An idea whose time has come, or gone?

Among the many distinctions between the former mayoral regime and the current one, a motion on the floor in city council chambers this week surely ranks near the top.

Kristyn Wong-Tam, the councillor for Toronto Centre-Rosedale, moved that the city explore the possibility of mounting its inaugural art biennial in 2017, in time for Canada’s 150th birthday.

It was seconded — and here’s the distinction — by none other than Mayor John Tory. Tory, an urbane sort, who sees the benefits of culture in the competitive arena of civic branding. But as the city is about to learn, it’s one thing to want a biennial and it’s quite another to make one.

Toronto has had biennial envy for years. The idea has been kicking around since at least the early ’80s. The last time it surfaced was in 2010 — absent since then maybe because of the Ford era’s cost-cutting, cultural chill — but even in the era of culture-friendly mayor David Miller, it couldn’t fly.

Five years ago, David Liss, the artistic director of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, and then Power Plant director Gregory Burke rallied the Toronto art world to the cause.

One day that spring, more than 200 people jammed MOCCA to hear a panel — museum directors such as Burke, Liss, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Matthew Teitelbaum and Luminato CEO Janice Price, whose support would be critical — speak in vague but hopeful terms. The crowd dispersed, a report was written and nothing ultimately happened.

Toronto had been down that road before, too, stretching all the way back to the 1980s, when a group calling itself Visual Arts Ontario, headed by eventual Harbourfront Centre CEO Bill Boyle, lobbied for a sculpture biennial that would leave permanent work behind every two years (it never happened).

We’ve also watched as the international biennial industry has proliferated in every corner of the planet, hatching events in Dakar, Beijing, Berlin, Havana, Istanbul, Liverpool, Taipei, Sydney, Sao Paulo and dozens of others.

At the same time, we’ve seen events in our own country take flight. The Alberta Biennial, exclusive to Alberta artists, is hosted in Edmonton by the Alberta Art Gallery, and the Montreal Biennale was reimagined last year as the amalgamation of two contemporary art extravaganzas that city hosted regularly. No city in Canada has the concentration of artists, infrastructure, wealth and art-friendly audiences that Toronto can claim. And don’t get me wrong: a polished, professional Toronto Biennial, mounted with the full support of our many cultural institutions that could showcase both what we have here and how we connect to the world out there is right at the top of my personal wish list.

But there are questions. Biennials are expensive, labour-intensive and have a propensity to sprawl. They happen once every two years partly because it takes that long to put them together. If the city had all staff, curatorial and otherwise, in place tomorrow morning, it would almost be too late.

More bad timing: the AGO, which would surely need to shoulder the load here, is without a director, Teitelbaum having decamped for Boston last week.

Liss, its champion a few years back, will have his hands full as MOCCA packs up and moves into limbo at the end of the summer.

With the glut of similar events all over the world, not to mention the constant perpetuation of art fairs in every part of the planet, the artworld calendar is already jampacked (aiming for summer 2017 would put us in direct competition with the Venice Biennale, the grand dame of the global biennial circuit).

Wong-Tam’s motion suggests a Toronto Biennial would “mark Toronto’s arrival on the international stage as a global visual arts powerhouse.” Not handled properly, though, it could add us to a long list of also-rans. And that’s the ending to a very long story no one wants to see. mwhyte@thestar.ca