Let's say Shelley Carroll doesn't run for mayor.
Carroll has certainly been saying as much herself. She said so in January, the day she registered to run for her city council seat. She said so last week when asked if she was reconsidering her decision after Adam Giambrone's withdrawal from the mayor's race. Just this past Wednesday, she told the Toronto Board of Trade she was looking forward to running for her council seat at a break-of-dawn breakfast meeting to talk about the city's 2010 operating budget.Indeed, the only clue she might change her mind came in an off-the-cuff answer indicating she understood "the game has changed" during last week's scrum. Let's say, then, the game may have changed but Councillor Shelley Carroll's mind has not. This is a very grim scenario to that critical mass of Miller-era progressives who had put their money on Adam Giambrone's mayoralty bid. They long ago rejected both Carroll and Deputy Mayor Joe Pantalone in favour of the young and bright chair of the Toronto Transit Commission. As the dust settles in the wake of Giambrone's hormone-fuelled collapse, the straight-talking budget-setting grandmother from Don Mills is the best hope for progressives to take the mayoralty one more time. Carroll has proven herself to be a hard working, and more importantly, an effective member of Miller's team from the beginning in 2003. As budget chief, she's balanced the city's broken finances and her boss David Miller's activist agenda on transit and the environment as well as one might expect. And the election year budget is neither a triumph nor a disaster. It balances by in large measured spending restraints in 2009 and large-scale cuts and fee increases in 2010. On top of all that, Carroll is a grandmother from Don Mills who carries a Liberal Party membership and has a keen enough wit to handle herself in any debate. The Miller-era crowd could not be accused of supporting another downtown New Democrat for Mayor. But this is not an exercise in wondering what would happen if, after the budget passes in April, Carroll refiles her papers and runs for mayor. We are saying that she doesn't run for mayor.The progressives find themselves in a very interesting place. The current crowd of registered candidates for mayor is listing heavily toward the right. Rocco Rossi will sell off Toronto Hydro and cut his own pay; Giorgio Mammoliti will institute curfews and let senior citizens off the hook on all of their property taxes; George Smitherman, still saying little, is fixating on good fiscal management but is coming to the table with a distinct anti-Miller glint in his eye. That leaves Joe Pantalone, who opened his frugal campaign office in an old Little Italy beauty salon this week. The 58-year-old deputy mayor was facing utter marginalization while Giambrone was in the race and it would be more of the same with Carroll running.But if Carroll doesn't run, and no one else suddenly emerges, then Pantalone becomes the de facto standard-bearer of the left in this election. Millerites will go there, or go home.It also opens some possible votes for him. Those Torontonians who vote reflexively for the left - people who watch these things say that amounts to about 70,000 these days - will have little choice but to vote for Pantalone. His message to move beyond that core is not as promising: that Toronto is a well-run ship that just needs a steady hand at the tiller.But he might not need move too much further, with that divided and sub-divided crew running on the centre and right. If we say that Shelley Carroll is stepping out of the race, then Joe Pantalone's future in city politics gets a lot brighter.And Carroll's future doesn't look so bad from a seat on Toronto City Council either. If Pantalone does well for himself, she'll be on the team. And if he doesn't - she'll be a strong voice among the critics of the new mayor.Either way, it's good preparation for a properly prepared run for the job when election time rolls around in 2014.Let's say.