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At no time has he mentioned any of this, in either the leadership race in which he finished second or the election campaign in which 60 per cent of the vote went to other parties.

He has no mandate from anyone, least of all the citizens affected. Yet because our system vests such extraordinary power in the office of one man, he can impose his will on cabinet, caucus, legislature, city and province, more or less by fiat.

Even the courts, the last line of defence against arbitrary rule, cannot stop him. For while we have passed a Charter of Rights, proclaiming our supposed belief in limited government, we have embedded within it a clause that allows governments to overrule those same limits. He invokes it, again imposing his will on cabinet, caucus etc, validating by fiat what he had earlier decreed by fiat.

And he does all this in the name of “democracy.”

This would be objectionable even if the legislation were rightly considered, urgently necessary, likely to succeed. It is none of these. It rests, rather, on a series of increasingly dubious propositions, supported less by evidence than assertion, not so much even asserted as assumed: that Toronto’s city council is “dysfunctional,” or more so than most elected bodies; that it is the job of the province, rather than the city’s voters, to “fix” it; that cutting the number of council wards in half is the required fix; that if it were, it must be done now, this instant, with an election under the old rules already under way; that so urgent is it that it be done now that nothing less than emergency legislation overriding the Charter is required.