LIVING IN FORD NATION

The next city council will have a very different relationship with the provincial government from the one it’s had. Watson and the Liberals at Queen’s Park were ideologically aligned — not just because Watson’s a Liberal himself, but because the Liberals under Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne saw cities as important, necessary partners in “building Ontario up.”

That meant light-rail money most of all, but also gasoline-tax transfers for transit, cash for sewer-system upgrades, a wider Highway 417, hospital expansions, new university and college buildings, even a new jail (albeit that’s still in the planning stages). Photo radar to catch speeders in school zones. Anti-protester “bubble zones” around abortion clinics.

Leave aside whether these have all been good. The point is that for 15 years, almost anything Ottawa seriously wanted from the province, with a little persistence and patience, Ottawa could get.

Premier Doug Ford and the Progressive Conservatives will not be as amenable. Their base isn’t in cities, it’s in rural Ontario. During last spring’s campaign, Ford promised to honour virtually all the firm commitments the Liberals made to lower-tier governments, but he also vowed to close the Ontario government’s budget deficit. Don’t expect the billions to flow as readily as they did, or for the mayor to have quite the same pull in the premier’s office when he asks for a favour. Even less if Doucet should manage to defeat Watson.

The new council should be prepared for the opposite: for downloading and funding cuts. The last time Tories were in power, the municipal government found itself paying for more transit operating costs and a share of welfare, public health and housing programs. The province forced it to take over Highway 174, then a provincial highway with millions in plowing and maintenance costs. Ottawa didn’t want it but had no power to resist.

Neither Ford nor Finance Minister Vic Fedeli has said more downloading is coming but they have billions of dollars in spending to slash. We saw the way Ford treated Toronto this summer, turning its civic election upsidedown in mid-campaign and deriding opponents of his abrupt interference as featherbedding lefties who didn’t deserve to be taken seriously. Negotiation and compromise with lower-tier governments is not the Tories’ thing.

That’s one of the reasons for Watson’s looser tax-hike promise, he says: The city might need the money to pay for things it’s not used to paying for.

“Changes in government always bring challenges to municipalities,” Watson says. “We see that with the provincial government and the issue of cap and trade. The city has lost tens of millions of dollars — Ottawa Community Housing has for energy retrofits, projects like Albert and Scott for revitalization and complete streets, the school boards lost money for retrofits to make schools more energy efficient. So that’s a challenge, but you work with those people because they’ve been duly elected.”

Love the Tories at Queen’s Park or hate them, the next city council is going to have to deal with them. Will we have a city government that co-operates with the provincial government or fights it?

So no, there’s no single issue to make this civic election into a referendum. There’s only the same question there always is: What kind of city do we want?

JUSTIN TANG/THE CANADIAN PRESS