Mayor needs to walk the walk on diversity

What are Toronto values? “Diversity Our Strength,” is surely one. We all like the sound of our city motto. The mayor does.

In a speech to the City Age conference in San Francisco in April, John Tory began with that motto, while he pitched Toronto’s immigrant population as a competitive advantage. Tory mentioned the 25,000 Syrian refugees Canada accepted, many sponsored through private families, including his own.

“Our embrace of diversity is not just a pleasantry or the by-product of what we see as our national character,” he said.

“Toronto is an experiment that has worked.”

That sounds like what Toronto and Canada tells itself all the time.

It feels good and maybe it’s good for business.

But do we actually defend the ideals behind the words?

Over the last few months, Kellie Leitch has led a divisive and incendiary campaign for the Conservative Party of Canada leadership around undefined “Canadian values.” Nick Kouvalis, one of Mayor Tory’s key advisers who helped him win the mayoralty in 2014, is advising the Leitch campaign.

Last week, the National Post asked Tory about this relationship and the mayor said he hoped Kouvalis would be part of the 2018 mayoral campaign and that he’s “one of the smartest people I have available to me,” swatting away any concern about the content of the Leitch campaign and Tory’s proximity to it.

Campaign managers are usually journeymen and women who do a job quietly and move on. Politics is messy and most of us have skin far too thin to deal with how, to use a phrase employed by political folks, the sausage is made. It’s a shrewd business across the political spectrum.

John Laschinger chaired Olivia Chow’s mayoral campaign in 2014 when Tory defeated her, but he had worked with Tory before, notably during the 2007 provincial election when Tory, as Progressive Conservative leader, lost to Dalton McGuinty.

Laschinger worked on other conservative campaigns, but was also the guy behind David Miller’s mayoral win and has worked on other left-leaning campaigns.

Kouvalis himself was behind Rob Ford’s mayoral win in 2010, but, as Tory’s strategist, opposed Doug Ford in 2014.

Two things are different with the Leitch-Tory connection: first, Kouvalis enjoys a high profile. There are usually no windows into the sausage factory; we see the finished product brightly lit and packaged for sale. But Kouvalis is a vocal and visible part of the Leitch campaign, tweeting and retweeting her message on Twitter and ranting against “elites.” He moved from the back room to the front window and is holding a strobe light and bullhorn. Perhaps he’ll run for office himself one day, but for now, he’s the smartest guy in the room, the best in the business and vocally advising the campaign with the polling data he mines.

The second difference is Canada has not seen a campaign as divisive as Leitch’s. Apart from her own dog-whistle politics, Leitch released a statement after Trump’s election congratulating him on his “exciting message.” It’s one that incited the KKK to endorse him and energized the “alt-right” people we used to call neo-Nazis.

In a speech at the cenotaph at Old City Hall on Remembrance Day that would seem to oppose this, Mayor Tory said, “We are very fortunate to live in a stable country where peace, order and good government underlie a way of life founded on freedom and respect.”

Some of these things are becoming harder to come by now. Mayor Tory is the mayor of all Torontonians and as His Worship, he embodies and must defend Toronto and what Toronto stands for.

His intellectual endorsement of Kouvalis is not done as a private citizen.

The political cynicism required not to see a problem here is incredible, but it’s also a little comedic. Kouvalis and Leitch rant about Canadian elites, but Tory is as elite as they come, a lawyer and business executive — his family name is even on one of the TD Centre skyscrapers downtown. Will he no longer be elite come 2018?

“Our increasingly polarized world reminds us just how quickly democracy can dissipate if it is not cherished and protected.” MAYOR JOHN TORY

I recently wrote both about Toronto’s commitment to Sanctuary City principles, which amounts to a declaration that the city is a safe place for immigrants, and about how mayors across North America are taking stands against the rising tide of hate that has washed up with Trump and his Canadian derivatives.

Does Mayor Tory have his city’s back?

“Our increasingly polarized world reminds us just how quickly democracy can dissipate if it is not cherished and protected. It is fragile,” Tory told the crowd at the Remembrance Day cenotaph, saying difference is a source of strength, not a reason to be afraid or adversarial.

“Sometimes we fail to connect these dots, and we take for granted the freedoms and the sacrifices that have made our country peaceful, democratic and stable.”

Are these just words we’re told to feel good? Or are they said to get the city business?

None of them mean anything if actions don’t stand behind the talk, especially in dangerous times. It’s, indeed, all very fragile.

Will the mayor connect his dots and stand behind his words? Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef