If you can, recall a time at city hall before the crack scandal, before we learned about Rob Ford’s personal habits and drunken language choices, before we learned what an ITO is or toured the various interpretations of the word “hezza.”

Before all that, we learned something else from the course of this political administration: that in Toronto politics, the mayor may dominate the conversation, but city council reigns supreme.

It was city council who rewrote the mayor’s proposed budgets, city council that rejected the mayor’s transit plan and replaced it with a different one, city council that banned plastic bags and then promptly unbanned them. And after the crack scandal broke and evolved into a crisis, it was city council that took away most of the mayor’s powers and kept right on governing the city.

If there was any doubt about that body’s importance to Toronto’s governance — under mayors Mel Lastman and David Miller it often seemed council just followed along, when push came to shove — it was settled during this term. The mayor sets the debating agenda for the city, but council makes the decisions.

That’s likely to be equally true in the next administration. Doug Ford and his brother have recognized this in explicitly tying their promises to push forward with their stalled agenda to the prospect of new councillors who are more likely to agree with them.

I think that if either John Tory or Olivia Chow wins, the composition of council will influence what kind of mayor they’ll wind up being, in ways we’ll barely notice from the outside. Both want to be seen as unifying consensus builders, and the left- or rightward tilt of the council majority will indicate where consensus is available to be found.

But in looking at the election, citywide media outlets and analysts emphasize coverage of the mayoral race, for the obvious reason that it is the one race that every voter in the city has an interest in, and the one race that will set the debating agenda. Which means it can be hard to get detailed information about the 44 local city council races, as important as they are.

It was to address this problem that a non-profit, non-partisan group called #WiTOpoli (taken from a Twitter tag meaning “Women in Toronto Politics”) launched its city council Position Primer on Tuesday.

“Because the mayor’s only one vote, it’s important to unpack the council races as well,” says the group’s media coordinator, Abby Plener. She says they also wanted to help level the informational playing field for candidates who are outside the establishment and dealing with limited budgets.

They ran a successful crowdfunding campaign to fund their efforts, and the result is a website at positionprimer.ca that briefly shows the positions of most candidates on a variety of issues, for every ward in the city. People visiting the site can search for their ward by postal code, or choose their ward from a list, and immediately see the short answers the candidates gave about their platform positions on 10 topics, including childcare, transportation and affordable housing.

The list is not comprehensive, though an impressively high 68 per cent of candidates contacted did fill out the survey (the names, and often the contact information and websites, of those who didn’t participate are listed, and Plener says any candidate who does respond to the survey now will be added). The brevity of the responses — all of them fit into a spreadsheet-type view on the page — means this is more of a place for voters to be introduced to their candidates than a source of firm conclusions. But that one-stop introduction shop is more than most voters had two days ago.

Another project in a similar spirit launched this week as well at everycandidate.org, in hopes of compiling information about council and school board candidates from various public sources. Perhaps as the race goes on, that will become a useful resource for voters as well.

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I hope so. There’s more than one important choice voters face about the future of the city on Oct. 27. The more information they have, the better.