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Opposition to Ford’s instant recourse to the clause had nothing to do with the validity or otherwise of the judge’s reasoning: it was the utter failure to show the necessity of leaping to such drastic lengths in response, when it was always available to the government simply to appeal the decision to a higher court — and, if an appeal would not resolve the question in time for the election, to seek a stay until the appeal could be considered.

The province’s justification — there isn’t time — was always somewhat nonsensical, as it depended upon accepting as given what was in fact in dispute: that cutting the council in half was a matter of such urgency that it could not be implemented for the next election, but must be made to apply to the election that was already under way.

But even if one accepted this circular argument as valid, it failed to answer why a stay could not first be sought — a matter of days at the most, and almost certain to be granted. If, after all, the lower court ruling was, as the province suggested, the handiwork of a rogue judge distorting the charter to suit his ideological agenda, it was all the more likely to be set aside at the first opportunity.

Only if you believed in the most paranoid fantasies of the Fordite fever swamp — that the entire judiciary are a nest of liberal elitists conspiring at every turn to thwart the popular will as embodied by the people’s elected representatives — could even a prima facie case have been made for escalating straight to notwithstanding. The court of appeal’s decision rather makes hash of that, too.