There seemed a large sigh of relief from some quarters of the city when, in early February, Mayor Rob Ford and his allies lost the vote on putting the Eglinton Avenue transit line entirely underground. Finally, people said, a year of bully politics from the mayor and his brother have been countered by more rational-thinking councillors.

But now, two months later, it’s looking like it was only a small scuffle and perhaps not all that significant. Sure, some headway is being made to improve transit planning, but no one has talked about giving the transit service enough money to improve surface routes where buses are stuffed to the gills or where streetcars are infrequent visitors to stops.

There’s no sense that Toronto City Council is about to commit to funding a really good transit system. The change is simply that council now says that, since it does not have the money to build subways, it will stop pretending that subways will be built in the near future.

Sadly, the dominant culture of Mayor Ford’s vision remains generally in place. His administration’s tough stance against city employees — witness the strike by the library workers and the brinkmanship with the inside workers — continues unabated to the city’s detriment.

Labour unrest diverts city council from focusing on the larger issues, as do all the other shenanigans at City Hall — like weight-loss programs, new radio slots and the threats by brother Doug Ford to challenge dissenting councillors at the next election.

One could argue that the transit kerfuffle is the first step in more serious change in political direction, but where’s the evidence? Where’s the initiative to get serious about how planning is done in Toronto? City Council is in the process of hiring a new chief planner, but where’s the drive to say we deserve good planning and we’ll fund good planning and make the tough choices needed, so developers and residents both know what to expect?

Where’s the push to ensure city services are well-funded? You’ll remember a group of councillors managed to restore the worst of the budget cuts that the mayor had attempted to inflict, but there were many services they did not address. The Ford financial strategy that depends on the mirage of gravy and cuts to both programs and staff is not healthy for the city — we need a strategy that secures more revenue for the city. Yes, it would be a terrific idea to rethink how services are delivered, but that can never be done when staff are under threat and when the innovative managers have decided to leave for the greener pastures of city administrations that value their skills.

Where’s the initiative to transform the police service into one the city can be proud of? We currently have a police service that seems unwilling to change how it deals with those in mental crisis, continuing its sad record of killing three or more of such individuals each year rather than serving and protecting them. And why are black youths stopped three times as often as white youths, as the Toronto Star pointed out in its powerful investigative piece on March 10? When that kind of discrimination occurs on the basis of race, isn’t that contrary to the law? Where are our councillors on this issue? Why hasn’t a single councillor spoken out and asked for change?

Mayor Ford wants to sell off some of the limited affordable housing the city controls. What’s gone wrong here? Why isn’t there a strong initiative to find ways to create more affordable housing, given how much it is needed? Good housing is an excellent way to address income problems. The Occupy Wall Street movement brought the serious inequities in income to the fore, but City Council hasn’t built on that movement.

The city is in a serious drift — perhaps more caught in a fog. The transit shift moves in the right direction. But given the sad state City Hall is now in, I’m not willing to be thankful for this small mercy, and neither should you. It’s spring time: we deserve more and better.

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 Suburbs.