Ward Watch
A look at the races in Parkdale— High Park and Etobicoke North,
Incumbent Councillor Gord Perks may be the front-runner in Ward 4 ParkdaleHigh Park during this campaign, but he says he’s treating it like a tight race.
“There’s an old saying: You’re either running scared or you’re running stupid. So I am treating this election the same as I’ve treated all the other ones,” said Perks, who was first elected to council in 2006.
“Actually it’s harder than all the other ones because I have to go and introduce myself to 50,000 new people,” said Perks, referring to Bill 5, the provincial legislation that reduced the number of councillors at city hall to 25 from 44, thereby increasing the size of each ward.
There are nine candidates running in the new Ward 4, an amalgamation of the previous Wards 13 and 14, which includes Swansea, the south part of the Junction, Bloor West Village, Roncesvalles and Parkdale.
Perks won easily in Ward 14 in 2014, besting his second-place rival by nearly 5,000 votes. His strongest potential opponent this time around was set to be Councillor Sarah Doucette (Ward 13), but she decided in September not to seek re-election.
An environmental activist, Perks is a left-leaning councillor who is often at loggerheads with Mayor John Tory. He’s taken a combative stance with Premier
Doug Ford, with whom he served on city council for four years.
“I learned that there’s no satisfying the man,” said Perks. “If you give him an inch, he takes your wallet. If you give him your wallet, he takes your house. So the only way to deal with him is to plant your feet right away and don’t let him come for the things that make Toronto great.”
His opponents say that combativeness makes Perks ill-suited to serve constituents for the next four years, especially with Ford in charge at the provincial legislature.
Candidate David Ginsberg, who owns the White Squirrel Coffee Shop near Trinity Bellwoods Park and who co-founded the Parkdale Community Hockey League, said voters have complained to him about Perks being a divisive force.
“He’s a progressive, I’m a progressive. But I believe it’s very important to be willing to work with people and not let our ideologies get in the way of our ability to be conciliatory, co-operative,” Ginsberg said.
“I think he doesn’t do that very well at all. He works well with people who think like him, but he is dismissive of others who don’t.”
Ginsberg believes the ward needs a councillor who is more responsive than Perks to the socalled micro-needs of the community — for example, neighbourhood associations lobbying for speed bumps on their streets.
Perks dismissed that criticism, saying his office policy is that whether residents write in or call, someone gets back to them within 24 hours with a plan outlining how the issue will be dealt with.
Perks said housing and transit are the two most pressing problems facing the city and, unlike many politicians, including Tory and mayoral rival Jennifer Keesmaat, who have said they would hold tax increases in line with inflation, he’s prepared to raise property taxes even higher to fund programs.
“Anybody can say ‘transit and housing,’ but if you don’t say, ‘and the money to pay for it,’ you don’t mean it,” Perks said .
He would support a tax increase above inflation, that would, he calculated, add about $2 a week to the average property tax bill, putting an additional $60 million into city cof- fers annually.
Perks supports the idea of a tax increase in the first year of the next mandate, with a waitand-see approach taken after that.
“From there we would need to review, and the reason we can’t be certain is that we don’t know what the province is going to do to us,” Perks said, noting that the city has numerous financial partnerships with the province, including agreements subsidizing child care and public housing.
Valerie Grdisa, a former nurse practitioner with a PhD in health services and policy research, said she’s running against Perks because she feels he’s had 12 years to make improvements to affordable housing and transit in the ward and hasn’t managed it yet.
“I think we’ve lost a lot of gains in the last decade or two,” said Grdisa, adding that developments have gone up without transportation plans to support them, and community and social housing in the ward is in a sorry state.
“I don’t think there’s been enough future-oriented thinking.”
Grdisa was director of, international affairs and best prac- tice guidelines at the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario from 2016 to 2018 and provincial chief nursing officer reporting directly to the deputy minister for the province of Alberta from 2014 to 2016.
She said city council needs to develop a multi-year municipal finance plan that focuses on revenue generation, modernizing city operations, infrastructure and business development, intergovernmental collaboration and investments, and results-based budgeting and expenditure management.
Candidate Kalsang Dolma, who founded the non-profit organization Drebu to promote Tibetan culture, agrees Perks is too combative and needs to stop engaging in what she called ideological battles with the mayor.
“Our current councillor is an incumbent who has been there for three terms, which is more than enough to make positive change, and we have seen our issues become worse, not better, so it’s time for a change to reflect that reality,” said Kalsang, who lives in Parkdale and is concerned that development is pushing out local residents instead of benefiting the community.
If elected, candidate Taras Kulish plans to immediately create as many as 10 community action councils to represent the neighbourhoods that make up Ward 4, to consult with residents, businesses and community groups about their specific needs.
Each neighbourhood would also have a youth leadership hub to promote and foster leadership, civic involvement and entrepreneurship.
Kulish is a business lawyer and community volunteer who founded the Youth Academy at Cooper Mills in Ward 4, which ran from 2006 to 2011.
Candidate Mercy Okalowe, who suffered sight loss as a young woman, said she would bring an important new perspective to city hall — that of a person with a disability.
“As a Black woman with a disability, I would be able to stand at city hall, on city council and provide that optic that I think is very much needed, now more than ever,” she said.
“One of the first issues in my platform is to always be a voice for those who have been historically marginalized.”
Other candidates in the ward include Nick Pavlov, Alex Perez, Evan Tummillo and Jose Vera.