Toronto VOTES
The ever-shrinking Olivia Chow, Selley The staying power of Ford Nation, J. Kay
Politically, Olivia Chow is a New Democrat of the modern, more centrist mould of her late husband and political partner, Jack Layton. So a pretty good fit for Toronto, one would think. And she is by far the most experienced candidate vying to replace charming liar Rob Ford.
First in a series of profiles of Toronto’s leading mayoral candidates.
‘We are young, creative, diverse, smart, energetic,” Olivia Chow signs off in a three-minute campaign video released this week — “we” meaning Torontonians. “We just need a good mayor.”
Over images of Toronto’s evolving streetscapes and skyline, Ms. Chow recounts her arrival from Hong Kong in 1970, at the age of 13; her family settling in St. James Town — then a massive, new Le Corbusier-inspired apartment building complex that rapidly went downhill — and discovering the joys of the city: free skating at Nathan Phillips Square, a transit system people envied.
Her pitch is simple: She loves the city. She’s been at its service her entire adult life. It has to do better. “Whether I was a school trustee, city councillor or member of Parliament, the key thing that drives me is to make life better for everyone,” Ms. Chow tells us in the video. It was remarkably well received.
“If we saw more of this Olivia Chow over the past six months,” the National Post’s Robyn Urback suggested, “Toronto’s election campaign would look very different.”
Perhaps. As the election loomed, Ms. Chow did have a certain air of inevitability. Her personal life “is quite similar to a lot of people in this city,” she says. “It reflects how the city has changed.” She is a visible minority; English is not her first language. She cares for her two elderly parents. And she knows what real struggle is: Her
recently published memoir recounts her father’s terrible violence toward her mother, which only worsened after they arrived in Canada and he couldn’t find fulfilling work. She herself suffered at the hands of two abusive partners, and survived thyroid cancer in 2005.
Politically, she is a New Democrat of the modern, more centrist mould of her late husband and political partner Jack Layton, who’s nearly a saint in progressive circles. So a pretty good fit for Toronto, one would think. And she is by far the most experienced candidate vying to replace charming liar Mayor Rob Ford, who dropped out of the race after a cancer diagnosis.
Her competition is Rob’s charmless brother Doug, scion of a successful labels and tags empire; and John Tory, scion of a fine old Ontario family and a smooth-talking veteran of big business, talk radio and the provincial Progressive Conservatives, of which he was leader. As a career politician, Ms. Chow has done very well for herself. But her humble beginnings were supposed to be a big part of the magic.
“She is almost an iconic figure,” Lorne Bozinoff of Forum Research observed way back in November 2012, when pollsters were already doing trial runs. “She is the giant-killer, the elephant in the room.”
Now she’s in third place, polling in the high 20s — not just behind Mr. Tory (around 40%), but tied or even behind Mr. Ford. There are plenty of explanations on offer — an early over-focus on Rob Ford and underfocus on Mr. Tory; an insufficiently progressive agenda; somewhat awkward performances in early debates; the deep unpopularity of the provincial New Democrats. But frankly, it remains a bit of a mystery.
Ms. Chow was best known as, until recently, the member of Parliament for Trinity-Spadina, and as the woman at Jack Layton’s side as he took the party on its improbable journey from also-ran to official opposition — and then, so quickly, as Mr. Layton’s remarkably poised widow in the glare of the national spotlight.
After more than 20 years as a municipal politician with almost exclusively urban core issues, the move to Ottawa would have seemed odd in isolation. But those who know her, and knew Mr. Layton, insist it made perfect sense to the wildly ambitious couple: Their visions of a perfected city always involved massive federal intervention and investment, after all. Ms. Chow and Mr. Layton genuinely believed they would wind up in government, their friends say.
No one was surprised, however, when her gaze turned back to city hall. As Ms. Chow tells it, her family’s early struggles in Toronto gave her a taste for helping people at ground level — the homeless, minorities, women, gays. Her first political job was as a constituency assistant for New Democrat MP Dan Heap, whose son eulogized him as a “pacifist, socialist, worker-priest, Marxist Anglican, [and] trade-unionist.” At the age of 28, Ms. Chow threw herself into the race for school trustee, and won.
