Article content

Ottawa’s council doesn’t need shrinking because it’s either not as big a city as Toronto is or because it’s a much more complicated one, depending whom you ask in the provincial government.

Premier Doug Ford made the first argument at a Friday-morning news conference where he revealed his plans to cut the number of Toronto city councillors from a planned 47 to 25 in this fall’s election, by drawing new wards that line up with provincial and federal riding boundaries. Why would Toronto have 25 councillors when Ottawa keeps 23, a reporter asked him.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Ottawa's council won't be shrunk like Toronto's because Ottawa's smaller, Doug Ford says Back to video

“Let’s not even compare Ottawa,” Ford said. “It’s apples and oranges. Apples and oranges when you compare a town the size of Ottawa, a beautiful city, compared to a city the size of Toronto, you can’t even compare it. You’re looking at a city that’s going to be eventually three million people.”

Toronto’s more like Los Angeles, he said, which has 15 councillors for a population of four million (though it also has 97 “neighbourhood councils” that have a lot of autonomy).

“Good governance, in any company, says you should not have more than seven to nine people on the board. You could have 20 of the smartest people around the table, nothing gets done. We’re going to get things done, we’re going to run (Toronto) city hall a lot more efficiently than before,” Ford said.

The second argument, that Ottawa is more complex than Toronto, came from local Progressive Conservative MPPs, including Social Services Minister Lisa MacLeod.

Ottawa, she tweeted Friday morning, “is the world’s largest agricultural city with many rural communities inside urban boundary-making us physically larger than Montreal, Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary & Vancouver combined. We are also home to a large francophone community. We are unique as Ontario’s 2nd largest city.”