[someone123]

This is a politically difficult situation given how council is set up. Most other councillors do the same thing with projects in their districts, because it takes very few votes to change the result in a single district. On top of this they get votes only from residents, not businesses or institutions, and younger people and renters tend to participate less in elections, so homeowners wield disproportionate power in municipal elections (unsurprisingly, the tax rates and municipal service levels are hugely slanted toward residential and against commercial properties).

The bigger problem is actually when it comes time to build infrastructure, not approve developments. With new infrastructure you get the inverse problem where for any project you get a few councillors in favour because their district is directly affected while most others tend to be against because they want the money spent in their district. I think this dynamic is why there was so little investment downtown for so long, and why transit is a mess. It is a really tall order to require 4 or 5 councillors to take a principled stand on a regional planning issue that their constituents won't like.

Some other cities address this problem by having "at-large" councillors who are voted to represent the entire city rather than a single district. I bet a council with, say, 6 at-large and 6 local councillors would perform better than the current council.