The question, which appeared in the headline of a report in the Star on Sunday: “What’s at stake for Toronto in Ontario’s election?”

The answer: everything.

A premier of Ontario with a majority government is the unstoppable boss of Toronto, able to dictate binding policy to the city’s government on a whim. Able, in fact, to dissolve the city’s government entirely and rule the municipality from Queen’s Park, if the mood strikes.

The power isn’t even just one of those theoretical discussion topics, like the idea of the Queen vetoing legislation is. Ontario premiers exercise their authority over Toronto all the time, to the frustration of local officials. Bill Davis stopped the Spadina Expressway. Kathleen Wynne spiked road tolls in Toronto. Mike Harris filled in half-dug subway tunnels, replaced elected school boards with provincial supervisors, and yes, forcibly amalgamated the six former municipalities of Metropolitan Toronto against strong local opposition in every one of them.

It is the premier’s city. We just live in it.

And as someone who lives in Toronto and follows its political ups and downs for a living, the idea of Douglas Ford Jr. becoming the premier scares me for exactly that reason. I thought he would be a horrible and destructive mayor when he was running for that job. But the destruction he would be capable of here in the premier’s chair would be multiplied exponentially. As mayor, as his brother found doing that job, he’d have to get a majority of city council to agree with him just to approve his own office budget. As premier, he could decide to convert the council chamber into a go-kart track and if his caucus backed him, no one could stop him.

Not that he’s suggesting that, but with this guy you never know what mood will unexpectedly strike.

You’ll recall how as a city councillor and lieutenant to his brother, he tried to replace a decades-in-the-making redevelopment plan for the Port Lands with a malls-and-Ferris-wheels scheme he had dreamt. It is actually, I think, one of Doug Ford’s more endearing qualities that despite being a small-government conservative by self-definition, he seems to have a soft spot for The Big Idea.

The problem, in my opinion, is that when we see flashes of this tendency — when he suggested a double-decker Gardiner Expressway with one deck operated by a private toll company, to point to another example — they tend also to be The Bad Idea. And the proposed implementation, further, seems to most often be slapped together and in an impossible rush. Which is a recipe for further badness, and for chaos.

He has shown himself, over a long time in public life, to be opposed to many of the things that might improve a city: he and his brother, in 2011, defeated what seemed like it would have been a routine motion to have city council accept provincial funding to hire two more public health nurses. They closed one library branch, and despite his brother never seriously working to shutter any others, Doug Ford publicly mused about how he’d close a whole whack of them “in a heartbeat” because the city was lousy with them. They cut bus service levels and hiked parks and recreation user fees.

Everything we’ve seen from Ford’s history and thought process suggests giving Ford dominion over the city’s social programs and infrastructure (and schools and hospitals) puts them in jeopardy.

There’s more, of course. His transit preferences could lead to the next bajillion-dollar boondoggle while turfing the most valuable plans we have underway. He seems comfortable playing footsie with extreme social conservatives and bigots, promising to overhaul a sex-education curriculum that deals forthrightly with gender and homosexuality; talking about “taking care of our own first” when asked about immigration; refusing to discuss whether he’d attend Pride if he were premier.

I can imagine him as premier of our province, with control over our city, but I do not want to. I may not have to: the reality could be mere days away.

I have no particular love for the governing Liberals — they have done much right in their decade-and-a-half in office, and delivered a lot to Toronto. But they have done much wrong. I’m as sick of them as anyone. And Kathleen Wynne’s cynical, union-bashing, Ford-boosting swan song of a campaign has soured me on her and her party even more.

Andrea Horwath and the NDP haven’t swept me off my feet, but they have promised a lot that would be good for the people of Toronto: reasonable operating dollars (at long, long last) for the TTC, affordable child care, universal dental care and prescription drugs. All of these are long overdue, and address some of the most pressing needs in the city and the province. They will not cut my taxes, which is fine with me, but their balance sheet projections promise to be less ruinous to the province’s financial future than the alternatives may well be.

Through the campaign, Horwath’s experience in opposition has shown in a level of maturity, competence, and assuredness that her main opponent has lacked. She looks like a leader we could be proud of.

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(Good leadership is going to be vital no matter which of the likely winners comes out ahead, since the lack of experience on both NDP and PC benches promises a clownshow of cabinet and backbench growing pains in either future timeline.)

I’m not recently in the habit of offering endorsements. But in what Wynne has acknowledged has become a two-horse race, it seems to me the decision is not one that requires much deliberation. Horwath, I expect, could be a fine premier, though I expect to disagree with much and I expect her government would have troubles and stumbles. But from the city’s perspective, it appears she’d also keep us on the right track, building us up, helping us grow.

Doug Ford, on the other hand, could very well be a disaster for the city — more so as premier than even our worst fears of what he’d have done as mayor. Aside from a vote, I can only offer a last-minute prayer we do not get the chance to find out.

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