During Rob Ford’s session with the Globe and Mail’s editorial board last week, I asked him when he’d hold a vote on reducing the size of council from 44 to 22 if elected mayor. In a revealing response, Ford said he wouldn’t put the question until the third year of his term, so as to prevent “in-fighting” among the councillors. Wishful thinking, that. In his third year, Ford may well be in a position to ask a possible premier Tim Hudak for help in delivering this platform promise (although provincial legislation doesn’t require intervention). He’ll need all the support he can get: with that downsizing looming on the electoral horizon, you’ve got to think that Mayor Ford’s council will be a rat’s nest of betrayal, suspicion and stealth attacks as councillors who share federal/provincial ridings jockey for position in 2014. None of the intramural bickering should come as a surprise to Ford, who admits to routinely interfering in other councillors’ ward business. Sure, he couches those interventions as disinterested attempts to help citizens thwarted by an implacable municipal administration. But the telling detail is that Ford carefully filed away all their names and numbers, as his campaign manager revealed during the ed-board session. After all, that kind of IOU list is money in the bank for someone whose political ambitions extend beyond the apparently graffiti-free world of Ward 2.

Another day, another subway platform. Adding his voice to the chorus of calls for subway expansion, mayoral candidate Rocco Rossi yesterday unveiled his own program, this one to be funded using the dividend of his plan to sell off Toronto Hydro and retire the city’s $2.5 billion debt load. Standing on the Kay Gardner bridge south of the Davisville Station, Rossi said yesterday that he plans to invest $4.5 billion over ten years, with funds drawn from the city’s operating budget. By paying off the accumulated debt, Rossi said the city would save about $450 million a year in interest payments. The announcement brought a swift put-down from George Smitherman, who issued a release that said, “Torontonians now have the right to question Mr. Rossi’s competence to be mayor” because of “errors” and “holes” in the plan. The annual savings, according to Rossi’s proposal (dubbed “Transit City Plus”), should pay for the construction of two kilometres of tunnel plus a station every year, with the TTC relying on a continuous tunneling approach to save start-up costs. Rossi also said he’d delay the Downtown Relief Line in favour of completing the Sheppard subway and extending the Yonge line up into York Region. Like Sarah Thomson, Rossi wants private sector involvement in these projects to bring costs down, but he rejected road tolls as a way of raising revenue. Also like Thomson, Rossi’s numbers are unrealistically optimistic and fail to account for a range of associated budget pressures.

Thanks to David Miller’s dogged pursuit of a City of Toronto Act, Rob Ford can spend the next five months vowing to radically slim down council, from 44 to 22, in order to deliver on his election promise to become Toronto’s biggest loser. According to sections 128 and 135 of the Act, which was passed in 2006 and updated this year, Toronto now enjoys the power to create or erase municipal wards, provided there are least five members of council. Presumably, Ford wants the new municipal wards to be co-terminus with Toronto’s 22 federal ridings. The city’s municipal code is silent on how council would enact such a self-immolating reform, but the task seems exceptionally daunting: he has to round up at least 22 votes (plus his own), and those would need to be sourced from the subset of councillors who (i) agree with Ford’s position; and (ii) feel confident they could survive an electoral shoot-out with the new ward’s other incumbent. After all, 22 sitting councillors need to back a motion that would potentially eliminate their own jobs. It’s like Russian roulette, except with worse odds. Whether or not Ford has thought through the politics is unclear. His gambit, really, is to drink deeply from the well of voter dissatisfaction by plugging away at the hoary old allegation that Toronto is over-governed, and therefore profligate.

