Scarborough’s revolving door of elected officials
The Scarborough byelection is over! Time to start the Scarborough byelection!
That is, the election of Neethan Shan to fill the vacant city council seat in Ward 42 Scarborough— Rouge River opens up a vacancy on the Toronto School Board that may very well be filled with a new byelection.
Such, it seems, has long been the case in Scarborough—Rouge River, where there’s always a byelection just ending or just beginning. The voters there, it appears, keep electing people who do not want the jobs they are elected to.
Consider the recent history, and see if you can keep your eye on the red ball: June 2014, Bas Balkissoon was re-elected as the local Member of Provincial Parliament. Later that year, Shaun Chen was re-elected as the local school board trustee — and was promptly appointed chair of the board. At the same time, Raymond Cho was re-elected as the local councillor. Simple enough, right?
Except none of those people, it seems, had actually wanted the jobs they campaigned for and won that year. Or, at least, they’d all soon voluntarily leave them.
In August 2015, Chen — who had served in the head job among school trustees for just eight months, resigned to run for federal parliament. He won.
In January 2016, Neethan Shan won the byelection to replace Chen as trustee.
Then, in March of that year, Balkissoon bailed on his job as provincial representative after suddenly discovering a new-found yearning for family time, which he apparently hadn’t anticipated when he’d asked for a new term less than two years earlier.
In the byelection to fill Balkissoon’s provincial seat, both Cho (the councillor with two years left in his term) and Shan (the trustee less than four months into his term) ran. Cho won.
This appeared to fulfil a longstanding ambition of Cho’s to escape city council, where he had served for decades even while running four times for federal and provincial seats. (Displaying the loyalty and dedication to principle he became famous for on city council, Cho once ran for the NDP, once ran as an “independent Liberal,” was a long- time member of the Liberal party and then twice ran as a Progressive Conservative.)
That, of course, led to the byelection to fill Cho’s now-vacant council seat. Shan ran — famously this was his 11th run for office in 14 years — and on Monday night won with an impressive 46 per cent of the vote in a field of 29 candidates. Which leaves Shan’s seat on the board of education vacant for the second time this term, just over halfway between normal municipal elections. In 26 months since the last election, the seat has been either vacant or filled by someone actively campaigning for another job for about 15 months. It’s hard to say, exactly, that the voters of Scarborough-Rouge River have been “represented” by a school board trustee at all this term.
This ought to reflect poorly on Shan, who is instead being greeted as a refreshing injection of “progressive” energy by some of his new city council colleagues — Mike Layton and Kristyn Wong-Tam apparently made the trip out to celebrate with him Monday. He is Toronto City Council’s first Tamil member, which is a milestone worth acknowledging and celebrating (it’s about time). And perhaps he will turn out to be a great, effective inhabitant of the clamshell. The good news for him and his supporters is he gets the chance to demonstrate it now.
But there is little in his recent public record that would lead one to expect that. Campaigning, he took the bog-standard John Tory line on tax rates and the Scarborough subway — including propagating the outright falsehood that anyone could save an hour on their travel time when the subway extension was built (the truth is likely to be more like five to 10 minutes) — and was also a vocal proponent of the “Scarborough First” resentment politics that have become the hallmark of the populist right.
And he has the resumé of a shameless opportunist, notably running for and winning public office a year ago and then spending half of the time since actively campaigning for jobs other than the one he was entrusted with.
Perhaps people overlook that last part because they’ve come to expect it of school board trustees. For as long as I can remember, people have referred to and thought of the job of trustee not as an important elected office governing one of society’s most vital institutions ( think of the children!), but as an easy resumé builder for ambitious politicians waiting for their chance at prime time. Sometimes columnists at the Star will say as much along the way to suggesting the job should be abolished and governance given to the province, which actually controls major education decisions. Longtime trustees will write in to say how essential and important the boards are.
And then their colleagues go and show how essential they think the job is: Shaun Chen resigning from the board’s top job after less than a year to go to Ottawa. Michael Ford resigning as trustee just five months after taking the job to run for city council. Shan treating the job as an immediate launching pad for his other ambitions.
But forget the school board. Out in Scarborough—Rouge River that seems to be the way, across the board, these days. Run for office. Win. Then abandon the job when you get it.
Balkissoon at least retired when he did so, after a long career.
Cho, Chen and Shan all had the nerve to think such cavalier attitudes to the public’s trust merited election to a new, higher-paying job. And look at that: in their wisdom, the voters rewarded each of them.
They may be shameless, these politicians, but they aren’t exactly stupid. So let the perpetual byelection continue.
Who knows, one of these days we might find a candidate who actually wants to serve in the job they’re running for. Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca.