Anniversaries are times for celebration and reflection. And after the week that David Miller's had - this week, one year after his land transfer tax/vehicle registration tax vote collapsed into sullen talk of cost containment - it's probably more the former than the latter in the mayor's office.

There's plenty to celebrate for a second-term mayor with an election on the very distant horizon. Council approved some big-ticket items: an environmental assessment that will almost certainly lead to the demolition of a big piece of the Gardiner Expressway; a shift of $75 million from a sale of Toronto Hydro's telecommunications unit to fix up Toronto's albatross-like affordable housing stock; the approval of $120 million in tax breaks to a massive, "transformative" development in north Etobicoke around the Woodbine racetrack.

Votes were overwhelming, or nearly so. The right-wing opposition that typically dogs the mayor when he tries to get a key item through was muted, no doubt diminished by the meeting-long absence of critics like Ward 34 (Don Valley East) Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong and Ward 39 (Scarborough Agincourt) Councillor Mike Del Grande.

One might well wonder: what exactly gives? Is it the warm weather? Did everybody's hearts - like the fabled Grinch's - grow three sizes that day? Is love just in the air?

The answer may just be more prosaic: try as anyone might, it's hard to take those three key issues and cast them ideologically in any depth. At best, they're positive; at worst, inconvenient.

Selling public assets and using the money to fix public housing assets? Sounds reasonable to most of us; it's really just sound fiscal management. And giving tax breaks to a company that will give thousands of jobs to kids from hardscrabble neighbourhoods? How does anybody look good fighting something like that?

Of the three, the Gardiner tear-down might be the best candidate for Land Transfer Tax '08: it certainly favours pedestrian movement over that of automobiles, and those years of construction are going to be a headache to everybody; and at about $300 million, it's a lot of tax dollars going to beautify a part of Toronto that most people just see in movies supposedly set somewhere else.

But the sketches of the new Lake Shore Boulevard sure look fine. And with gasoline prices heading to the stratosphere, more and more of us are starting to wonder whether those high-priced horseless carriages are worth all the bother. Also, the Canadian Automobile Association - the lobby group most likely to oppose a Gardiner demolition - has not been able to muster a fraction of the public relations muscle that the Toronto Real Estate Board did last year, when it went to war against Miller and the land transfer tax.

So it's not as though Toronto Council suddenly found consensus, although it was awfully strange to watch right-wingers like Rob Ford and Case Ootes stand up and vote alongside David Miller, Joe Pantalone and Shelley Carroll. No, they dislike one another as much as they ever have.

But it just goes to show you - good news can make fast friends out of the most bitter, vindictive enemies. Happy anniversary, indeed.