Perhaps we shouldn't read too much into the fact that the glass doors leading to the reception area in the mayor's office are now equipped with locks.

Or that the mayor, who reportedly returned calls from his hospital bed last week, hasn't made himself available to the men and women of the City Hall press gallery since the election, letting big brother Doug, the councillor from Ward 2, handle the tough questions.

Not sure who died and made Dougie mayor, but even Rob Ford's enemies on council are willing to cut him slack on that last one. Every mayor has his or her own way of communicating with the public. In Ford's case, it's usually a brief statement and off to the next whatever.

It's hard to know to what extent he's actually engaged in the day-to-day business at City Hall. Members of council aren't sure either, since Ford sightings are scarce - about as rare as, say, an endangered wolverine in the wild.

For councillors, there's no seeing the big guy without an appointment, no snatching a few minutes with the chief magistrate between meetings, as you'd expect in an organization as large as the city of Toronto, where the hurly-burly requires the occasional deviation from protocol.

The Friday press releases from corporate communications outlining the week ahead include none of the mayor's scheduled events. The management structure is very much top down.

If he's not careful, people are going to start talking, if they aren't already. Fordo hasn't looked himself lately. And it's not just the 5-millimetre kidney stone he had to have surgically removed last week. Perhaps the rigours of the job are getting to him, and something more serous is setting in, like a bad case of bunker mentality.

The guy in charge of the country's sixth-largest government hasn't exactly been fully engaged in the civic discourse. In some ways, his carefully managed tenure so far has resembled a propaganda film.

Check the script: there've been visits with a governor general, a U.S. ambassador, a movie-star-turned-California-governor and a former rock star with a tongue that's been in places an overweight kid from the burbs can only dream about. All of it for no other reason than optics.

Yup. The mayor is living la vida rock star. And as if to maintain the mystique, he's only being served up for public consumption in dribs and drabs.

This hasn't gone unnoticed by the City Hall press gallery, who tried to grill the mayor on the subject of his availability in a scrum outside his office Friday (February 18), only to be cut off when the queries got testy. He was out of there in three minutes and 23 seconds flat.

Ford laughed off the suggestion that he's been hard to find. "It's hard to miss 300 pounds of fun," he said. His press secretary, Adrienne Batra, says the mayor attends between 25 and 30 events a week.

It's unclear why the press was summoned to Ford's office in the first place. One theory: he's getting push-back from the province on his subway plan and is negotiating via the media.

On that front, Ford is laying the groundwork for the train robbery of the century - going to the province with a pitch to fund his Sheppard subway with private money while completely taking away council's authority to vote on the plan.

Doug Ford's musings the other day about Toronto following the Chicago strong mayor model and giving Rob veto powers didn't come out of the blue. It's part of a larger strategy to centralize power in the mayor's office.

If you think council has been whipped by Ford now, wait till there are half the number of councillors and the mayor controls practically every vote. One key difference from Chi-Town's strong mayor system: there, a speaker represents council's opposition. Here, there's no real op-position except for a handful on council's progressive wing, and some of them are abandoning ship on votes.

The mayor has not only been able to set the agenda, but now he wants to hijack it, too. And there's no better evidence of that than his private funding plan for subway expansion.

Let's think about this for a second. Billions have been committed by the province to Transit City, a plan to crisscross the city with light rail, providing faster, more reliable public transit to poorer areas now left behind.

Yet we're now contemplating a subway that would serve nowhere near as many people just so Ford's business buds can make a killing. How did we get here?

Who's afraid of Rob Ford? Dalton McGuinty, that's who. Why else would the premier allow the mayor to tell the province how to spend its money?

The Grits are unsure about whether Ford's financing plan would end up costing taxpayers like the last public-private partnership to build transit (the Sheppard subway to nowhere). But it looks like they're heading down the road of political expediency anyway, selling out Transit City to avoid pissing off Ford just so they can (maybe) hold onto seats in Scarborough come the fall election.

McGuinty's crew don't want to put precious resources into fighting electoral battles in T.O. when the next provincial election will be won in ridings in southwestern Ontario and the 905, or so the theory goes. Grit polling suggests public transit is a non-starter as a campaign issue. The provincial election will be won or lost on jobs and the economy.

Funny thing, though, how Transit City promises to fast-track thousands of construction jobs and create far-reaching development opportunities that would mean more jobs. But try explaining that to the voting public. Too complicated, Grit insiders say. When it comes to Ford, best to keep things simple.

enzom@nowtoronto.com