Downtown, within a few hundred yards of each other, are two points that more or less define Toronto. In the square in front of City Hall, there is a statue of Sir Winston Churchill, and in front of him is a small, neatly built wooden podium, courtesy of the city works department.

''This is Speaker's Corner,'' a plaque proclaims (or near to that - I am paraphrasing), ''dedicated to the principle of free and open speech. Here the citizen may address the public on any topic, without constraint. Except, don't say any of these things:'' followed by a long list of the types of speech that are not so free: racist, sexist, libelous, ''Fire! '' in a crowded theatre, and so forth. I have never seen anyone speak at Speaker's Corner, nor listen, nor so much as loiter there.

A couple of blocks away is the real Speaker's Corner - in front of the Eaton Centre. All the essential elements are there: religious cranks, vagrants, petitioners against this or that atrocity and street vendors, each pleading his cause to the stream of shoppers entering and leaving the mall, usually to the accompaniment of a saxophone-and-drum combo playing 45-minute versions of ''Tequila.'' And every so often the police come by and tell everyone to move along.

Toronto would not know what spontaneous street life was if it bit it in the leg. Whenever the city threatens to get the slightest bit fun, city council descends upon the offenders, either to punish or - worse - to envelope them in its ghastly bureaucratic embrace. It's been a busy summer. Amid all the other essential work that council does - declaring Toronto off limits to nuclear weapons, suggesting changes to the national anthem - councillors had to deal with these threats to public order:

Rabbits. The three-bunny rule, passed in July, sets a strict limit on the number of rabbits per household (it was originally set at one), with a $2,000 fine for infractions.

Strippers. In Toronto, dancers must pay for a license to strip. Council makes about $62,000 a year this way. The city licensing commission may remove the requirement, but not before councillors make an ''inspection tour'' this fall of the city's 63 strip clubs.

Hot-dog carts. The number of permits for these and other street vendors for the whole city of Toronto is limited to 178, though there are more than 5,000 (licensed) applicants. To prevent ''chaos on the sidewalks,'' as Mayor Art Eggleton put it, the city gave itself the power to impound illegal carts.

The city also licenses and restricts the number of subway musicians; some councillors are keen to do the same to bicycle couriers. But the cause of the moment is rickshaws. Toronto students clear up to $150 a night pulling these around the downtown area. Tourists and other lazybones get a nice, open-air ride, but council wants to outlaw them. To do otherwise, said one councillor, would be to condone ''slave labor.''

COUNCIL MEDDLING

This doesn't begin to exhaust the catalogue of incidents of council meddling. In most cases, they involve a service people want at a price people are willing to pay, which imposes no cost and offers no offence except to people with too much time on their hands. Which brings us to begging.

A group of merchants in the city's Cabbagetown area recently launched a campaign against the neighborhood panhandlers, and it's a sure bet council will follow with some sort of plan to license them. The easiest way to discourage panhandling, if it's such a problem, is just not to give them any money. Since people do give them money, then in economic terms, they're providing a service to the public. You might doubt that begging is a service people want. But measured by what they do, rather than what they think, it is: whatever it is that makes people willing to give coins to beggars constitutes a demand for begging.

If we are to prevent council, however, from robbing us of even this level of spontaneous public discourse, we will have to act fast. Or rather, act slow. I propose a public shelter be built for beggars, to protect them from the rain while they ''work.'' A similar structure was recently erected on a busy downtown street for the benefit of bus riders. To build one bus shelter took the city six years: one year to get the project up and running, two years considering different designs, and three years to get clearance from no fewer than nine utilities.

Maybe the answer to bureaucracy is more bureaucracy. In the time it takes to build a begging shelter, we could probably elect another council.