[LINK] "Downtown councillors shut out of Ford’s priority committees"

[rfmcdonald]

The Globe and Mail's Kelly Grant lets us know about the geographical distribution of power on City Council.

The council committees overseeing the budget, labour relations, the Toronto police and the Toronto Transit Commission have all been stacked with councillors from the former inner suburbs, most of whom lean to the right and are allied with the new mayor.

Some of the shunned councillors argued the downtown could wind up being ignored without at least a token presence on such important committees.

“There are practical issues around how to simply make the city function that require input from people in different corners of the city because different corners of the city are built differently,’ said Ward 20 Trinity-Spadina Councillor Adam Vaughan, who will no longer sit on the Toronto Police Services Board.

In fact, all three of the former council representatives on the police board have been or will be replaced by Michael Thompson and Chin Lee of Scarborough and Frances Nunziata of York.

Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday – the chairman of the striking committee, which doled out committee slots that council later confirmed with one exception on Wednesday – said Mr. Ford couldn’t be expected to empower his enemies.

“[Mr. Ford] has got an agenda that they don’t support,” Mr. Holyday said of the 12 councillors whose wards are entirely within the boundaries of the old city of Toronto. “How could he put them in key positions?”

The ideological divide on Toronto city council was even more apparent than usual Wednesday with some progressive councillors donning pink as a light-hearted rebuke to Don Cherry, the hockey personality who lambasted “pinkos” and “left-wing kooks” at council’s investiture ceremony Tuesday.

“I wanted to restore dignity to pink and to the council chambers,” said Councillor Janet Davis, clad in a fuchsia blazer nearly as loud as the jacket Mr. Cherry wore as the mayor’s special guest.