There has been a great deal of consternation in the past few days as Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced that he plans to slash the number of city councillors in Toronto by almost half, under the rubric that there are too many politicians.  This kind of populist position is not new to Ontario the Harris government reduced the number of provincial MPPs by 27 with the Fewer Politicians Act in 1996, which was seen at the time as being part of centralizing more power in the premier's office.  The justification, with Ford or anytime something like this happens, is always that people don't want more politicians, and that if you asked them, they'd say as much to your face.  Mind you, everybody says they want fewer politicians, but demand better outcomes and their phone calls returned you can't really have both. Also, this kind of thing tends to lead to some perverse outcomes.

To start with, we should establish that in this particular circumstance, the province does have the power to make this change, as constitutionally, cities are creatures of the provinces, but also that you can't really equate the role of a city councillor to that of an MP or MPP, or most especially with a cabinet minister.  They don't make the same kinds of decisions, they don't have the same kind of legislative authority, and they have to deal with constituents in very different ways, particularly when it comes to issues like casework, which is very much at the heart of what a city councillor does, as compared to a provincial or federal legislator.  They are vastly different, and our municipalities don't really operate in the same kind of Westminster parliamentary fashion as the provinces and federal government.  This being said, however, there are some universal constants that can be observed regarding the mantra about fewer politicians.

The first constant is that regardless of how many elected representatives you have, the bureaucracy remains a constant.  Why this matters is because where you have fewer legislators to watch over the bureaucracy, the more they try to get away with particularly if there is high turnover of those legislators, as we tend to have in Canada.  The Ottawa Citizen's David Reevely pointed out that this "fewer politicians" mantra tends to go hand-in-hand with the same kind of populist rhetoric advocating term limits.

"Term limits have the same problem," Reevely tweeted.  "The bureaucrats don't change.  Term limits mean a constant flow of rookies who don't have the grounding or confidence to challenge staff."

It's why having legislators with institutional memory helps, because they will know how to effectively challenge bureaucrats, and will know their particular tactics in trying to pull one over the elected representatives there to watch over them.  And this ties directly into the "fewer politicians" mantra because you need to have a legislature/council that has room enough for turnover as well as "safe seats" with longer-term incumbents.  Federally, part of this is accomplished by having the Senate, which is the repository of corporate memory and a body that isn't concerned with trying to gather votes for the next election but this isn't the case in the other legislative bodies in the country.

Look at the parliament at Westminster it has 650 MPs, and is often seen as a bastion of independence for MPs, who can and do vote against the party line on occasion, but this is largely a function of the fact that the number of seats allows for a significant enough portion of "safe seats" where the backbench MPs in question know they'll be re-elected, and that they're never going to get into Cabinet, so they have the latitude to be better parliamentarians.  Ironically, Westminster is currently trying to reduce the number of seats and reduce the number of safe seats out of some misguided democratic principle, but it's something we need to think more about here.

Granted, this can't be done given our current set-up.  Not only would we need more seats, but we would need to do the necessary work of restoring our system to how it should operate where we have the caucus selecting and removing leaders, where the leader doesn't have the power to override local nominations or to sign-off on an incumbent's nomination papers as a form of blackmail, and where the local nomination process is not being controlled by the party leader's office in easily manipulable ways.  That will be an uphill battle.  And it'll be hard to overcome the populist impulses that Ford is demonstrating right now with Toronto about people not wanting more politicians, because it's such an easy trap to fall into.  The federal Liberals were trying to keep the House of Commons at 308 MPs during the previous parliament during redistribution, citing the very issue of not needing more politicians, despite the fact that a number of underrepresented provinces Ontario most especially, which the Conservatives went out of their way to continue to short-change even with the addition of 30 new MPs overall (they initially planned far fewer for the province, and basically shrugged and said it's Ontario).  But we need to have an honest conversation about the fact that appealing to the kneejerk impulse of "more politicians = bad" is limiting to the work that these elected representatives are supposed to perform.

Of course, the inevitable comeback is to ask how many politicians becomes too many, and sure, there is an upper limit, which also has to do with the context of how they're elected and what their functions are within our particular democratic structure.  There are principles to look at around representativeness, and with Toronto's case, a city that size having just 25 councillors will mean a much bigger workload for those councillors, that would reduce their ability to scrutinize the work of the municipal bureaucracy.  They just completed a study that recommended increasing the size of council from 44 to 47 based on principles of relatively equal representative weight, something that reducing the number to 25 won't solve.  But to simply declare that 47 is too many without a proper rationale is to bow down to the worst possible populist impulses, which is ultimately poisonous to our democracy.