Friends, rivals say not to underestimate the aspiring premier
Steven Del Duca, the Ontario Liberal Party leader, is an unlikely political star. Bookish. Family-oriented. Suburban dad. He draws inspiration from the biographies of great American political leaders, and yet is still trying to define his own story.
Del Duca, 48, has ditched heavy-rimmed glasses, lasered his eyes and spent weeks rolling out policy after policy ahead of the spring election campaign.
After spending most of his life in and around Ontario politics — as a Liberal campaign volunteer organizer, manager, staffer, MPP and cabinet minister — he knows what it will take to win. Yet more than half of Ontario voters do not know who he is or what he stands for.
The global pandemic made introducing himself as party leader all that much harder.
Now Del Duca’s got five weeks to become known and make the case for why he and the Liberals, not his political opponents, should be returned in force to Queen’s Park.
That’s his uphill challenge. The people who know him best — mentors, colleagues, rivals and friends — all say the same thing: don’t underestimate him.
Del Duca lost his own seat in Vaughan— Woodbridge in the 2018 election that saw voters reduce the Kathleen Wynne Liberals to a rump of seven seats. The party lost official recognition at Queen’s Park, along with all of the resources and attention that go with that — “the “worst results in our history,” notes Kate Graham, who ran against Del Duca to replace Wynne and is now running with him to get elected to Queen’s Park.
But Graham and Michael Coteau, who came second in the race for the leadership, credit Del Duca for running a sophisticated yet “friendly” campaign that set the party on a solid course to recovery.
Before one leadership debate, says Graham, a TV host asked if the rivals needed separate rooms to get ready “because in the PC race, I guess that was needed. There was lots of conflict between the teams. And we burst out laughing, saying you can put us all in the room
We put a lot of work into this. And I intend to see it through to the point where we as a team can actually deliver on the progress that’s required.
STEVEN DEL DUCA LIBERAL PARTY LEADER
because we’re literally going out for a cocktail after this debate across the street from the TV station, where we sat down and talked about families and summer vacations and real human things. And it was Steven who had arranged that.”
Coteau, who is now a federal MP, says the race for the provincial leadership was friendly but also tough because of “the Del Duca factor.
“All the other candidates combined couldn’t exceed the amount of organizing that Steven had done,” he says. “He ran an exceptional campaign.”
When it was done, he tasked Graham and Coteau with provincewide consultations to shape a substantive policy platform centred on “economic dignity.” Del Duca focused on fundraising through the pandemic, allowing the party to finally eliminate a $10-million debt, and assembled a slate of candidates before the official campaign launch.
“We are so ready,” Graham says.
Longtime political strategist Don Guy is not running this campaign — Christine Mcmillan is — but has known Del Duca since he was a volunteer organizer on Dalton Mcguinty’s 1999 campaign, which Guy directed. Guy sees similarities in the two leaders and not only because both are “centrists.” Voters may not know Del Duca yet, but Guy says that’s not an insurmountable challenge. He doesn’t need to persuade everyone, Guy says, he just needs two million people to vote for him, and with campaign exposure, advertising and media attention, they’ll soon learn who he is.
“He’s really grounded,” Guy says. “He’s a fantastic dad. He is intellectually gifted. He’s brilliant. He’s analytical. He’s a policy wonk. He stays up all night, thinking about how to make people’s lives better. He is the dad and son that many of us want to be — you know, drives the kids to school, packs their lunches, enjoys cooking for the family, visits his parents every day. Just a really tight-knit family. He draws a lot of strength from that. And he has a lot of emotional reserves because of that.
” Still, politics is a bruising line of work where no sin is forgotten. Already his PC and NDP opponents are painting Del Duca as a return to the worst of the Wynne Liberal years when, as transportation minister, Del Duca ran into controversy over his push to locate a new GO train station in what was his riding, and over building a backyard swimming pool too close to his home’s lot line. Del Duca defended the former as a legitimate political call for a minister to make and admitted his “embarrassing” mistake in the latter.
Del Duca is doing better on the stump. He ditches notes, speaks off the cuff, having memorized his political arguments, in contrast to Andrea Horwath who still reads out questions using notes, and Doug Ford, who is stiff when he reads a teleprompter.
Born July 7, 1973, in Etobicoke, Del Duca lived there until he was 14 when the family of four children moved to Vaughan. “Kleinburg,” he specifies. In Etobicoke, he says he never crossed paths with the Ford brothers, who were older than him.
In an interview, he rattles off his childhood street address, phone number, schools and sports teams with ease. As a kid, he won a Grade 3 speech contest on the topic of “responsibility.” Growing up, he played soccer and hockey, was a Montreal Canadiens fan and played right defence. Asked to describe what kind of player he was, he says, “a steady and reliable player … a defensive defenceman. I was someone who, for me, it was important to protect our zone and make sure that the team had a good anchor.”
