Rookie Premier Doug Ford is scrambling to salvage the Progressive Conservative government’s legislation slashing the size of Toronto council.

With the Oct. 22 city election in peril, Ford has taken the rare step of holding a weekend session of the legislature in order to have enough hours of debate so Bill 31 can pass.

But it may be moot if Attorney General Caroline Mulroney is successful at the Court of Appeal on Tuesday and wins a stay.

A stay would quash Superior Court Justice Edward Belobaba’s ruling that the legislation’s previous version, Bill 5, was unconstitutional.

It would render Bill 31 unnecessary and nullify the need for Ford to invoke the Charter’s notwithstanding clause for the first time in Ontario history because Bill 5, which cuts the number of Toronto councillors from 47 to 25, could become law.

Against this backdrop of legal uncertainty, Government House Leader Todd Smith told CBC Radio’s Matt Galloway on Friday that the Tories are “absolutely not” panicking that they won’t have enough time to ram through the legislation before the municipal vote.

Belobaba’s ruling blindsided the government, leading Ford to unleash the Charter’s notwithstanding clause, which allows the government to overrule the courts in order to proceed with its legislative agenda.

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Toronto City clerk Ulli Watkiss threw the premier’s office into a tailspin Thursday with a warning that a fair election was “becoming virtually impossible to carry out.”

Court filings made Friday by Watkiss — in an unprecedented move after she hired her own outside lawyer from Stikeman Elliott LLP — say that in order to print a planned 2.6 million ballots on time, the printers will need to work 14 hours a day for seven days and that the “current schedule does not provide any room for slippage for unanticipated issues or the correction of errors.”

The written materials note that already a contingency plan includes reduced testing and the cancellation of advanced voting days, set to start Oct. 10, which could “increase the risk of irregularities with the election.”

The clerk had originally planned to have all ballots printed, testing done and ballots and tabulators “locked down” for the October election by mid-September. Ballots have yet to be printed. Her statement was the latest blow in a challenging week for a government sworn in on June 29.

Sources told the Star that late Thursday a hastily prepared cabinet order-in-council was signed in order to convene the legislature Saturday at 1 p.m. to expedite passage of the bill.

Ironically, Bill 31, which passed first reading on Wednesday, will not be debated Saturday because under the complicated standing orders, or rules, not enough time will have passed before that can begin.

But if the Tories opt to sit Sunday then second-reading debate could begin.

The government cannot move a “time-allocation motion” to limit that until six-and-a-half hours of debate has taken place in the House.

Further complicating matters, the standing orders state that “a time allocation motion may not be moved on the same calendar day that any of the bills that are the subject of the motion have been called as government orders.”

If the House does sit Sunday and the Tories are somehow able to convince the New Democrats, Liberals, and lone Green MPP to cancel or abbreviate the two-day break for the International Plowing Match and meet Monday and Tuesday, Bill 31 could pass as early as Wednesday or Thursday.

But skipping the annual rural expo, where the leaders mount tractors and plow fields for the media cameras, would be unpopular with all four parties.

So as things stand it appears that the following Monday — Sept. 24 — would be the earliest day the bill could pass presuming the Court of Appeal challenge fails.

NDP Leader Andrea Horwath said the Saturday sitting, which is usually reserved for an emergency such as ending wildcat transit strikes, speaks volumes about Ford’s misplaced priorities.

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“NDP MPPs would be very happy to sit all weekend to deal with the issues facing Ontarians, issues such as painfully long hospital wait times, crumbling schools or the tragic loss of jobs, after 80,000 jobs were lost last month under Doug Ford,” Horwath said Friday.

“Unfortunately, the only reason we’ll be sitting this weekend is so Doug Ford can ram through his plot to trample on the rights of all Ontarians under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” she said.

Toronto city council voted Thursday to fight the government’s legislation in court.

Ford never once mentioned reducing council size on the campaign trail.

He frequently denounces the “downtown Toronto NDP councillors” he is targetting and says he wants to end the “gridlock” and “dysfunction” at city hall, where he was a one-term councillor between 2010 and 2014 before losing the mayoral election to John Tory.

“The leader of the NDP is here to protect her crony buddies: Mike Layton, Joe Cressy, Gord Perks,” the premier thundered earlier this week, referring to prominent left-leaning councillors.

Green Leader Mike Schreiner blasted the Tories for “wasting taxpayers’ money” on both a $30-million constitutional challenge of the federal carbon-pricing scheme and on fighting the city of Toronto in court.

“The irony is appalling. The premier on the one hand attacks the judiciary and now he wants to use the judiciary to try to overturn legislation that was democratically passed by the federal government,” he said.

Schreiner made his comments after Environment Minister Rod Phillips announced Queen’s Park had filed its “carbon-tax” legal arguments with the Court of Appeal, which will be heard next April.

Liberal MPP Nathalie Des Rosiers, a law school dean and co-author of The Oxford Handbook of the Canadian Constitution, has warned the government is setting the stage for “an unconstitutional city council” whose every decision could be challenged in court.

Des Rosiers, predicting the provincial government will lose its carbon-pricing appeal, questioned the legal competence of the new administration.

“They have made a mistake,” she said Friday.

Former PC premier Bill Davis, a key player in the 1982 Constitution Act, has condemned Ford’s use of the notwithstanding clause.

On Friday, former NDP premier Bob Rae and former Liberal premier David Peterson echoed Davis’s alarm.

Peterson told Metro Morning that Ford, an MPP for just three months, is being “thuggish” and “dictatorial” and displaying “his lack of experience in the legislature and understanding of the democratic, parliamentary system.”

Rae said on the same panel with CBC’s Galloway that the new premier’s moves are “certainly not the way to do things.”

“There must be a group of people in his caucus or in his party who are saying: ‘Is this really who we are?’ I mean this is not Bill Davis’s Conservative party; it’s not even Mike Harris’s Conservative party. Mike Harris never used the notwithstanding clause.”

With files from Jennifer Pagliaro

Robert Benzie is the Star's Queen's Park bureau chief and a reporter covering Ontario politics. Follow him on Twitter: @robertbenzie

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