The Big Number: 25 per cent, the reduction in the number of total Toronto council meeting hours to date this term, after Premier Doug Ford cut the size of council by 43 per cent.

“This is a record,” noted Speaker Frances Nunziata before banging her gavel to end last week’s lightning-fast meeting of Toronto city council after just a single day of debate.

I checked, and she’s right. A search through council’s online meeting minutes, which date back to 1998, finds no record of any shorter meeting where a full agenda was up for debate. Call Guinness — the council meeting of Jan. 29, 2020 is one for the record books.

And last week’s quickness wasn’t an anomaly. It’s part of a trend — Mayor John Tory and members of council have been speed demons this term, working through agendas faster than ever before.

So the question needs to be asked: Was Premier Doug Ford right? Has the premier’s move to cut the number of councillors in the summer of 2018 been justified by shorter meetings?

Nah.

The time saved needs to be put into context. To date, the current roster of 25 councillors plus the mayor have sat for 159 council meeting hours this term. That compares to 211 hours at the same point in the previous term, when there were 44 councillors and the mayor. That’s a 52-hour difference.

Significant, but hardly earth-shattering. Reducing the number of councillors by 43 per cent has resulted in a 25 per cent reduction in total meeting hours so far. That feels like a modest outcome for a political move that disrupted an election, sparked fierce protest, came with a threat to override the constitution and led to an ongoing legal fight that could go all the way to the Supreme Court.

Budget savings from the move turned out pretty modest, too. Ford said the move would save $25 million over four years, but the city’s draft 2020 budget shows total spending on council salary and expenses at $21.9 million, down just $2.8 million from 2018, when there were a lot more councillors.

But even if those numbers impress you, the point of the council cut was never pitched simply as a way to make meetings faster or budgets cheaper. It was also pitched as a way to make Toronto’s government work better.

On that count, it’s hard to find real signs of success.

Action on major files like housing and transit is chugging along at basically the same pace as before. And there are worrying signs that the smaller council has made local democracy worse.

Last November, a report to the now-shuttered special committee on governance included feedback from councillors to the change in workload. Some said that it’s now “very difficult to balance their role as local representative addressing local community and constituent issues and their role in making decisions on citywide strategic policy.”

Feedback from community associations was more dire. “The pressure on councillors, particularly in the central south/north corridor is intense, and unsustainable,” says a letter from the Federation of North Toronto Residents’ Associations.

To be fair, some councillors say they’re fine with the larger wards, but that makes sense, given just how different the gig can be depending on what part of the city a councillor is representing. The day-to-day job representing Ward 23 Scarborough North, where population declined by 2.3 per cent in the recent census update, is different than the job representing Ward 10 Spadina Fort-York, where population shot up by 40 per cent, and development proposals pop up every day.

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A more effective governance model could take that into account. But the suburban majority on council last fall opted to shut down the special committee on governance and voted against funding studies of potential reforms like an “office of neighbourhoods” that could create a formal role for residents’ associations, or further delegation of some council functions to local boards.

Instead, council voted to stick with the interim governance model hastily put together after Ford’s 2018 cut. The meetings are faster, sure, but the push for more effective local democracy seems to have been lost in the rush.

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