Maybe four years is too long a term for city councillors. They seem a tired bunch, but maybe some of us city residents are more exhausted than they are.

One thing that caught my tired eye was the city manager’s report that said he had a backlog of some 393 requests for reports on various issues from the city council and its committees. That’s a vast number of items requiring a vast amount of time. One way of looking at this is to say that the city manager needs a lot more staff just to respond to all that civic activism.

But a different perspective is to say that this great number of requests for reports is nothing more than councillors off-loading issues onto the city staff rather than addressing them directly. It is a way of not making decisions, of not providing leadership, of avoiding taking a firm position with constituents and instead saying, “That’s an important issue and we have asked staff to report on it.”

Maybe the situation would be different if elections were held every two or three years, as happened three decades ago before the province imposed the four-year term limit.

All of which might help to explain the discouraging decision by councillor Joe Cressy that he will not run in the municipal election a year from now. Cressy has been one of the most active members of council. He works well with people who disagree with him on the fundamentals of a political purpose and gets them to see a more reasonable and progressive position. He did that when he got Mayor John Tory to visit centres that supported those addicted to drugs and convinced him to advocate for safe drug injections sites and see five or six such sites established in the city.

He worked with people at city hall, in other cities in the province and at Queen’s Park to reverse the cuts to provincial public health funding and then to ensure that cities could respond more quickly and more reasonably to the COVID pandemic than the province showed any inclination to do.

Cressy’s view is clearly that if you talk to people openly and with conviction and appeal to their best instincts they will step up. His announcement about not running again concerned the personal: he wants to spend more time with his wife and his two-year-old son.

One understands that, and good for him. But if we had a more active council, one that took responsibility for doing the things that Joe Cressy has been doing, that would make more time for everyone to devote to family matters.

Losing Joe Cressy is a real blow to local politics.

We need a rejuvenation that Queen’s Park, which controls the mechanisms of city elections, refuses to grant. It won’t allow the number of wards to increase to bring in new blood, new ideas. It won’t allow cities to reduce the voting age. It won’t allow residents who are not yet citizens to vote, even though they pay property taxes and, as newcomers, have many useful ideas that could be implemented.

Looking forward to the municipal election a year from now does not engender much enthusiasm. No new voices seem to be on the horizon, and too many councillors seem to think their main job is to ensure their re-election.

Well, maybe these dark thoughts are nothing more than a reaction to the coming of the dark winter days. Perhaps as the solstice turns and the days brighten up hope in a better political future for the city will return as well.

Post City Magazines’ columnist John Sewell is a former mayor of Toronto and the author of a number of urban planning books, including The Shape of the Suburbs.