Please don’t call me a politician: Mansour
#NIAGARA VOTES2018
Dinah Mansour has one message for voters as she campaigns for Niagara Falls’ top political job. She’s not a politician.
The 37-year-old board chairwoman at an international trading and investment agency in Niagara Falls has never run for office before and says maybe now is the time to try a different direction at city hall.
“I am not a ‘poli’. I am strictly a lady, a mom, an entrepreneur and a citizen,” she says. “I don’t speak like one and I don’t want to be remembered as one.
“People say, ‘Dinah you don’t sound like (a politician).’ I say, ‘Good!”
She is running for mayor, however, in a race dominated by two others who are longtime politicians — Jim Diodati, with eight years as mayor and seven on city council, and Kim Craitor who has spent 17 years on council and 10 as the city’s MPP.
For Mansour and Kip Finn, another first-time challenger and non-politician, the task is to convince voters to try the path less travelled when they vote Oct. 22.
Mansour says she speaks seven languages and with a father who was an international trader, she has lived all around the world — Lebanon, Egypt, Israel, France, Dubai and England.
She received her bachelor’s degree in literature from the American University of Cairo, in Egypt, and later earned a master’s degree and her PhD in political science from Hertfordshire University in England.
All that, she says, gives her a world-view the other candidates can’t have.
She’s been relying on social media and a lot of door-knocking to introduce herself to voters.
“Oh god, yes, I’ve been going to door to door. Me, my husband, my son — he’s 11 years old, he’s been my campaign manager,” she says with a laugh.
She says she has worked on campaigns in other countries, like England, and in the Middle East.
Having an unfamiliar name is challenge enough. Having an uncommon one has made it harder.
On social media by a few people who assumed she was Muslim, she says, “I was viciously attacked about my religion, but what’s really funny is that I was born Catholic and raised Catholic.
“And my son’s name is David, and he goes to a Catholic school.”
She tries not to dignify those comments with a response — “I remain diplomatic as much as I can.”
Going door to door, though, “what I experienced was totally different” and people were happy to meet her and talk.
Instead of new hospitals or GO trains, she says what she hears most from people are concerns about their own well-being. And, she adds, a desire for a change in governing.
“I tell them that I am all about them. I’m all for them,” she says. “If they choose me, they have to understand that all my life I worked hard … I have built an empire in my businesses.
“I created leaders, not followers … it’s not about being boss. Not about being a leader, it’s about working together.”