Pam McConnell, a long-time leftwing city councillor who was on the school board at the time, recalls Ms. Chow as “dynamite just waiting to explode.”
After six years on the school board infuriating the city’s conservatives — with her advocacy for gay rights, voting for an 86% pay raise for trustees in 1988 and, most famously, living with Mr. Layton in a federally subsidized co-op until they were hounded
out — she moved up to Metro and then city council. And it was there, more than anywhere else, that she developed the reputation her opponents now use against her: She’s just another big-government, tax-andspend left-winger.
In response, Ms. Chow points to her history at city hall battling big budget requests from the police. She notes her current opposition to an endlessly debated subway extension to Scarborough, preferring a much cheaper LRT option. And she touts her experience on conservative former mayor Mel Lastman’s budget committee.
Some of her colleagues on that committee aren’t buying it, though. “Olivia often wished to expand social service programs at the cost of the taxpayer,” former chair David Shiner told The Globe and Mail earlier this year. Mr. Shiner’s predecessor, Tom Jakobek, concurs. “Every single time there was a union issue, or there was a social cause, Olivia would be in the backroom telling people that she was there for them and being their spokesperson,” he says. Eventually she would support the budget, he alleges, but not before trying her damnedest to reverse any proposed cuts.
It’s not entirely clear why Ms. Chow would want to deny this legacy. There is no doubt she believes in the power of government, and government costs money. Indeed, many Toronto progressives have been heard wondering where “the real Olivia Chow” is. In a recent open letter, arch-left NOW magazine publisher Michal Hollett accused Ms. Chow of “downplay[ing her] NDP heritage,” of running a “safe, oh-so-friendly and bland campaign.”
Ms. Chow isn’t having it. “No, this is me,” she says. “How am I safe? We have policies — maybe we didn’t broadcast them enough — on affordable housing, on community benefits agreements with companies, and ... “— here ensued an awkward, fivesecond pause — “feeding kids, child care, basic standard stuff that I’ve always supported.”
Clearly, the criticism hit the mark, however. Ms. Chow’s platform, released Friday, begins with the words: “I have always been and always will be a committed progressive.” And that platform ticks all kinds of progressive boxes: bike lanes, affordable housing units, child-care spaces, arts funding, a handgun ban, opposing a pipeline project that runs through the city, and raising the land-transfer tax on houses worth over $2-million.
But while Ms. Chow talks constantly of the need to “invest” in the city, her platform proposes just $10.2-million of new spending, to be supported by property tax, which she has said will rise only around the rate of inflation. “There are people who can’t pay more property taxes,” she says. Raising them on principle, she says, would “let the provincial and the federal government off the hook” for the funding the city.
“I’m not afraid to go back to the voter, just like Rob Ford did, to say, we have to [raise taxes] to build public transit,” she stresses. But if progressives imagined the taps would open, she says they’re out of luck.
Job 1 in this election, for many Torontonians, is getting rid of the Fords. So assuming you’re not a raving lunatic — which Mr. Tory and Ms. Chow very obviously are not — being in the lead is its own reward for Mr. Tory. The differences between him and Ms. Chow are insignificant compared to the change each offers. This seems to be Ms. Chow’s central problem.
That said, there is more than three weeks to go — roughly the duration of a normal election campaign. The Chow campaign has successfully cast doubt on engineering, funding and timeline aspects of Mr. Tory’s signature “SmartTrack” express rail plan. Ms. Chow’s transit plan is anchored by $15-million for better bus service — which sounds absurd in a city that’s still obsessed with free subways. But modesty’s silver lining is achievability. There’s no reason to think her appeal to struggling everyday Torontonians can’t peel off some of Mr. Ford’s support; and no reason to think her focus on Mr. Tory’s shortcomings and re-energized progressive agenda can’t convince his soft supporters to consider a different anti-Ford option. No question, she’s in with a chance.