Rob Ford (open Rob Ford's policard) is fated to be remembered as the worst mayor Toronto ever had. But the really sad thing is that he is also the best mayor Etobicoke never had.

None of this would have happened — the rise of Ford Nation, the bitter divisions and reputation-ruining civic mismanagement — if local government in Toronto was still even a little bit local.

Etobicoke Mayor Rob Ford would never have imagined becoming Mayor of Toronto. He’d be living the dream — answering every constituent’s call, being loved, winning votes and sounding off to an adoring media. A new Mel Lastman or Hazel McCallion, with a popular appeal far outstripping the perceived limits of his office.

But that rosy future died when the Mike Harris government channelized all the braided streams of local politics into one very big city at the beginning of Ford’s political career. Thrust by fate into a role for which he was never suited, he bombed.

Exactly the same thing happened to Lastman — massively popular as North York mayor, disastrous as the first mayor of amalgamated Toronto. The megacity mayoralty is a powerful institution, but the qualities that make for an effective local politician simply do not “scale up” sufficiently to meet its demands.

The problem is that without those qualities — the genuine grassroots flavour — there is no love. Just ask David Miller, who embraced the big-government challenge unreservedly and used its power effectively. The result was Ford Nation — a righteous backlash against local-government gigantism.

Widely perceived as an unbridgeable urban-suburban divide, the current impasse has helped revive talk of “de-amalgamating” city government — especially among downtown separatists chafing at suburban dominance. But the real losers of amalgamation have been the suburbanites whose dominating leaders have notoriously failed to deliver the goods — especially rapid transit.

Critics of amalgamation denounced it as a suburban takeover. But the result has been a costly, bureaucratic government of the type that right-wing suburbanites typically abhor — and not without reason. Even Rob Ford is on record saying amalgamation was a mistake.

In Toronto, the glory days of suburban domination ended with the death of the old Metro federation. Metropolitan Toronto was a brilliant innovation that let localism thrive while leveraging the downtown tax base for massive, cross-border public works — focused mainly on building and servicing the suburbs. In the matter of advancing a suburban agenda, the accomplishments of the suburban-dominated megacity are comparatively puny. Deadlock has replaced dynamism.

What we have in Toronto today is a modern expression of the classic Canadian conundrum, first and most famously diagnosed by Lord Durham 175 years ago, of “two nations warring within the bosom of a single state.” Durham’s solution was amalgamation — jamming Upper and Lower Canada together into a unitary government rigged to ensure the ultimate victory of the English-speaking Upper Canadians, the raw and uncultured suburbanites of the day. But like the megacity, this first united Canada led ultimately to impasse.

The solution was a creative divorce known today as Confederation. Left to themselves yet joined in equal partnership, the two squabbling colonies together built a great nation.

The prevailing wisdom in Toronto today is that “de-amalgamation” is merely nostalgic or even Luddite. “We can’t turn back the clock,” people say. “We have to learn to make what we have work.” There is also an admirable resistance to separatism. But separatism is not the point. What we need is a positive vision of “refederation” — essentially a matter of recreating the partnerships that worked so well for us all in the past.

Designing such an arrangement entails no insuperable difficulty. Virtually every major city in the English-speaking world, including Montreal, is a federation. Toronto is the only one that has experimented with a unitary local government. And Toronto is the only one that has become world famous for local-government failure.

The advantages of refederation become apparent every time someone says the words “Etobicoke” or “Scarborough.” Despite being wiped off the map with extreme prejudice, these places still exist. They have real meaning for the people who live and work in them. Giving them back their own governments can only be a sign of respect.

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The same goes for the old city, which will obviously be delighted to fly its own flag once again. But it will have to give up the name, becoming Central Borough or some such. In Refederation, “Toronto” will once again become the one word that unites us all.