Are you encouraged and heartened by the new Toronto city council — cut to half its size, but not its cost; led by an executive committee that’s loaded with the mayor’s suburban bootlickers; weak in gender representation; and saddled with the same intractable problems of 20 years ago?

Only the mindlessly optimistic among you can find comfort in the posed picture of the 26-member council as Mayor John Tory “leads” the new members to the municipal gallows.

Like it was in 1998, the Premier of Ontario has his boots on Toronto’s neck — only this time the mayor is almost an accomplice, malleable to the point of being complicit.

Premier Doug Ford is poised to take over the city’s subway system and the response from council is to enter into talks with the province while noting its disapproval. An opinion from city lawyers is that such are the unassailable powers of the premier that he can move heaven and hell without legal resistance. To wit, the provincial government can take over the subway system without paying Toronto a cent for it. And then subject the city to assuming the maintenance costs, for good measure.

About this time one would expect the chief magistrate to push back, at least a little. Mel Lastman did as much 20 years ago, faced with the original bully, in our modern times, Mike Harris who provided the modelling for Premier Ford. Mayor Tory is strangely ingratiating, even for him, given his “Timid Tory” moniker.

Like Donald Trump’s strange affinity for Vladimir Putin, one wonders about the Tory-Ford nexus.

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We know this: Tory will do anything to preserve his SmartTrack idea, namely, to increase the number of GO station stops inside Toronto and provide 22 such connections from Unionville to the airport area. For that concept — long dismissed and proven to be undeliverable, and now reduced to 6 stops — Tory has committed Toronto to pay hundreds of millions of dollars, paying for transit options that rightly belong to the province’s bank account.

To save the SmartTrack scheme, Tory traded votes to approve the Bloor-Danforth subway extension to the Scarborough Town Centre when the provincial Liberals had signed an agreement to pay for an LRT there.

Once the subway was approved, Tory even agreed to remove the subway stop at McCowan and Lawrence because that stop would cannibalize ridership from his Lawrence SmartTrack stop on the GO line from Stouffville.

Well, you can put this in the bank: when Ford takes over the subway system next year he will reintroduce that stop at McCowan and Lawrence. Tory’s meek demeanour is likely a strategic response to ensure that Ford won’t target the SmartTrack station at Lawrence as the waste it is.

The smiling suburbanites on Tory’s city council team are laughing at the political pickle that has Scarborough set to receive an overbuild of transit options, even if it does little to cover this part of the city with good transit options.

“What do you want me to do, refuse to take the subways they are throwing at me?” one councillor laughed nervously, when confronted with the transit landscape about to unfold. “What am I? Stupid?”

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These are the folks running our city.

Tory didn’t even try to conceal his political intent to pander to the suburbs. His eight-member executive committee includes himself, three councillors from Scarborough, two from North York, plus former York mayor Frances Nunziata and Ana Bailao from west-end Toronto. And this comes from a politician who says he believes in one Toronto. Apparently, the way to do this is to pull a veil over the core city.

And what is Tory’s response when the province pulls out of funding the Finch West LRT?

There are other points of concern.

Almost 20 years ago city council declared homelessness as a state of emergency. The numbers are almost doubled now — and still we are building shelters instead of homes. And the waiting list for a subsidized unit is as long as ever.

So, our mayor and council are prepared to spend billions of dollars on transit in corridors we don’t need while crying poor — short of cash — when it comes to building homes for residents who can’t afford the escalating rents in a booming economy.

Concurrently, the council is fixed on keeping property taxes artificially low.

And instead of using a variety of funding tools, council has depended too greatly on the land transfer tax on homes when they sold. New numbers from the finance department shows the tax is now delivering less than budgeted — a harbinger of trouble to come.

The biggest solution offered by the mayor-premier is to cut the council almost in half, promising savings everyone but the gullible expected wouldn’t come.

You can expect that future initiatives — for the subway and other services Ford will usurp — will yield similar “success.” Don’t expect resistance from city hall.

Royson James is a former Star reporter who is a current freelance columnist based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @roysonjames

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