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Photo by Chris Young/CP

I admit it’s difficult to separate my view of this from my occasional professional obligation over the years to sit through council’s soul-destroying pageants of mediocrity. For every smart, hardworking and forward-thinking member — and thank God for them — there is a chair-moistening dullard whose greatest pleasure in life is to spend four minutes of a council meeting making an ass of himself, then implore his colleagues for two minutes more.

City Council didn’t spend an entire 12 hours debating whether to ban shark fin soup, as Premier Doug Ford contended to Global News over the weekend, but that debate did feature dullard Councillor Glenn de Baeremaeker deploying a remote-controlled flying shark in the council chamber. Council eventually banned shark fin in 2012, over staff advice it might be overstepping its jurisdiction. The ban was overturned months later by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice. Time well spent.

Photo by Chris Young/CP

All in all, Toronto is going gangbusters. But there’s a lot of nonsense going on under the clamshell. The biggest flaw in Clark’s argument was how reminiscent Monday morning’s proceedings at Queen’s Park were of what he was ascribing to City Hall.

For starters, Clark made his opening argument in favour of Bill 31 at around 12:30 on Monday morning.

I have been at City Hall past midnight many times. I have never arrived at City Hall at midnight to hear a debate begin.

The nocturnal edition was necessary — if you accept that any of this was necessary — for a few reasons. Start with the inherently madcap timeline of Bill 5, which was Bill 31’s near-identical predecessor: It received Royal Assent on Aug. 14, just 10 weeks before a municipal election in a city of 2.3 million people where the campaign was already well underway. Justice Edward Belobaba’s unexpected decision to quash Bill 5 on Charter grounds made the timeline even dodgier, despite the government invoking the notwithstanding clause for the first time in Ontario history.\

Photo by Chris Young/CP

The opposition refused to give Bill 31 speedy passage. Standing orders dictated there needed to be two sitting days between first and second reading. Because the legislature was scheduled to recess Monday and Tuesday so MPPs could attend the International Plowing Match in Paincourt the bill couldn’t have been passed until late next week. So we got an “emergency” weekend sitting: all of 45 minutes on Saturday, then another beginning at midnight Monday morning.

All things considered, the debate was remarkably civil. But when I popped back into the chamber around 5 a.m., fewer than 30 of the legislature’s 124 members were in attendance. Earlier, at 2:13 a.m., NDP MPP Peter Tabuns had moved to adjourn debate. It was a stalling tactic that ultimately failed, but not before setting the deafening bells at Queen’s Park — used to call members in to vote — to ringing for 30 sanity-eroding minutes.