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Our mayor is seeking more powers from the provincial government. True, he doesn't like to call them powers, and as powers go they're pretty piddling.

David Miller's looking for the ability to hire and fire city managers; he wants to be able to hold meetings of his executive committee in private; and he wants to pay those hand-picked committee members more. Really, they're more lines of accountability - lines suggested by the outside panel Miller brought in to find better ways to manage the multi-billion dollar corporation that is the City of Toronto.

If these minor adjustments seem worrying, it might be because the mayor of Toronto, Canada's largest city, is already a creature of immense political power. Indeed, the mayor is the unintended Frankenstein monster of the stitched-together megacity that former premier Mike Harris created through amalgamation in the late 1990s.

Mel Lastman, the city's first mayor, figured that out early on, when he called Harris "liar" to the assembly of television cameras, microphones and notebooks that make up the Toronto media horde. While Lastman's powers were extremely limited in legislation, they were well-nigh infinite in terms of the political waves he could make.

Miller made a pretty big wave just this week, when he used the only slightly enhanced powers of the post-City-of-Toronto-Act mayor to hijack his own executive committee meeting, and thereby launch a national campaign to ban the private ownership of handguns. Miller allowed the committee's work to come to a virtual standstill, to let almost 40 speakers from the community to parade in front of television cameras and reporters, and make their case for an end to private handgun ownership. Then, Miller unveiled a YouTube video of himself, making the same argument, and unveiled a website with an online petition urging Ottawa to ban the weapons.

There was a vote - unanimous - supporting Miller's campaign. But it was completely unnecessary. The mayor of Toronto, accompanied by a chorus of voices who'd all felt the effects of gun violence on Toronto streets, had spoken. Two days later, that online petition had 16,000 names on it.

None of which is to say that the Toronto mayor's enhanced profile, his magnificent powers of persuasion, will result in a handgun ban now or any time soon. The federal Conservative government's base of support includes many more gun owners than it does aggrieved Torontonians.

Yet Stephen Harper would surely be a happier prime minister were he not faced with the voice of Andrea Aster, whose first love John O'Keefe was killed by a stray bullet from a registered handgun while walking up Yonge Street earlier this year. Aster is clear in her call to end private access to handguns, but the call is amplified by the tools available to the powerful mayor that amalgamation created.

Now, for most people in Toronto, the exercise of that power is a righteous one in this case. But it is not a power exercised with any real accountability. Miller, ultimately, can say what he likes here: the same way that his predecessor said what he liked. The end-game is either the persuasion of some other government to take action, or the embarrassment of that government into perhaps disgrace, maybe oblivion.

The powers that Miller is contemplating differ fundamentally, in that they bring the accountability back to the mayor's office itself. They let the mayor implement his own mandate, and ultimately, they leave him accountable if he falls short in the achievement of it.