Soon after Deputy Mayor Norm Kelly was handed most of the mayor’s powers, he joined a bunch of councillors at a meeting in one of the committee rooms Rob Ford rarely entered. He gave each of them a fist bump.

A small thing. They noticed.

Kelly was taking over for a man more likely to raise his fist than offer it up. The little tap meant something.

“He gave it to the right-wingers and the left-wingers and the centrists. He gave it to everybody. It was kind of like a ‘Go Team,’ almost like a coach. And I remember feeling really excited about that,” said Councillor Josh Matlow, a centrist. “Because for the first two or three years, Rob Ford and his staff made such a clear delineation between who was ‘our team’ — the group of councillors around them — and then everybody else was the enemy.”

Kelly, Toronto’s de facto mayor since November, has earned wide acclaim for restoring civility and some semblance of normalcy to a government roiled by Ford’s outbursts and outrages. As councillors braced for Ford’s Monday return after a two-month leave of absence, they hailed Kelly for his conciliatory attitude, low-key gestures of goodwill, and efforts to mend relationships Ford damaged.

Their standards, to be sure, are not especially high at the moment. Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong began his praise of Kelly as follows: “He hasn’t burned the house down.”

Kelly’s studiously dull reign has been notable mostly for the fires he has not set. Looming legislative battles have been defused. Chaotic impromptu media scrums have given way to sedate scheduled news conferences. Ford insulted the gay community, Kelly promoted a mass gay wedding.

Nobody has met his lawyer.

“He’s contributed to the stability that council has benefited from since the mayor has left,” Minnan-Wong continued. “We’ve gotten back into a pattern of governance where we get things done. And we haven’t been distracted.”

Kelly has gone out of his way to avoid contentious battles. He drew sharp criticism from Councillor Gord Perks and others for introducing a proposal to force unions and non-profit organizations to register as lobbyists. During a lunch break before the motion was to be debated on the council floor earlier this month, he told Perks he would withdraw it.

“The deputy mayor took me aside and said that he wanted to be remembered as the deputy mayor who listens,” Perks said.

Kelly will retain most of his new powers when Ford comes back. He will surrender the spotlight. Not the actual lights. With the evident glee of a child playing with a shiny new toy, he has regularly arranged for city hall to be bathed in some colour or another to honour some occasion or another: Earth Day, a rare Raptors playoff series, the International Day of Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia Awareness.

The lighting initiative, he said, is not just fun: accepting requests from community groups is “part of the openness” he has attempted to bring to the government.

“This is an office that’s inclusive,” he said. “You open your arms wide.”

Kelly, 72, has most pointedly embraced the community Ford most alienated. Kristyn Wong-Tam, the only openly lesbian or gay member of council, was shunned by Ford. Kelly made so many Pride-related appearances with Wong-Tam, mostly related to Thursday’s mass wedding, that colleagues jokingly asked them if they had gotten married to each other.

Kelly sends reporters the daily itinerary they have never received from Ford. And he sent a subtle early message to the media pack by ordering the removal of the blue velvet ropes Ford had used to keep cameras away from his office door. They were last seen protecting a mystifying art installation in the lobby.

“It’s almost as if the life of city hall was focused on one door, one person, and a very narrow range of issues,” Kelly said. “And when the mayor took his leave of absence, I wanted to make the point that that was no longer the case.”

The strongest detractors of Kelly’s tenure are opponents of the Porter Airlines proposal to fly jets out of an expanded island airport. Kelly lobbied hard in favour of the proposal — and deftly.

Kelly deferred the matter twice to give himself time to build more support. In the end, with the vote count too close to call, he worked behind the scenes with anti-jets councillors to craft a compromise motion that averted the kind of high-stakes showdown Ford often stumbled into and lost. It passed 44-0.

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Kelly’s rise to power “definitely made things more challenging,” said No Jets T.O. chair Anshul Kapoor. “Because he played a better political game than Mayor Ford.”

Kapoor said his group was “shocked” the purported peacemaker made such a priority of a “divisive” issue. He argued that Kelly put private interests ahead of the public.

He also offered a line of criticism that included a generous dollop of applause.

“He had a very Jekyll and Hyde kind of tenure. From all other aspects of the city, he ran it smoothly — complete 180 of Mayor Ford,” Kapoor said. “He built alliances, reached out across the aisle, made sure the city was functional. But when it came to this specific issue, he did exactly what Mayor Ford was looking to do.”

Calm has prevailed since the airport fight dissipated. Some of Kelly’s media availabilities are so boring they are almost awkward: so few controversial things are happening that there is sometimes nothing worth asking him.

“A number of my colleagues at the council meetings have said to me, ‘Gee, it’s quiet,’“ Kelly said. “Mammoliti punctuates that from time to time. Overall, I think it’s been a business focus.”

Kelly, a former Liberal MP from Scarborough, shares Ford’s fervent preference for subways and some of Ford’s right-leaning ideology. He also has a Ford-like fondness for government-as-sports analogies. Even in their jock talk, though, they sound different: Ford like a self-aggrandizing wide receiver, Kelly like a glory-sharing quarterback.

“I played a lot of team sports,” he said by way of explaining the fist bumps. “If you can get everyone on the team working with each other, try to establish as many common goals as possible, then your chances of reaching them are significantly increased.”

Kelly rattled off a list of minor policy successes from the June council meeting: a commitment to help the threatened Red Door Shelter, a new approach to dangerous rail cargo, a request to the federal government to restore funding for a youth employment program, a post-scandal restructuring of the Sony Centre board.

Asked if he had a significant role in all of these victories, his voice rose in polite protest. Someone had missed the point.

“No!” he said. “And that’s the beauty of our system. You don’t have to be the one that’s at the heart of it. But you do have to appreciate the contribution of others. And reinforce it.”

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