Come October, we won’t have Kyle Rae to kick us around any more. After 19 years as downtown councillor, he’s decided not to run this fall. Though he’s tired of fighting, he won’t go gentle into that good night.

“The only way we’ll ever change,” he declares, “is by revolution. That’s a dangerous thing to say. But we’ve locked ourselves into a 19th-centuty governance model that has failed. The electoral system of Ontario reflects the rural character of the province, not the urban. It’s even worse at the federal level.”

As for municipal governance, Rae’s equally unimpressed: “Council spends hours debating a bicycle lane, whether a tree should be cut down, or front-yard parking, and two minutes on an important policy issue. Councillors spend more time grandstanding in front of the camera than going to committee meetings and asking tough questions of staff.

“What Toronto needs is a level of governance that weds the city to the region. We do not co-ordinate. We should have councillors on some sort of regional authority, and it should be about more than transit.

“We have members of council and bureaucracy that do great work, but too many are only working for their pension. They’re sleep-walking through it.”

Still, the 56-year-old veteran admits that progress has been made since he was elected in 1991, Toronto’s first openly gay councillor. Back then, his priority was to stop police “harassment” of gays.

“Treatment of the queer community has changed radically,” Rae says. “David Boothby was the police chief I worked with and he supported what I was doing. But I remember talking to those old sergeants who would ask me, ‘Why do you people have to have sex in the park?’

“What,” Rae answered, “straights don’t?”

Though many expected him to be nothing more than the gay councillor, he quickly moved on to other issues, none more controversial than development. Unlike most of his colleagues, Rae has encouraged developers, while insisting on architectural excellence. He stepped on more than a few toes along the way, many belonging to local residents.

“You don’t need to make everyone happy,” he argues. “That would be nice but it’s a false political economy. In Toronto, we always want to reach consensus. The result is that it takes years to get anything done.”

As for the city’s phobia about tall buildings, Rae dismisses it out of hand: “I find the fear of height is an uneducated and emotional response. I have spent much time fighting with neighbourhoods. Where most cities look forward in the hope that their best decades lie ahead, we look backwards thinking our best decade was the ’70s. But that was another century; Toronto’s a different city today.

“In ’91, Toronto was pockmarked with parking lots. We weren’t that far off from Buffalo. It was pretty dire downtown. The condo boom changed all that. I mean, who wants to spend 90 minutes a day commuting?”

Heading into the fall election, Rae admits he’s not optimistic: “I’m worried about continued provincial and federal denial of their responsibility for cities. And I’m worried about the lack of vision for Toronto. We are failing to give people an opportunity to fulfill their potential. And our treatment of immigrants is a disgrace. We want to be a great place to quietly raise our children but not make a blip on the pages of history. Instead of talking about where we’re going and what kind of city we want, we talk about dogs s---ing in parks, or dogs off the leash.

“I’ll miss people, but I won’t miss council.”

Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca