As much as we’d love to rid the city of Giorgio Mammoliti, he’s only one reason Toronto councillors need term limits.

The lack of limits has created a culture of civic politics as a career, a job for life. That may be fine for the elected — although even that’s debatable — but it’s not for the rest of us. In any city, let alone one changing as fast as Toronto, having precious council seats occupied by the same politicians for decades doesn’t make sense.

Over time it grows ever harder for the elected to tell the difference between their own personal interests and those of the community. This conflation of objectives serves neither the individual nor the city. Even those who seek office to fight for a cause end up as placeholders, people who know nothing else.

The story of Norm Kelly is instructive. In 2013, when the veteran Scarborough councillor was chosen to fill in for then-mayor Rob Ford after the latter had imploded, as much as anything it was because after so many years on council, Kelly threatened no one. Except for fighting communism and denying climate change, he no longer had any semblance of an agenda. But having been around since the mid-1990s, he knew how the place worked and was happy to play the fool.

In other words, councillors rewarded his lack of ambition. They knew they could trust him not to rock the boat, smoke crack cocaine or suddenly start to take himself seriously. He was the perfect choice — and a strong argument for why Toronto would benefit from term limits.

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Then there was Hazel McCallion, the mayor of Mississauga from 1978 to 2014. During that time, she turned Canada’s sixth-largest city into a textbook example of suburban sprawl. Even before she retired, the “Queen of Sprawl” had seen the errors of her ways and was trying to remake Mississauga in the image of a something more urban. But by then it was abjectly auto-dependant.

During McCallion’s heyday, voter turnout of 34 per cent was considered remarkable. Sometimes she ran unopposed. Even with opponents, fewer than a quarter of voters would typically bother to cast a ballot. Either Mississaugans had such faith in McCallion that they felt no need to support her because she'd win regardless, or they felt no pressure to vote against her because she would win regardless. For better or worse, McCallion presided over Mississauga for 36 years, shutting out a couple of generations of potential leaders in the process. The result is a habit of indifference that reveals our democratic pretensions for the sham they are.

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Term limits would be one way to change this culture of apathy. If a city’s mayor and council were held to two, maybe three, terms, Mississauga could have had as many as a dozen mayors, not one. It’s hard to believe that none of these theoretical magistrates wouldn’t have been as capable a leader as McCallion, if not superior. We’ll never know, but perhaps having to choose would have forced voters to pay attention.

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Meanwhile, back in Toronto it’s blindingly clear that incumbency is the critical factor in winning a seat on council. Candidates who get elected once tend to get elected again and again. In the 2014 election, for example, the only incumbents who didn’t win were the two who didn’t run. And those who did prevail, did so with startlingly unimpressive numbers. The much unloved Mammoliti, for instance, won with a paltry 6,816 votes, laughable in a city of almost three million inhabitants.

What’s worrisome is not simply that a number so ridiculously low flies in the face of our democratic presumptions, but that so few care. Indeed, Toronto voters aren’t much more enthusiastic than their neighbours in Mississauga. A sense of inevitability pervades local politics There’s a feeling that those who do show up to vote look no farther than the first recognizable name on the ballot. Either they feel no one else stands a chance or they genuinely approve of the incumbents’ efforts.

If councillors had two or three terms to implement their agenda, it would help keep them focused. For voters, it would have a similar effect. Term limits would force us to choose candidates with unfamiliar names. Some would respond by paying closer attention, others by walking away. At the least, council would gain fresh faces and — who knows — perhaps better leaders. It’s a chance worth taking.

Christopher Hume is a former Star reporter and a freelance columnist based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @HumeChristopher

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