After 15-or-so years observing and covering Toronto municipal politics — only a few of those years, thankfully, being full-time — I thought I had come to terms with the untethered heights and depths of maddening, petty irrelevancy to which city council can rise and plummet. I thought I had cringed as hard as I could cringe, raged as hard as I could rage, about and against the legions of parochial zeroes, elected and otherwise, who want to hold this hard-striving city hostage to their various whims and preferences.