Look, over yonder: it’s a band of conservatives, in their blue hats, galloping across the horizon to save… Transit City? What’s with that? In a Friday speech at the Board of Trade, Conservative leader and renowned urbanist Tim Hudak pledged that if he was premier, he’d “ensure” the City of Toronto would have access to reliable funding so the new mayor wouldn’t have a fiscal sword of Damocles hanging over his or her head every time they sat down the do the books. And some of the money, he added, would go to transit. Believe it! Next up was Eglinton Lawrence councilor Karen Stintz, whose intriguing trek towards the ideological centre led her last week to a kind of political level crossing, if you will. As the mayor’s office happily announced, she and David Miller have made common cause on restoring the Transit City funding, a substantial chunk of which will be spent boring a tunnel along the southern border of her ward. Stintz says she supports the Metrolinx “Big Move” plan, which includes the LRT network. “We came together,” she told me on Friday, “because it’s not a partisan issue, it’s a city building issue.” Finally, we have John Tory, who used his CFRB 1010 drive-time show on Thursday to scope out the broad terms of a cease-fire and possible armistice. Saying that he’s worried the mayor is “mishandling negotiations with the province,” Tory urged Miller to halt the Save Transit City campaign and instead ask Dalton McGuinty for a meeting. Then he called on the premier to stop being vague about delays and work out a binding, ten-year funding arrangement with the city. “Let’s nail down this money with dates and no going back a second time,” Tory said.

When news broke last week of David Miller's unprecedented move to take his Transit City funding fight to the TTC's tinny public address system, I found myself thinking, "Why can't the mayor just stop talking?" I write this with considerable regret. In the dying days of the Lastman regime and for a good portion of Miller's own tenure, I found his voice to be a refreshing contrast to both the ignorance of his predecessor and much of what passes for political rhetoric in the city. He spoke knowledgably about urban issues, answered questions directly, and conveyed a real passion for the city. But as his mayoralty winds down, Miller's unwillingness to leave well enough alone has become increasingly difficult to comprehend, especially given the mounting evidence of a significant right-of-centre voter backlash. That tick became apparent last month with the camped-up revelation about that $100 million surplus. Now, the mayor's almost certainly futile campaign to persuade Dalton McGuinty to reverse the decision to delay $4 billion in transit funding has the makings of a scorched earth strategy that may backfire on the left. The mayor of the city certainly has an obligation to represent the city's interests to other orders of government. Indeed, if the funding cuts had happened last fall, such a campaign would be absolutely in order. But the circumstances are different right now because the 2010 mayoral race is already in full swing.

Mayoral candidate Sarah Thomson wants me to write about her campaign, so here goes: Let's start with a fact check of her plan to "complete" Toronto's subway system by building 58 kilometres of new lines (33 km along Eglinton, the Downtown Relief Line and an extension of Sheppard to Scarborough Town Centre). Claim: "Construction cost estimates, based on forming a public-private-partnership to help finance, build and maintain a subway line are approximately $200 million per kilometer." Fact: The 5.5 km Sheppard line cost $1 billion or $180 million/km (2002 figures). The 8.6 km Spadina extension to Vaughan will cost $2.6 billion (2009), or $300 million/km -- 50% more than her claim. Claim: A 33 km Eglinton line, from Lester B. Pearson to Kennedy, will cost $6.6 billion.

At last week's Spacing launch, one left-leaning councilor laid out the bare bones of Joe Pantalone's campaign strategy: the veteran, this person predicted, will emerge as a kind of Jean Chretien figure -- le petit gars de Trinity-Spadina, if you will -- who offers voters a calm harbour of positivism while fiscal pitbulls Rocco Rossi, George Smitherman and Rob Ford rip one another to shreds. After months of relentlessly divisive rhetoric, voters will be ready to embrace Pantalone's steady-as-she goes candidacy. If he takes just 35% of the votes, Pantalone could prevail in a field where the right is deeply split, or so the logic goes. But does Pantalone have anything going for him besides the math? And is the math, in fact, correct, or will the various drum-thumpers on the right succeed in boosting voter turnout among the ranks of Toronto's aggrieved? I am not persuaded by the Chretien model. The analogy, for one thing, is imprecise: Yes, the wily parliamentarian understood how to capitalize on being underestimated. But the fact is that he won in 1993 because voters were hungry to punish the Brian Mulroney/Kim Campbell Tories for all sorts of reasons. Torontonians also seem to be in a fairly punitive frame of mind this year, but Pantalone doesn't automatically emerge on the sunny side of that dynamic just because there's so much competition on the right.

