You can, in fact, fight city hall.

That you can’t is one of the great cynical lies of democracy, although Premier Doug Ford’s move to cut Toronto council in half threatens to make that lie a reality.

Ford’s attack on local democracy counts on people paying less attention to what goes on at City Hall than they do at the provincial and federal levels of government, and counts on the easy cynicism that lack of attention allows for.

People who support the cut might dismiss City Hall as just a place where potholes get fixed and parking disputes are settled. They’ll also point to the ample evidence of the ridiculousness that sometimes comes out of there. Some city councillors, and some mayors, say and do preposterous things. Comic things. Absurd things.

It’s true there is no political theatre quite like a city council meeting but it’s also true that this is the level of government closest to our everyday lives. From the moment you turn on a tap or flush the toilet in the morning, it’s your municipal government that oversees much of what you need to work, play and prosper throughout the day. The decisions, compromises and arguments are often at the neighbourhood level and are personal. The debates can be vigorous, raw and messy: the “sausage” is made in plain view.

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Municipal governments fix potholes but they also decide what kind of developments will change neighbourhoods, what kind of transit we have, and is part of the solution to the affordable housing crisis. In a city like Toronto, there are billions of dollars involved and this combination of personal connection to everyday issues and the high stakes is precisely why City Hall can be an emotional and dramatic place.

Local democracy is intense representation and your city councillor is apt to pay attention to your concern if you make enough respectful but insistent noise about an issue, but especially if you get a few neighbours to make noise with you. This is the kind of grassroots organizing that is at the heart of local politics and how you can fight city hall. Doubling ward sizes will make this much more difficult.

The cynicism that the Ford government is counting on suggests none of that matters, that the politicians who represent you don’t do much and won’t listen. However, spend time in a Toronto councillor’s office and you’ll see it isn’t a sleepy place. Phones ring all the time and the councillor’s staff is busy all day, often staying into the evening. If you’ve got a good one that cares about his or her ward, a city councillor’s work life is also an intense one and requires not just daytime hours but meetings and events many nights of week and on weekends.

Of course there are some who don’t put in the work. Ford himself had the third worst attendance record when he was city councillor. If you’ve got one of those, vote for somebody else, but even councillors I personally don’t agree with, or who have voted against something I believed in, put in the time. Hard work and representation shouldn’t be a partisan issue.

There are multiple ironies to Ford’s attack and his sentiment that “nobody wants more politicians.” One, is that he is a member of a political dynasty that has produced three generations of politicians. Another is more profound: his own brother, Rob, was the king of retail politicians, both as a city councillor and mayor. He prided himself on returning all phone calls and solving individual constituent concerns personally. That he could have done a lot of that more efficiently by delegating some of these tasks to staff is beside the point: he truly believed in the importance of local democracy and dedicated his life to it.

This is not just a Toronto thing: city councillors across the province of Ontario have big workloads. Rino Bortolin has been a Windsor city councillor for four years. A local business owner turned politician, he’s a hometown friend and I’ve been able to get an insider’s view of the life of a councillor though him. In Windsor, the position of councillor is considered “part time” but for him, like many others, it’s a full-time job.

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“I probably put in 40 to 45 hours a week on council work,” he told me, referring to his downtown Windsor ward of about 20,000 people. “I’ll get five or six calls a day, sometimes as high as 10 or 20, and 15 to 20 emails. That’s on top of the 17 committees I sit on, reading and preparing for each meeting as well as attending them, plus the community work.”

Sometimes it’s messy. Sometimes it’s frustrating. But if you value your ability to fight city hall and have your voice represented there, you’ll fight to preserve strong local democracy.

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