As a veteran of many years on Toronto city council, several of them as deputy mayor, I’m a little surprised at the increasingly excited tone of public debate around city hall.

A lot of this seems to be about Mayor John Tory (open John Tory's policard) (full disclosure: I served on his transition team following the election). A chorus of voices — some of them on the council’s left but others whom I greatly respect in journalism and civil society — seem puzzled and even angered by the mayor’s recent moves.

His decision to invest $100 million in the TTC, let children under 12 ride the transit system for free and expand school nutrition programs prompted some on the right to question whether Tory was a closet socialist.

When he won the Gardiner East vote, pushing forward the “hybrid” solution, he was decried as pandering to right-wing suburbanites.

Let’s keep in mind the polls have consistently shown that Tory enjoys the confidence of the majority of the public.

My years on council have given me a long view, one that is scarce in the era of instant communication and social media. The fact is real progress takes time. And finding the centre in Toronto politics is a lengthy process.

The city is a big place, and getting bigger. That’s true in terms of our growth, and our emergence as a global city. It’s also true in the smaller but very important world of city hall. Finding the centre, where good politics and good government can take place in accordance with our best traditions, means reconciling an amalgamated city with disparate downtown, suburban and regional interests. It also now means finding common ground with neighbouring municipalities, as well as with the province and the federal government‎.

Few could argue that Tory isn’t doing a great job in making things happen with the other governments. This month saw a triumph with the federal Conservative government making a historic commitment to fund $2.6 billion for Tory’s SmartTrack plan. This comes atop the Ontario Liberal government’s commitment to make a roughly equivalent contribution to SmartTrack. There’s no denying that Tory is finding the path on his signature campaign pledge to deliver on transit, the issue Torontonians care about most.

Finding the centre is taking a little longer on some other issues that are inside the City of Toronto’s boundaries and scope of governance‎. The Gardiner East question was a case in point, but I expect most reasonable people would view the “hybrid” solution that council chose as sensible and moderate: tear down as much as we can to improve the city’s connection to the eastern downtown waterfront, while maintaining the important DVP-Gardiner connection. Something for drivers; something for urbanists, something for the developers. A good Toronto compromise, and a good John Tory compromise.

Similarly with policing issues. This is difficult stuff, made harder by the inflamed state of police-community relations in the United States.‎ Tory understood that attempts at mediated progress on the carding issue weren’t working. He listened to the community and wasn’t afraid to take a bold step‎ and call for an end to the practice’s most offensive elements — the random stopping of innocent civilians and the retention of information related to those stops.

That’s what good leaders do. A lesser mayor could have just as easily continued to tread water.

‎I know from my work with John Tory over the years of his engagement with city affair, that his instinct is always to find the political centre. I believe that’s what he’s doing on everything from SmartTrack to carding and the Gardiner.

My years at city hall have taught me that the mayor’s chair is the most difficult place to find the balanced political centre that our best traditions require. Consensus is always difficult to find — at least on anything that matters. Vote margins can be tight. But the plurality of Torontonians who want a livable, affordable and functional city moving onto the world stage understood on election day that Tory was the person for this difficult job.

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My experience suggests we should keep the voice of that democratic plurality in mind as the mayor wrestles with the challenges of the day.

Case Ootes was a city councillor from 1998 to 2010 and served as deputy mayor for five years.

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