Doug Ford is a Toronto politician.

I mention this obvious little detail because the premier’s move last week to cut the size of Toronto’s municipal council in half has sparked anger in the city — nearly half of residents are against the move, according to Forum Research, while only a third support it. Among those in opposition are former chief planner and current mayoral candidate Jennifer Keesmaat, who after the news broke began tweeting about “secession.”

Keesmaat has already started to walk the comments back (her nascent campaign tells TVO.org that “secession will not be part of Jennifer’s platform for the city”), but the sentiment is not confined to her tweets. The idea of secession — that is, of creating a separate Province of Toronto — comes and goes every time a major decision (or election) at Queen’s Park fails to go the city’s way.

But Torontonians who want to break up the band because they’re angry about Ford present their case as if Ford were someone else’s fault. And he’s not.

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Ford served as a Toronto city councillor for four years (during which he regularly told reporters how much he hated the job) before running for mayor. He was, to all appearances, preparing to run again this year until the Progressive Conservative leadership opened up in January. He now represents the riding of Etobicoke North, which is most assuredly within the boundaries of Toronto.

Throughout his brief political career, Ford has found support both from Toronto voters and from Toronto media, be it in the form of supportive op-eds or of his own multi-hour AM radio show. He and his politics are and always have been a product of this city.

To put it another way: even if Toronto could secede from Ontario, we’d have to take custody of Doug Ford in the divorce.

Which isn’t to say that Toronto deserves what’s coming to it. The proposed Bill 5 — which would see the government cancel, on the premier’s whim, elections in Toronto and in four regional municipalities — is outrageous and sets a dangerous precedent, in that it basically confirms there are no checks on the province’s power to meddle in local politics.

(If Ford wakes up one morning in early October and sees that Keesmaat is leading in a mayoral poll, can his government introduce legislation to simply abolish the mayoralty altogether? If we take the absolutist view of provincial power over municipalities, then, yes, the Progressive Conservatives can do that.)

It’s bananas, even if it’s constitutional — and a court may yet say so. But Torontonians needs to accept the fact that Ford is something we’ve exported to the rest of the province, not an alien force that’s been imposed on us against our will. That means we need to stop talking about secession.

If Toronto and other Ontario municipalities are going to defend municipal rights in the face of an overweening province, they’ll have to do so by electing a government that respects municipal councils. And if we want to chip away at the powers of the province — a constitutional amendment entrenching some basic limits on Ontario’s ability to mess around with cities would require the agreement of Queen’s Park and Ottawa — it’ll still take a majority of MPPs at the legislature to do that.

It would be much easier to get that cross-province support if Toronto would stop pretending that the rest of Ontario were beneath it.