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Last week, she was preaching patience.

“I’m done,” she said Tuesday. “This is just not acceptable.”

There are a lot of different elements to evaluating Toronto’s response to the largest snowfall in a long time. Generally, the clearance of major roads and highways in the immediate aftermath seemed actually pretty good, secondary roads and side streets not as good. TTC readiness and delays are something else. The pace of snow removal (using not plows that push it to the side, but dump trucks that haul the snow away) is another aspect entirely.

But here the mayor was highlighting something more basic: Did the sidewalks get cleared as they are supposed to? And can we trust the word of our city’s management when they say the work has been done?

And given that the obvious answer is no, then why the hell not?

Our frustrated mayor likely didn’t have to hunt very hard for a location to make her point 鈥� one where a member of her staff could help a senior citizen safely scale a massive snow bank even as she was talking. If you’ve been out there, you’ve probably seen many such locations. That’s not good.

What’s worse is that, as Chow points out, senior city managers speaking to the mayor and to the public over the past week have been saying it ain’t so. Were they in the dark? Or were they trying to spin it in their favour somehow?聽

The thing is, claiming things are better than people can plainly see they are does not make anyone believe the situation is fine. It only makes people think management does not know what they are talking about. Or worse, that they do know and are lying.

“There will be consequences,” Chow said. We await learning what those are. One conclusion we can hope the city management takes from this is that being honest is a minimum expectation.

Here’s another: When it comes to things like the three-week timeline for snow removal, there’s a big difference between saying “We’re doing the best that we can,” and saying “This is the best we can do.” The former asks for understanding in a crisis, where given the existing constraints and resources, all hands are on deck scrambling to manage. The latter implies that it is impossible to imagine a situation where constraints and resources are different, leading to a different outcome.

Too often when the city’s senior bureaucrats answer questions 鈥� not just in the current crisis, but about other things (in the past, for instance, about the possibility of sidewalk snow clearing downtown, about the seasonal opening of park washrooms, about the viability of laneway housing, about development application backlogs, or simply about the need for proposed budget cuts) they have an aggrieved or dismissive tone that suggests not just that they are doing the best that they can, but that also implies that it’s about the best we could hope for.

It is understandable that they might say that this result is what city council direction led them to. But too often left unsaid is that things could be different if council gave different direction: more resources, fewer constraints, a different approach.

And here’s the thing: when they imply that this kind of snow removal 鈥� or whatever other unsatisfactory status quo is the question of the day 鈥� is really the best we can hope to expect, that feeds into a sense people have that governments can’t accomplish anything well. Which feeds a kind of populist “tear it down” impulse we’ve seen far too much of lately across North America.

Maybe, knowing all the facts 鈥� say, if doing better required a big property tax increase or redirecting funds from other essential programs 鈥� we would not choose to do better. But that is something different from having the public believe that nothing better is possible.聽

Chow, on Tuesday, seemed amid her frustration to be crystal clear on her own position on that question. “Can we do better?” she asked. “Absolutely.”