CHOW RETURNS, BUT VICTORY FAR FROM ASSURED.
Now faces old family opponent, Adam Vaughan
Toronto • Olivia Chow, the Toronto New Democrat who abandoned federal politics last year for an ill-fated mayoral run, announced her return Tuesday, setting up a showdown with an old foe in a new riding in the city.
Chow appeared beside federal NDP leader Thomas Mulcair at a downtown Toronto daycare. With children crying and laughing in the background, she said she intends to compete in the upcoming federal election.
“I’m running as an NDP member for Spadina-Fort York,” she said. “After 10 long years of Stephen Harper, his plan just isn’t working.”
Chow vowed to help deliver a national child-care program, $15-an-hour minimum wage and a national transit plan, if elected.
She called Mulcair “the only leader that can defeat Stephen Harper and bring about good public transit, a decent minimum wage for hard-working Canadians and hope for children.”
Though her pedigree in downtown Toronto politics is impeccable — the former councillor was half the city’s most powerful political duo with her late husband, Jack Layton — Chow’s victory is by no means assured.
After a tepid campaign, she finished an embarrassing third in last October’s mayoral election, behind winner John Tory and Doug Ford, a oneterm city councillor and labelling executive, who joined the race with only six weeks to go.
Her opponent in October will be Adam Vaughan, a popular Liberal MP with a long history in politics and journalism in Toronto. Vaughan, who replaced Chow on city council in 2006 and in Ottawa in 2014, wasted no time going after his new opponent Tuesday.
“Less than a year ago, she made a decision that federal politics wasn’t where her future lay. And she cost taxpayers a million dollars for a byelection so she could run for mayor,” he said.
“Now, less than a year after I was sworn in, she’s back saying, ‘No, federal politics is where I want to be.’ I think that’s a measure of one’s commitment to the program.”
Vaughan quit city council last year to run in the federal byelection.
For her part, Chow said she left federal politics because “thousands of Torontonians” told her they needed a new mayor.
Asked why she’s returning now, she replied, “I refuse to stand on the sidelines and watch the desperation and parents waiting for child care, 17,000 of them in Toronto alone.
“I’ve worked so hard for 30 years for children, for a national daycare program, and we are at a historical moment. We’re at the edge of having a government that can finally deliver child care to one million kids across Canada.”
Her speech focused on Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservatives. She took only one shot at Liberal leader Justin Trudeau.
“Only the NDP will repeal Trudeau and Harper’s reckless, dangerous, ineffective spy bill, C-51,” she said.
At the end of her speech, Chow echoed Layton’s words, telling supporters in 83 days, they will have the chance “to replace fear and division with hope and optimism.”
She will be taking a leave of absence from her teaching position at Ryerson University to campaign.
Though Chow and Vaughan have never faced off directly, they have fought proxy wars for years. In 2006, when Vaughan left journalism for city politics, the NDP warned him to stay away from Trinity-Spadina, Chow’s old ward, he said.
“Jack (Layton) took me aside and said, ‘We’ll destroy you. You’ll never work again as a journalist. You should think twice about running against the NDP. We take no prisoners.’ ”
Vaughan won that race, handily, over Helen Kennedy, Chow’s former executive assistant.
Eight years later, when he ran for Chow’s old federal seat, also called Trinity-Spadina, he faced another member of the Chow/Layton team in Joe Cressy. Cressy, who was the best man at the wedding of Mike Layton, Jack’s son, left Chow’s mayoral campaign to run federally. Vaughan won that race, too.
Then Toronto mayor Mel Lastman once threatened to kill Vaughan on the city council floor — Vaughan is also the Liberal point man for the party’s national housing strategy. He said he’s happy to put his record on housing, transit and other issues up against the better-known Chow’s.
“I’ve run a couple of times now against the NDP machine in downtown Toronto, so there’s very little in the way of surprises,” he said. “I know the riding inside out, better now than I did in the last three campaigns.”
The riding itself, however, has changed significantly. Because its boundaries have been redrawn, Spadina-Fort York now encompasses a huge swath of Toronto’s fast-growing waterfront. It’s younger and more upscale than the old Trinity-Spadina.