Article content continued

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or

Selley: We don’t need more, that’s for sure. While we might disagree on specific areas of overreach, I suspect we can all agree the city is over-governed as it is. A city council that has the time and the inclination to ban new businesses from opening on Ossington and Queen West, consistently study entrepreneurs’ and residents’ desires vis-à-vis street food and never fulfill them, and debate every halfway-controversial liquor license, parking pad or imperilled tree, is not one that needs more members. (And those members should really be deciding a lot of that crap at community councils.) If council’s existing members are overworked, their recourse is obvious: Stop messing around with successful things that run themselves and get busy helping their constituents. It may well be that as the population grows — what a nice problem to have! — certain councillors will be able to make a compelling case for more staff help, and I have no problem with that: It’s staff who solve most of the problems anyway. But I see no compelling reason even to be considering expanding council. New York gets by with 165,000 people per councillor; we’re currently at about 60,000. Redraw the boundaries in as close accordance to population as possible and be done with it.

Gurney: This is one of those issues that is simultaneously really, really boring but also so, so interesting. The details are pretty eye glazing but the overall point of the matter, obviously, is literally fundamental to our democracy and government. It’s also a good opportunity to sit back and scratch our heads a bit and remind ourselves just how much frickin’ change this city has gone through and how much more is still to come in even the near term. We’re fast closing in on the 3,000,000 mark. To dive into your questions, I’m not sure there’s a perfect answer to how many councillors we need, though I’m philosophically hardwired to want that number as low as feasible. I’m also not sure there’s such a thing as the right number of residents, and I’m not bothered too much if there is some variation in the ward-wide numbers. If I recall correctly, and I’m admittedly speaking from memory here, the idea for federal electoral ridings is that each should have about 100,000 residents, and there shouldn’t be a differential of more than plus/minus 10% off the national median in any riding. That’s as good a yardstick as any to use in Toronto’s case — keep things reasonably close while acknowledging that certain wards will be bigger or smaller than others on a case-by-case basis. Overall, though, I’m not convinced we need more city councillors than we do MPs or MPPs. That would mean about 26 wards in Toronto, down from our current 44. I could live with that.