There is a fleeting byplay in the late scenes of Martin Scorcese's brilliant urban epic Gangs of New York, when the ever-aspiring William (Boss) Tweed, notorious crook and leading sachem of the great Tammany Hall political machine, muses about building a "modest" courthouse after cleaning up that messy business with Bill the Butcher, the Know-Nothings and the Dead Rabbits.
It was barely a throwaway but still a treat for New York junkies, who know that the magnificent Tweed courthouse, which still stands on Chambers Street in Lower Manhattan, was the unlikely cause of the reformist outrage that ultimately destroyed both Tweed and the Tammany stranglehold on New York.
You needn't be a junkie to appreciate the story here and now, in the late days of Tory Toronto, on the eve of Premier Ernie Eves's allegedly outrageous budget infomercial.
For our purposes, the moral of the Tweed courthouse is that it took decades to build, and that most educated New Yorkers knew full well that kickbacks and bid-rigging were relentlessly inflating its costs and grandeur all the while. For years, local elites chose to shrug at the plain sight of municipal corruption, ignoring reformers' pleas. But the tide changed suddenly following a New York Times exposé of the courthouse scam - one of dozens at the time - and a few years later the untouchable Tweed died in jail.
The tipping point always arrives unexpectedly. So it's tempting to speculate - or hope - that these surprising protests against the Tory government's decision to do what it has done openly and unapologetically for years - contemptuously overriding all manner of democratic conventions - will prove to be Toronto's own Tweed courthouse, the unlikely but decisive impetus for a coming downfall.
Lots of pinkish local Tories seem to think that. Not only Oakville (in the person of Speaker Gary Carr) but also much of Rosedale is furious at the government's decision to announce its budget outside the legislature. Their editorialists are equally outraged. It's a phenomenon.
Mr. Eves is right to dismiss the budget fracas as a non-issue - he knows that six dozen constitutional "opinions" wouldn't buy a small coffee in any of the suburban doughnut shops where his power resides. But that's a rational view, and Mr. Eves's new antagonists are acting on the basis of pure emotion. Anything can happen now - and a casual observer can't suppress the feeling that, in fact, it is.
It's just possible that this city, at least, if not the rest of the province, is finally fed up with all the plundering and contempt and the flat-out incompetence of the Tory government and its well-fed cronies.
Who could have guessed? Our suddenly inflamed constitutionalists only applauded when Mike Harris set more than a century of sober good government on its ear with omnibus legislation so sweeping and Draconian it caused his own ministers to gape. They yawned when he abolished independent school boards and awarded him with a second majority after he smashed local government in Toronto, replacing it with the horrendously dysfunctional but reliably Tory megacity.
Talk about constitutional conventions! You'd think that local government might be one worth fighting for. But no, nothing of actual substance perturbed the loyalists, the same ones now expressing such concern over the merely symbolic budget issue.
In Tory Ontario you don't even need legislation - let alone policy discussions, committees and debates - to change the world. Former finance minister Jim Flaherty reversed Ontario's seminal, 150-year commitment to public education by agreeing to fund unaccountable religious schools with a surprise subclause buried inside an earlier budget.
There hasn't been a real debate in our sadsack provincial legislature for more than a decade. That's why the Tories - understandably, given the consent they have received - prefer to keep it closed most of the time.
With the Brampton budget, they're only doing what they have always done - bypassing the legislature to communicate exclusively with their core constituency. But suddenly, unaccountably - and at long last - they seem to have lost that licence.