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Deputy Mayor Norm Kelly flew to Florida on Christmas for a holiday dinner with his family as thousands of Toronto residents remained without power in the wake of a major ice storm.

Mayor Rob Ford has presided over the city’s storm response, but Kelly is Premier Kathleen Wynne’s key contact on storm issues and the city’s legislative leader. He returned to the city after a day away, on Thursday afternoon.

In an interview Thursday night, Kelly said he was in close touch with city officials and his constituents from Florida, via BlackBerry, and he said he does not regret the decision to leave town briefly to see his relatives. He is 72, and only one of his four siblings is still alive.

“In public life, you tend to ignore family events. The scope of my immediate family is declining in numbers. And it was very important for me to be there,” Kelly said Thursday. “It was critical to me that I spent that evening with family, and I made sure that I stayed on top of everything. I didn’t miss a beat.”

Kelly, who represents Ward 40 in hard-hit Scarborough, argued that “any reasonable person” would allow him a family Christmas. But he received some sharp criticism on Thursday night on talk radio and on Twitter.

“Hope vac(ation) was good with family as I could not share time with mine. All our homes had no power. No heat no hot water. Still dark,” one resident wrote to him on Twitter.

Kelly said senior city officials were “basically over the hump” in responding to the storm when he departed. Had the situation in Toronto remained as bad as it had been days earlier, he said, he would not have gone.

“I regret the controversy it’s created,” he said. “But I thought it was important for me, at this time of my life, to spend a Christmas dinner with my family, and at the same time honour my commitment to the residents of Toronto by making sure their business is done.”

Kelly’s colleagues were divided on his decision. Councillor Paul Ainslie, who represents another Scarborough ward, said he thought Kelly should have stayed home. Ainslie said he was himself driving around his constituency at 2 a.m. on Thursday morning looking for power outages.

“I think family is important, but with so many people without power, I think the proper place for the deputy mayor is in Toronto,” Ainslie said.

Councillors Joe Mihevc and Shelley Carroll, who themselves worked into the night on Thursday, came to Kelly’s defence.

“For a day and a half, on Christmas? Frankly, I would cut the deputy mayor some slack,” Mihevc said. “At the end of the day, we are all human beings and we all need a break, and the fact that it was a day — I don’t think anyone should begrudge the humanness of politicians.”

Carroll said Kelly “literally went for one day.” And she noted that Ford did not heed calls from some councillors to formally declare an emergency, which would have put Kelly, not Ford, in charge of the response effort. Kelly had mused that a declaration could be a good idea.

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“Clearly, cryptically, in his comments, this was an extremely important family event, because certain people won’t be around for much longer,” Carroll said. “And so he raced down and he raced back despite the fact that the mayor is pretty much closing us out, refusing to declare an emergency even though I’m driving around in the dark and I have freezing people.”

Councillor Josh Matlow declined to weigh in. “I’m in the midst of responding to hundreds of residents who are without power and going out soon for more visits. That’s all I care about tonight,” he said.