Del Duca no longer plays but can still skate, and once coached his younger brother Michael — the better athlete, he says, deadpanning a nowfamiliar joke about how he had the better hairstyle. Del Duca shaves his head. He’s also got a stiff upper lip that causes his cheeks to dimple when he smiles.
Four years ago, the same year he lost his seat in the 2018 election, Del Duca lost his brother Michael in a fatal car crash that devastated the family. Michael’s widow and two sons moved to a house on the same Woodbridge street as Del Duca’s parents after that. The family found “strength and resiliency” in each other, Del Duca says.
But for the first time in the interview, the Liberal leader says he is at a loss for words, and stammers to describe the impact on his family and professional life.
“I don’t have words that do this feeling justice, you know? It is a heartbreak and a wound that I know will never completely heal.”
Time isn’t “supposed to” heal, he says, but it does give perspective to focus on memories that are often funny, and always tinged with sadness.
This election campaign will be no different. Del Duca’s brother was actively involved in all of his political campaigns — a municipal bid for York council, three provincial runs and his plan to run for York Region chair before Ford’s electoral reforms ditched that — and he would have worked on this one and loved it, says the Liberal leader. “The fact that he’s not here is — is just s--t.”
His candour feels unrehearsed. It is also what seems an honest attempt to answer an undoubtedly intrusive question but one that speaks to what has marked and shaped him as a man and politician. Family, he says, is at the centre of it all.
Del Duca draws lines between his upbringing as a first-generation son of an Italian father and a Scottish mother who met in Canada, and his and his wife’s efforts to parent their two daughters (Talia, 14, and Grace, 11) through the pandemic, to his understanding of the concerns of everyday Ontario voters and his plans to address their worries about economic security, education for children and how to care for aging parents — all big planks of the Liberals’ campaign.
He jokes he’s been working on his charisma game for a long time — standard political fare for candidates who acknowledge that flash is not their style. In his case, it’s also true.
As a kid, he devoured historical political nonfiction, especially biographies of his political heroes: Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson. He loves former prime minister Jean Chrétien’s story and says he is drawn to tales about ordinary people who do extraordinary things, or make extraordinary decisions. It was a political book — “The Rainmaker” by Liberal strategist Keith Davey, a Christmas gift from sister Lorraine when he was about 14 — that excited him about Canadian politics.
A relative then took him to the federal Eglinton—lawrence nomination meeting ahead of the 1988 free trade election when he was 15, and he was hooked, he says.
Del Duca attended Carleton University for a year, where he took on part-time work as a cleaner in restaurants and banks to pay the bills, but says the adjustment to living and studying away from family was hard. After a year, he transferred to University of Toronto and studied political science and history. He did not complete a degree but did become Liberal campus club president and was the “opposition Liberal leader” in the University of Toronto model parliament. He “did all of those conventional things as a young budding political activist”: working on provincial and federal campaigns, setting up chairs, knocking on doors.
“At a young age, I think it felt empowering to me,” he says.
Del Duca worked as a staffer for Mcguinty as well as for Greg Sorbara, the former party president and MPP for the same Vaughan riding he would later go on to represent.
Sorbara says when Del Duca, then 30, told him he wanted to go back to school to get a law degree, Sorbara approved and told Del Duca it would be good preparation for whatever he wanted to do in life. Del Duca told him, “Someday, I’d like your job,” recalls Sorbara, chuckling.
Del Duca insists his mind wasn’t made up until he realized at Osgoode Hall what a law career would entail in time away from family. He had already met his wife-to-be Utilia Amaral, the daughter of Portuguese immigrants, at a party fundraiser and knew they wanted to have children. “I wanted to see my kids growing up,” he says.
Another Liberal who has known Del Duca for years says he has been preparing to run for the top job his whole life, “like Pierre Poilievre.” But Sorbara disagrees, saying Del Duca has a different temperament, is not out to “shock” anyone and “comes from the extreme centre of the party.”
Liberal MP Yasir Naqvi once served as a cabinet colleague of Del Duca’s and says admiringly that “he takes politics seriously.” Indeed, Del Duca’s serious demeanour gives him the aura of a NASA mission control specialist who should be standing behind the big desk directing the astronauts who do the glamorous and risky spacewalking.
But his moon shot is to become premier. In a Zoom interview from party headquarters a day before the Ontario budget that now serves as the PC’S election platform, Del Duca says he’s in it for the long haul.
“We put a lot of work into this. And I intend to see it through to the point where we as a team can actually deliver on the progress that’s required.”