How do we make sure Rob Ford never happens again? Bring in the parties

It’s the question I’ve probably been asked the most over the last week: is there really no way for Toronto to get rid of Mayor Rob Ford?

And no, there’s really, really not. Short of Queen’s Park passing special legislation or Ford getting convicted and imprisoned, he gets to keep the job.

I know that seems hard to understand. The mayor’s colourful track record would probably disqualify him from continued employment anywhere else, but somehow he gets to remain mayor of Canada’s largest city. But them’s the breaks — the law is the law.

And besides, it doesn’t really matter.

Last week, Ford’s council colleagues took steps to greatly curtail Ford’s power.

Should they successfully win a vote to reduce his office budget, the mayor won’t have too many remaining responsibilities beyond signing bobbleheads that vaguely look like him.

So the question we need to ask is less “how do we get rid of Ford?” and more “how do make sure nothing like this ever happens again?”

Some have suggested the solution is a recall process for municipal politicians, so voters can force bad seeds out early.

I’m not big on the idea.

Elected officials need to have latitude to make decisions that aren’t going to be immediately popular. That gets harder if they start facing recall threats every time they make a tough decision.

Instead, I’m thinking maybe it’s time to consider something more conventional: bringing political parties to city hall.

This is not something that I’ve always been in favour of, and I still have my reservations.

One of the best things about Toronto’s politics — where parties are formally banned — when compared to Queen’s Park or Ottawa is that elected officials can vote with their conscience. They’re not explicitly tied to a party script.

But consider this: if Ford were head of a local political party, the pressure for him to step down right now would be even greater. Party members would be in active revolt, worried about the future of their brand.

More importantly, with a party system, there’s good reason to think Ford never would have become mayor at all. Unless he ran as an independent, he’d have had to win a party nomination, and no major party would have been likely to take him — not with his metric ton of personal baggage.

Add that to the most common argument for bringing political parties to city hall — they already exist behind-the-scenes anyway and we just don’t talk about them — and

I’m finding it hard to think of big downsides.

With the Ford crisis making it clear that there are flaws in Toronto’s governance model, maybe it is just time for city hall to get its party on.