to define Toronto's future, that any talk of the future of Toronto had to include a discussion about raising money - and a lot of money - to balance Toronto's budget in a sustainable way.
She went on to say how next year's operating budget, which by every indication is going to be a miserable, unlovable pig of a budget filled with cuts and property tax increases and fee hikes, will provide an object lesson as to why this is so.
So the message became: whether it's a sales tax made and administered in Toronto, or a One-Cent-Now-style share of the federal or provincial sales taxes, Toronto needs more money.
It's a righteous position, so much so that Mayor David Miller adopted it himself, in the form of the aforementioned One Cent Now campaign launched after his second victory in 2006. Many other mayors also saw the wisdom of it, and adopted it too. There were posters.
But during the last years of boom times - when governments had the cash to make these kinds of long-term commitments, it could not deliver. The only attention it drew from Ottawa was a stern letter from the mint, asking the city to stop using a photograph of the Canadian penny in its logo.
This is not to say Toronto couldn't use a cent of the GST to keep its operating budget in line, or even that it's not right to expect the federal government to do something like that.
But given the boom has passed and deficits are back, chances of convincing the federal or provincial government to do this now have drifted from slim to none.
It's an argument Carroll might well make, as she attempts to concoct a palatable budget for 2010 in her role as Toronto's budget chief. Making that argument a centerpiece of a mayoralty campaign is something else again.
Of course, Carroll's not running for mayor - not now.
When she does, she'll have to find some talking points that deliver a little more hope than these do.