It's too bad Doug Ford lost the race to the mayor of Toronto.  Instead, he lost and found himself premier of Ontario.  Now he gets to inflict the godawful politics of Canada's least-governable city on an entire province.

Here he is sabotaging Toronto's municipal elections just as they're beginning.  There he is complaining about how long it takes to get the suburbs to downtown Toronto.

It's a bit hacky and clichéd, but here we are anyway: the government of Ontario is now run by and for the city of Toronto.

It wasn't really a consequence I'd considered at the time, but in retrospect it's an obvious outgrowth of Ford's campaign.  He spent his time on the road giving voice to the aggrieved, calling not necessarily for revenge but something quite close to it.  And now that he has power, his grievances are the ones he's taking care of first.

Unfortunately for the province, a great many of his grievances seem to stem from his time on city council.

Which is why we get the absurd spectacle of the premier announcing he's cutting the size of city council by nearly half on the last day of registration to run for municipal office.  Whether it's a good idea or not— I could probably be convinced either way — dropping a shell like this on top of a city at the last possible minute, with no warning, is a terrible way to do anything.

But screwing with those downtown Toronto do-gooders is as close to a mission statement as he's got.  So, this is what the province gets.

Of course, this wouldn't be a Toronto politics story if some kind of absurd backlash didn't soon erupt.  An lo, so it did.  A nascent movement, if we can consider a bunch of tweets to be a movement, for Toronto to secede from Ontario and become a province of its own.  This is quite obviously a non-starter.  But it's also hilarious in the way these sorts of reflexive demands for a far off saviour, rather than doing something both plausible and useful.

(It's probably not a great start for mayoral candidate Jennifer Keesmaat to already be backing away from her early tweeted support for succession.  Perhaps good city planners do not make good politicians.)

Cities in Canada draw all their power at the whims of the provinces.  It's one of the great flaws of our constitutional system that local power is granted bequeathed upon the city by its provincial masters.

City councils should have more power than they do, but they don't.  If you want your city to have more autonomy, the best way to do that is to win provincial government.  Not hope for some constitutional process to set things right.

Getting enough provinces with enough of the population to agree to grant the province of Toronto the right to exist, without, presumably, the consent of Ontario, is an awfully long shot.  Demanding a federal government waste political capital on shepherding such a thing is even less likely.

Nothing will come out of this reflexive, extremely online, outcry.  It's foolishness.

But when Ford talks about how long it takes him to get from his suburban Toronto house to Queen's Park, he actually has power to do something about that.  Mega highways are surely in our future.  (Which won't actually solve the problem, but no matter.)

When ever Mayor John Tory gets under his skin — given he defeated Ford on a platform of not being a Ford, this will be frequently — the premier can do something about that.  If Ford can squeeze down the size council on a lark, he can do all sorts of other nasty things, too.

But if the people of Toronto want to do something about it, they should focus on getting themselves together for the next election.  The easiest solution to bad politics is always better politics.  Winning elections is hard, but it's the least-fanciful solution.

Unfortunately for those of us not in Toronto, this is what we're all in for now.  Years of Toronto politics on the provincial, god help us, maybe even federal, stage.

Not what I would call ideal.