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A memo went out last week from the mayor's office. It hit the desks of about half of council - without exception, that half that generally finds itself sympathetic to the mayor's positions, and votes with him. The other half - comprised of councillors who sometimes but not always disagree with him - got no memo.

It was mighty suspicious. It would have been more suspicious if the memo from Miller staffer Mae Lee had included any startling or even uniquely useful information. The memo was about the smattering of trouble that residents have had with the new pay-as-you-throw garbage collection system. If you've been reading this in this and other newspapers, you'd know the deal: not all the garbage bins have been delivered yet, so some residents are getting special tags to put on their garbage until the bins arrive, and some of those residents didn't get their tags right away.

You'd also know that the people to call about these problems are solid waste collection bureaucrats Rob Orpin, Geoff Rathbone and Richard Butts. You might not know John Ioannou - he hasn't gotten the press those other three have for whatever reason - but Mae Lee cleared that up by putting him in the memo along with the other three.

The story from David Miller's office was that the list was comprised of people who'd contacted Lee with anxious questions about how the garbage system was going to work. Anyone who asked got a memo. The story from councillors in opposition was that the list was a friends' list, which, they say, is how access works in the Miller city hall, and asking does no good for those on the outs.

Everybody exaggerates. It's hard to believe, for example, that Public Works and Infrastructure Committee Chair Glenn De Baeremaeker really needed a memo to tell him to contact the bureaucrats who regularly brief him. Yet he got one, along with his vice-chair Adam Giambrone and a bunch of other councillors who have more than enough resources to figure out their own constituents' garbage collection problems.

On the other side of it: it's hard to believe that the mayor would choose to leave his new garbage collection plan to founder and fail in its early days, across more than half the city, regardless of how cross he might be with Case Ootes or Karen Stintz or any of the other councillors left off the list.

The truth is somewhere in the middle here: in particular, in that large divide between what has become the two solitudes on Toronto council: the Miller-led, left-of-centre coalition, and the right-of-centre opposition. The two groups rarely talk, and when they do, it's generally to hurl political invective at one another.

To an extent, this divide has always existed, but in the past, it's been narrow enough you can throw the occasional suspension bridge across. Not to wax too nostalgic for Miller's predecessor - but Mel Lastman knew how to co-opt his left-wingers. And the left-wing opposition knew when to pick their battles. It wasn't constant political warfare, which is the case here.

So I don't have any trouble believing that when a mayor's staff member tallied up her list of inquiries about the garbage bin problems, the only names that came up were the familiar ones who always vote with her boss. I don't have any trouble believing that she might have added a few names - like De Baeremaeker and Giambrone - to that list, just because she knew they'd be interested. Or her figuring that anything from the mayor's office would just get caught in the spam filter in Denzil Minnan-Wong's office, and just not bothering.

What is clear - and a little scary - is that as Toronto goes into its first winter with those big blue and grey bins, and local residents are liable to be more confused and inconvenienced than ever (think about how it will be hauling an extra-large blue bin across the shifting dunes of snow in January) council is showing every sign of being just as dysfunctional as ever.