Toronto has a city councillor problem this week. Not the specifics of who or what; those details will fade. But the structural pattern they reveal matters. When someone holds civic power for decades without meaningful challenge, the conditions for accountability quietly erode.
This isn’t about one person’s conduct. It’s about what happens when public office becomes a permanent position. The longer someone stays, the more informal their power becomes. Relationships deepen. Influence becomes personal rather than procedural. The mechanisms designed to challenge that power (oversight, opposition, media scrutiny) become routine rather than disruptive. Eventually, the job isn’t just stable. It’s entrenched.
Entrenchment changes incentives. When re-election is nearly guaranteed, the pressure to remain responsive weakens. When relationships span decades, loyalty networks form that make internal accountability harder. When institutional knowledge becomes concentrated in one person, challenging them feels risky even when it’s warranted. The result is civic inertia: problems tolerated longer than they should be, not because anyone explicitly decides to ignore them, but because the systems that should surface them have been quietly worn smooth.
This dynamic isn’t unique to Toronto or to municipal politics. We’ve seen versions of this before in transit governance, in development approvals, and in oversight bodies that exist but rarely unsettle incumbency. The pattern is familiar across institutions where power becomes durable without friction. In police services, hospital administrations, and school boards, the same sequence appears. Long tenure, informal authority, weakened challenge mechanisms, delayed accountability. By the time a problem becomes public, it has often been gestating for years inside institutions where questioning senior figures felt impolitic or futile.
The solution isn’t to assume bad faith or moral failure. Most people in long-standing roles start with good intentions and often do valuable work. But intentions don’t prevent structural drift. Institutions need renewal not because the people in them are corrupt, but because unchallenged power naturally becomes less accountable over time. This isn’t a character judgment. It’s a design principle.
Term limits are one answer, though an incomplete one. They force turnover, but they also create their own problems: loss of expertise, weakened institutional memory, increased reliance on unelected staff. A better approach is building friction into the system itself. Friction is what prevents power from becoming ambient. It is the presence of real challenge, real scrutiny, and the possibility of being unseated.
That means competitive elections. Genuine opposition. Independent oversight with real investigative capacity and no institutional loyalty to protect. Media that treats incumbency as something to scrutinize rather than defer to. Civic culture that rewards challengers and treats long tenure as a yellow flag, not a credential.
The hardest part is that these changes require collective will. Voters have to stop treating name recognition as a proxy for competence. Parties and civic groups have to stop clearing the field for incumbents. Oversight bodies have to be designed for disruption, not reassurance. None of this happens automatically. It requires intentional choices about how we structure accountability and what we are willing to tolerate in exchange for stability.
Toronto will move past this week’s controversy, as cities always do. Another report will be written. Processes will be reviewed. Commitments to reform will be made. But unless we address the underlying dynamic (the way long tenure without challenge distorts civic accountability), we will find ourselves here again. Different name, same pattern.
The question isn’t whether any individual deserves to be in office. It’s whether our institutions are designed to handle power that lasts too long without friction. Right now, they are not. And that’s a problem we can actually fix.
Sven MacNeil 