Early in 2007, Denzil Minnan-Wong, who at age 43 has been a city councillor for nearly 14 years, took it upon himself to shadow Mayor David Miller at his every public appearance. He first tried the idea on for size at the Toronto City Summit in late February, scrumming with the media after Miller announced the One Cent Now campaign. His riposte: the city needed to get its own house in order before it went begging for other people’s money. After that, he stayed on Miller’s tail throughout the spring, even while walking on crutches (due to a running injury), which made him appear all the more dogged.

In reality it was nothing more than a political mop-up act, but as those things go, it was effective. The more Minnan-Wong condemned waste and overspending at city hall, the more it entered public consciousness. And the perpetual annoyance threw Miller off his game, giving everything he said a partisan tinge. If Miller claimed to speak on behalf of all Torontonians, Minnan-Wong was there begging to differ. He was all over the airwaves, too, appearing regularly on AM640 to denounce Miller’s plans. It was an unexpected twist to Toronto’s nascent “strong mayor” era: capital-O Opposition had come to city hall.

Those early scrums turned out to be a mere foreshadowing of the partisan freak show that would engulf council over the summer. In the debate over Miller’s proposed land transfer and vehicle registration taxes, council’s right wing, led by Minnan-Wong, repeatedly dunked Miller in the tar of NDP stereotype. The right succeeded in deferring the vote, and Miller, between his tortured pro-tax campaign and his bungling of budget cuts, was made to look like a tax-loving union stooge who couldn’t make a decision. Meanwhile, Minnan-Wong was organizing meetings with Ontario PC Party Leader John Tory, who, capitalizing on the tax revolt Minnan-Wong had helped foment, called for an audit of the city’s finances.

It was as brilliant as it was reprehensible. Though the deferral lasted only three months, the delay carried hefty consequences, since it left the city unable to balance its books for 2008 and probably for 2009 as well—an act of pure brinkmanship when you consider that deficits are forbidden in municipal government. Minnan-Wong and his allies were having it both ways, first railing against taxes, then against cuts. They knew the city had drained its reserves and was flirting with bankruptcy, yet they never brought forward a feasible alternative. His job, Minnan-Wong apparently decided, wasn’t to find solutions or answers but to stir things up. It all drove the mayor’s staff and supporters bonkers.

On August 10, the day Miller announced the cuts, councillor Adam Vaughan, who emerged as the debate’s most effective voice from the left, lay in wait for Minnan-Wong to begin his habitual counter-scrum, then pounced. “Where’s your plan?” Vaughan asked. “You’re a hypocrite, Denzil.... You’ve been on council since you were 12 years old and you don’t even know the details in this budget.” One pro-Miller political staffer who watched the chaos unfold told me that, “we were all quietly cheering inside. Denzil doesn’t play fair. He seeds doubt. Left-wingers are naive: we bind ourselves to reason and think that, if we explain the situation lucidly, people will agree with us. What Denzil understands is that people don’t think that way.”

Had Minnan-Wong been the leader of an official opposition—if he spoke on behalf of a group of councillors, and if all their reputations were on the line when he went before the microphones—he would never have gotten away with it. He would have been compelled to present an alternative plan, or at least to have an idea.

Alas, political parties are forbidden in municipal government. So says Ontario’s Municipal Elections Act. But in Toronto it’s more than just a legal edict: it is an article of faith that Torontonians do not want party politics at city hall, because they value open government that is collaborative and responsive to local needs. This axiom, which has always struck me as a pleasant fiction, has now attained the status of outright farce. Even Miller admits the principle no longer holds true. “We’ve clearly got a system which is neither a party-based system nor a local municipality where everybody is collegial and sorts out the problems,” he says. I would put it a little differently: the system has been drifting away from collegiality and toward partisanship ever since amalgamation, and it’s high time council ceased pretending to be something it is not.