Okay, so now what? Much has been said about the folly of the McGuinty government's decision to slash (delay?) $4 billion of funding to Transit City, so I won't add my opinions to the bonfire, except to note that this cut appears to be yet another stealth incursion by the Liberals into the municipal race and its aftermath. As happened last month with David Caplan's private member's bill, George Smitherman was conspicuously fast off the mark, with praise for the government's move, while Rocco Rossi, who early on called for a Transit City moratorium, seemed taken aback, saying in a statement he "takes no joy" in the announcement. We should also take Dwight Duncan's fiscal pessimism with several grains of salt. Finance ministers know how to do expectations management. Duncan relied on conservative growth projections in forecasting the eight-year phase-out of the deficit. But when the economy really begins to hum two or three years hence, a third-term Liberal government may well be in a position to eliminate the shortfall sooner than expected and thus resume those legacy-leaving capital investments, transit among them. By then, the Millerites will likely have passed into history and someone else will be on hand to take the credit for persuading Queen's Park to turn on those spigots. Perhaps, that's the point of the exercise. But enough of scenarios.

On the morning of the now-infamous $100 million press conference, a Metro Morning producer called me at 6:30 am and asked if I wanted to speculate on air about rumours that David Miller was either going to resign or jump in the race. When Matt Galloway posed the question, I braved all and opined that the mayor was going to run, citing, as evidence, his recent screed in NOW Magazine. Almost a week on, I am happy to report that I was largely correct. No, he hasn't registered, and no, he won't be on the ballot. But Miller last week unambiguously inserted himself into the 2010 mayoral campaign (not to mention the work of the next council), thereby creating a strange and unseemly dynamic in a race that's already looking fairly ugly. And he did so by choosing to position this piece of budget-related news in such a conspicuously political way. Miller, of course, is looking to burnish up his record as the term winds down. And there's little doubt that by trumpeting this in-year surplus as evidence of sound fiscal management, the mayor was taking yet another crack at pressuring Queen's Park into a deal to cover half the TTC's annual operating shortfall, which he's taken to describing as "the provincial share." Yet by laying out part of a spending plan for the next term of council (including the false promise of a TTC fare freeze), Miller was directly challenging George Smitherman and Rocco Rossi, who've been outspoken in their critiques of the city's financial problems and had no choice but to turn up at City Hall on Tuesday to respond with their own spin ("emotional turmoil," "lamest of lame ducks," etc.).

From what I can glean, there are three competing explanations for what former Liberal health minister David Caplan was up to last week when he introduced a private member's bill that would declare the TTC an essential service. Let's quickly dispense with the loose cannon version. Premier Dalton McGuinty has always run a tight ship, and it's inconceivable that a member of his caucus could introduce a private member's bill - especially one that addressed the jurisdiction of a senior minister - without a vetting process from the central command. Indeed, as a well-placed Liberal source assured me, "This was planned." What the move sought to accomplish, however, remains the subject of much speculation. Theory A: A shot of electoral ginseng for George Smitherman. After Caplan tabled the bill and transportation minister Kathleen Wynne declared it a non-starter, the premier said in the legislature that it's an important issue for the mayoral race. Smitherman - who hasn't been quick off the draw with anything so far in this race - had a statement of support all teed up and ready to go: "I want to applaud David Caplan's Private Members' Bill as it reflects an appropriate source of concern about the cost of a TTC strike to the city and commuters - there can be no doubt that work stoppages cause a huge disruption. I look forward to the debate continuing in the Legislature - including a full committee hearing with public consultations. Based on the outcome of that debate, we can have a fulsome discussion about the options the city might have in the future." In other words, he's marking territory among right-of-centre voters.