In court on Friday, Robin Basu, a lawyer representing the government of Ontario, reminded a judge that the provincial government has the legal power to “destroy” the City of Toronto at any time. Not that they want to do that, Basu noted, according to my colleague Jennifer Pagliaro. But they can.

It’s a handy reminder to everyone, if they still needed reminding after the summer we’ve had. The passing of the Labour Day weekend marks the traditional point in a Toronto election where regular people are expected to start paying attention. So it’s the traditional point where newspapers run columns recapping what’s happened so far and predicting what is to come. But anyone sitting down to forecast election day on Oct. 22 will have to take account of the fact that virtually everything they would have told you to expect earlier this year would have turned out to be wrong.

If the provincial government hasn’t, under Doug Ford, quite approached the level of destroying the city yet, they certainly shook up the Etch-a-Sketch of this particular election, and utterly demolished what any of us might have expected from it.

All those new council faces that were to arrive via retirements and open seats on the enlarged, 47-seat council? That appears unlikely now — replaced by the prospect that no new faces may be elected and many of the city’s longest-serving incumbents will battle for political survival in a shrunken governing body.

Mayor John Tory sleepwalking to re-election? He’s still the front-runner, obviously, but the campaign became more of an obvious horse race when former chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat registered in the final hour nominations were open in response to the province’s actions.

At this point, we can’t even be 100 per cent sure of the date of the election, given that a court decision on the province’s mid-campaign implementation of Bill 5 isn’t expected until Sept. 10 or 11. Appeals could delay certainty beyond that. The possibility of postponing election day to accommodate a decision remains open.

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Reader, my crystal ball is foggy at the best of times. Just now, it’s shattered on the floor.

Especially when it comes to those city council races, which are entirely different contests with entirely different prospects depending on whether we’re looking at 25 wards or 47.

It seems fairly likely, on the other hand, that the slate of mayoral candidates is set. Mayor John Tory has so far run a pretty quiet re-election campaign, focused on affirming some plans already implemented in his first term, announcing an ever-longer list of campaign co-chairs, and attacking his highest-profile opponent, Jennifer Keesmaat.

Keesmaat has done her share of attacking Tory back — especially trying to dissect how his elaborate and detailed SmartTrack election promise of four years ago has morphed into little more than a few new stations on long-planned improved GO lines, even though her own transit plan incorporates almost all of what’s left of the mayor’s plan. But Keesmaat also, at the end of August, put some plans of her own forward, including a transit network and a proposal to more than double the number of affordable housing units created by the city in the next decade.

There’s a long list of others running for mayor beside them — Saron Gebresellassi and Sarah Climenhaga are two who’ve released relatively detailed platform outlines — and the challenge for them will be to capture public attention and fire up imaginations enough to go from longshots to contenders.

We might expect all of them to pick up the pace of their campaigns significantly here in early September. The affordability of the city — and especially of housing — transit, traffic, and public safety are likely to be the big areas of potential debate. They are the pain points in this growing city, and I’d hope those who want to become or remain mayor would spend their energy discussing them.

But there’s another big shadow that can be expected to loom over the whole election — as both a participant and an issue. Premier Doug Ford. He’s already turned the whole thing on its head, and his lawyer in court reminds us he could go much further than that. In the remainder of the campaign, and the term to follow.

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Every candidate for councillor or for mayor has to reckon with that. Whatever they hoped their plans for the city would be, the next mayor and council will work down the street from a premier able to destroy those plans on a whim, and one with the demonstrated willingness to do so.

How to deal with the Doug Ford Factor hasn’t shown up in the polls of big issues yet. But it’s right up there with the toughest challenges facing anyone who gets elected this fall.

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