Score one for transit, none for democracy.

Thanks to Toronto City Council’s vote Wednesday night, the Eglinton LRT will go ahead as originally planned.

Later that night, thanks to Mayor Rob Ford, we also found out that city council is “irrelevant.”

This may have been an ill-chosen word spoken by an overly excitable politician whose grasp of the language is tenuous at best, but it speaks volumes about a mindset — specifically a conservative mindset — that is less interested than ever in the people it claims to represent.

Within hours of Ford’s dismissal of council’s decision, Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak and one of his legislative bright lights, Peter Shurman, were adding their voices to the din.

Council, they argued, should simply be ignored. Like Ford, they believe it is irrelevant, a body that can be forgotten.

Though Hudak’s anti-democratic sentiments come as no surprise, it isn’t often we are treated to the spectacle of a senior leader of a mainstream political party so openly displaying his contempt for civic democracy.

In Ford’s case, one suspects the rationale lies elsewhere; this is a chief magistrate who believes himself uniquely able to divine the will of Toronto’s taxpayers, if not its citizens. Those bizarre photos of Ford wandering the Scarborough Rapid Transit system in the small hours of Thursday morning were poignant images of a man trying desperately to connect with the mythical “man on the street” to whom he feels such a close bond.

Of course, Ford’s sense of connection to taxpayers doesn’t extend to telling the truth. The whole transit debate, framed by Ford and brother Doug as “subway” versus “trolleys,” was nonsense from the start. An underground LRT line is not a subway and LRVs aren’t trolleys, or even streetcars for that matter.

Transit has been so overshadowed by politics that the two now have little in common. Wrapping themselves in the flag of suburb-versus-city and using fuzzy language, the Fords have sold a bill of goods to Torontonians who live in Scarborough.

Eglinton came closest to getting a subway in the last century. In 1994, under former premier Bob Rae, tunnel construction started at the Eglinton West station. But as Hudak will remember, a year later Rae’s successor, Mike Harris, killed the line. Indeed, Hudak was a member of Harris’s cabinet, the one that spent $50 million filling in the hole that had been dug by then.

Now, Hudak finds the need for subways so pressing, it trumps democracy itself.

Except for the Sheppard subway, which Ford abandoned to an unwilling private sector, Scarborough’s chances of getting the sort of underground transportation associated with the term “subway” are negligible to non-existent.

On the other hand, LRT — Light Rail Transit — has more in common with traditional subways than streetcars. Light rail vehicles are faster, lower to the ground, and two or three times as long as the streetcars we see on Toronto roads. The trouble with putting them underground is the cost of tunneling. Burying them also negates the LRT’s revitalizing effects at grade. Light rail provides the fine-grain transit that makes streets such as College, King and Queen so vibrant.

For Ford himself, Wednesday’s defeat was crushing. The day after being elected, he staked his mayoralty on subways, and now council has said no. The province won’t be far behind, which means Ford has alienated everyone but Hudak, who, like the mayor, lacks credibility.

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Though he has three years left in his term, Ford is a lame-duck mayor. How long can he last?

Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca