The biggest thing to take away from yesterday's transit vote is this: after a year in power, Rob Ford has managed to shrink the number of councillors who would reliably vote for his priorities from around 25-30 (depending on the issue) to less than half of the council. Yesterday's LRT vote wasn't a narrow defeat on a trivial matter; it was a 25-18 rejection of the Mayor's signature campaign issue. In a very real way. Toronto now faces an era of minority government. Rob Ford and his allies will continue to have a number of formal controls over the city, but the unprecedented use of a Special Session to overrule the Mayor shows that the opposition can impose its will on the Mayor when it wants.

And the mayor's side of council shows no willingness to reach out to their opponents. At the end of the day, after they'd lost the transit vote, it came time to formally excuse the absence of Councillors Ron Moeser (Ward 44, Scarborough East) (who is seriously ill) and Gloria Lindsay Luby (Ward 4, Etobicoke Centre) (who was on a long-planned vacation, but signed the petition which convened the special session). Ford-aligned councillors demanded the votes be held separately so they could specifically condemn Lindsay Luby, a mark of the anger on Ford's side of the argument, but a move that a lot of councillors and council-watchers called extremely petty.

(Amusingly, some councillors voted the wrong way to condemn Lindsay Luby. It forced council to re-open the vote so they could change their votes—and numbers supporting Lindsay Luby actually grew.)

The mayor, having already lost one of the most important votes of his term so far, seems unwilling to face the arithmetic of Toronto's politics (he needs 22 votes on council, plus his own) and instead is working hard to alienate the very centre-right councillors he needs. In hushed tones, some council staff tell reporters they've never seen a mayor so unwilling to compromise. In particular, ruling out TTC Chair Karen Stintz' attempt at compromise (which everyone from Giorgio Mammoliti (Ward 7, York West) to Cherise Burda of the Pembina Institute seemed to be able to live with) left a number of staff shaking their heads.

Staff who spoke on condition of anonymity said councillors who vote with the mayor 70 and 80 per cent of the time are being told by the mayor's office "that's not enough." There's no reason to think this is a sustainable attitude in the mayor's office.

Now, yesterday wouldn't have been Toronto Council if there weren't a touch of the absurd. We had Speaker Frances Nunziata doing her level best, shouting at councillors that Stintz's proposal was just the "David Miller and Adam Giambrone plan", as if this had somehow escaped everyone's notice.

At one point, Councillor Gord Perks (Ward 14, Parkdale—High Park) called out "Is Matt Elliott in the house?" and started conferring with @graphicmatt himself over his progress on the LRT talking point bingo card:

Perks won, but he may have been the only one playing in the room.

But the most absurd moment is the quote you may well have heard by now: when, after an all-day meeting the Mayor of Toronto (whose formal position is head of Council) declared the entire meeting to be "technically irrelevant". What Ford meant was that in the end the province will decide the fate of Eglinton, Finch and others. This is true. But it also means that the province can decide that the meeting is relevant after all, something the Transportation Minister of Ontario seems to have done last night after the vote:

Now that Council has endorsed a position, we have asked Metrolinx to consider the impacts on current transit planning and report back to us as quickly as possible.

As time is of the essence, we look to the Mayor and Council to move forward together and help us build public transit.

There's been no indication that Queen's Park intends to override council, if for no other reason than because the original deal between McGuinty and Ford was contingent on a council vote in the first place.

This will continue to be an issue Toronto argues over—Rob Ford and Ward 2 Councillor Doug Ford both say this will be an election issue in 2014—but for now the sharpest argument over transit in Toronto is over.

Blog image by John Michael McGrath.