You can skip the Churchillian five-minute conversation with the average voter. The best argument against democracy in Toronto is Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti. For the almost 28 years he’s continuously held elected office, he has provided constant refutation of the presumed wisdom of the voting crowd.

And it appears City Hall can never be rid of him. Just three weeks ago he announced he’d be leaving the city council seat he’s occupied since amalgamation to run provincially for Doug Ford’s Conservatives. Though the prospect of him as a potential Minister of Anything was horrifying to many of us, at least his clown show would no longer be a 416 shame. He’d be Brampton Centre’s problem, if they were fool enough to elect him.

But on Monday he announced on Twitter that he would heed the cries of his North York constituents for him to stay and continue representing them. Brampton voters will be spared his representation. Toronto is stuck with him.

Which is not good news for people who care about the city. For decades, his entire public persona has been a performance of cartoonish villainy, aimed at hyping up division and soaking up headlines.

He carries himself, to a startling degree, like a professional wrestling heel, hyping rivalries and alternating between boasts and accusations for their own sake. He’ll sometimes suddenly switch allegiances (he has been a member of all three major parties during his time in public life), but all along it seems his only actual allegiance is to himself. He had a famous rivalry with Rob Ford for some years (the late mayor once called him “a snake” and “a scammer”), even staging protests against Ford in his ward, before becoming something of a tag-team partner to Rob and Doug after 2010. Then he wielded a gladiatorial thumb in the council chamber indicating His Fordness’s presumed voting wishes.

Which is just the tip of the sky-high flagpole in his penchant for dramatics. Famously, he once stripped topless in council chamber to make some kind of point about nude beaches. He has proposed making the Toronto Islands a red-light district and the ferries floating casinos. He’s sent out press photos of himself with his middle fingers raised at the camera, and once responded to a Star reporter’s inquiry with the phrase “bite me Mammo-style.” His every motion at city council, put forward between red-faced rants (he once referred to a neighbourhood in Toronto as a “pedophile district”), appears to be a joke or a spiteful statement rather than an actual proposed law. Once, he proposed making the entire downtown core a dirt-roads only car-free zone where only horse-and-buggies would be allowed. His 2012 spur-of-the-moment property-tax freeze motion enticed then-mayor Rob Ford to vote against his own budget.

Then there are the scandals. I don’t have space to recap all the lowlights of almost three decades in office, but consider briefly: as an NDP MPP under Bob Rae, my colleague Jim Coyle reported in 1998, he earned the nickname “Hot Wheels” after he billed his expense account about $5,000 for travel in one year from his North York home to Queen’s Park and another $4,700 for travel within his riding; after being elected to North York city council, he held onto a second public-sector job as a property manager for public housing, and when forced to quit that job after amalgamation, tried to get assurances it would be held open for him if he were turfed from office; then there was the 2013 fundraiser where lobbyists and others gave him $80,000 — personally, not for an election fund; and a report that same year he was the beneficiary of very low rent on an apartment owned by a company that does business with the city; he has been found to have broken election spending rules; and he was once reported by CBC to have received $275,000 in mortgage loans from realtors who he helped with council business.

The list could go on. The behaviour does. Through all the outrage and outrageousness, he has persisted as a city councillor. He intends to continue to do so.

It is up to the ward voters who have somehow returned him to office so many times before. It seems they will get another chance to elect someone else this fall. They have tested our faith, they could restore it. Democracy gave us Mammo. Our only hope is that it can finally send him away.

Ed Keenan is a columnist based in Toronto covering urban affairs. Follow him on Twitter: @thekeenanwire

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