The City of Toronto municipal election is just five weeks away, and there is growing doubt that it can be conducted in a fair manner or perhaps even held at all.

The Toronto City Clerk, quite properly and quite pointedly, told her city council last week that holding a fair election on the originally scheduled date is increasingly questionable. The reason, of course, is the bizarre actions by Ontario Premier Doug Ford concerning the make-up of Toronto City Council.

From slashing the council in half on the last day of nominations to the court siding with the city's case to the Premier's unprecedented decision to use the notwithstanding clause to the subsequent city's appeal to the head-spinning problems of candidates running for a council seat, it is just a mess. Nothing like this has ever happened before in Canadian municipal politics.

Protests from the public gallery at Queens Park resulted in seniors being tossed from the gallery, some in handcuffs.

 Most of the Official Opposition got turfed from the House by the Speaker for their protests.

This has become a mosh-pit of politics--a mash-up and a debacle that has become a national talking-point.

One has to feel particularly sorry for the candidates, many of them first-timers who have been planning their incursion into politics for a year or more. They have been raising money, writing brochures, buying campaign signs, knocking on doors, prepping for debates and often putting their own lives on hold during the campaign period...and then they are suddenly informed that their ward boundaries had changed. Then they weren't. Then they were. Now they are...well, nobody is very certain.

It is a debacle of a process. No one seriously challenges the idea that a province can order a municipal council's size to be changed. (That is a whole different matter and one which I oppose, but that is not the argument here that is a bigger and even more important discussion we should be having.) According to the BNA Act, provinces have virtually unfettered authority over municipalities. 

What irked the Judge in the original case was the timing and the process. Correctly, in the view of many. You can't change the rules in the middle of the game. Or at least you shouldn't be able to.

Toronto voters are confused, angry and frustrated. They have every right to be.

Forgotten in the shouts and protests is the fact that school board candidates are also impacted.

There are a number of observers who feel that the new Premier is indulging in payback for his one term on Toronto Council, which coincided with his brother Rob's one term as Mayor. Neither went well.

If this is a petulant and mean-spirited action, then Ontario seems to have elected its own mini-Trump. 

Towns and cities across Ontario are nervous about what the next steps may be, and municipalities across the country are looking on with concern.

It is going to be a long four years in Canada's largest province.