So much time to prepare, yet Chow has little to say
TORONTO — It is to weep.
What if the darling of Toronto progressives, one of the presumed front-runners in the city’s mayoralty campaign and the person atop much of the pre-election polling, held a kickoff and had nothing to say?
That’s the sad story of Olivia Chow’s campaign launch Thursday at the parish hall at St. Simon-the-Apostle church.
At a moment in history when the city has rarely been so divided, the city hall so rudderless (though officially it is two-headed, with the disgraced elected mayor, Rob Ford, stripped of most duties and left free to campaign full-time while the deputy mayor, Norm Kelly, does the grunt work), and vision in such scarce supply, the great squishy hope had little to offer but warm-andfuzzy blandishments.
Though there had been speculation that Chow would unveil virtually her full platform, she did nothing of the sort.
Even where she dropped hints of hard policies to come — such as her position on the Scarborough subway extension and the proposed downtown relief line — she was vague.
About the former, finally belatedly approved by city council last summer, Chow said, “We need to move people faster and do it now and one of the ways … for Scarborough is we can build something four years faster and four more stops” — in other words, light rail. Of the proposed latter line, she allowed that “it is important” and that “eventually it should be built, the question is how do we fund it, what does it connect to?”
As for her preferred method of paying for transit improvements, Chow resorted to the line that already seems to have become a touchstone for the campaign: “We can work together,” and promised to release “a transit policy, an intensive one” at some later date.
Wearing a bright yellow jacket and black skirt, Chow arrived to an adoring crowd at the jam-packed hall in the downtown neighbourhood where she grew up after moving, as a teenager, to Canada from Hong Kong with her family in 1970.
Her speech was laden with references to that typical immigrant’s tough start in a new land, undoubtedly polished by her recent book tour to promote her memoir, My Journey, released, by pure coincidence, a mere two months ago.
That a candidate who has long been considering this particular job — for more than a year people have been working on her behalf, and when Ford appeared in late 2012 about to get the boot from office over a conflictof-interest court case, she was reportedly ready to go — should have had so little to say was shocking to me.
The only themes I could detect were: 1) We must put women and children at “the heart of the city,” which she didn’t explain but I take to mean the city of her adolescence, flowering with libraries and parks for all. 2) The TTC is crowded and that pressure must be relieved sooner than later. 3) We must come together and work that way.
(I should say here that a quick poll sent out by the Chow campaign after the speech, quoting some of my press colleagues, suggests my dim view of the event is solidly in the minority. The release quoted seven journalists, all variously approving either of Chow’s speech or its content or both. I read it just as I finished transcribing the actual tape of the speech and the Q&A press scrum after it, and I was gobsmacked by the contrast between what she’d actually said and what others had heard.)
Chow has always been a New Democrat and is the widow, of course, of the late leader Jack Layton.
But her campaign team has prominent local bigwigs of all stripes — including veteran Conservative strategist John Laschinger, who ran former mayor David Miller’s successful campaigns, NDP activist Joe Cressy and longtime Liberal Warren Kinsella — and there wasn’t a sliver of NDP orange anywhere to be seen at the launch.
It is in Chow that city progressives have invested their hopes and in Chow alone: She is the only candidate from that side of the political spectrum, while the right-of-centre field is crowded, with former councillor David Soknacki, former Ontario Progressive Conservative leader and radio show host John Tory (my own conflict-of-interest here is that I regularly appeared on Tory’s former show and frankly love the guy) and former TTC boss Karen Stintz (I know Stintz a little too and also like her a lot) and the already declared and incumbent Ford, of course.
Chow had little to say about Ford’s ruinous personal life and administration, except that “It’s not just the scandal, it’s really the failed policies,” which may leave the impression that hers will be a highminded campaign.
That’s one notion that can be easily dispelled: Kinsella, in his blog, has been rabidly attacking the opposition for weeks.
His Thursday entry was headlined, “John Tory and Karen Stintz: the birthers of Toronto municipal politics.”
Birthers, of course, are the lunatics in the United States who believe President Barack Obama’s birth certificate is forged. Kinsella made the odious comparison because the two local campaigns apparently raised the old issue that Chow and Layton once lived in subsidized housing.
Yet even the Torontoist, a progressive online magazine, asked that very question in a “campaign fact check” Thursday and answered it with this: “The answer is yes — but it’s complicated.”
Indeed, it was. The two paid market rent for a three-bedroom apartment in a co-op that was a mix of geared-to-income housing and market-value units. Chow and Layton didn’t live in a low-income unit, and them living there didn’t rob anyone in need of a place. “Strictly speaking though,” the magazine pointed out, “every unit in most federally funded co-ops is to some extent subsidized by taxpayer money.”
It also notes that three months before the Toronto Star broke the story, the couple began paying an extra $325 a month “to bring their rent more closely in line with those charged in the private sector,” which suggests some awareness they were getting a break.
Two hundred and 28 days to go before it ends.