Rob Ford is “misogynistic, bigoted, homophobic,” mayoral candidate Karen Stintz told a gathering of businesswomen on Thursday.

Stintz’s words are the strongest used to date by any of Ford’s primary rivals, who have generally exercised caution in responding to the incumbent’s racial and anti-gay slurs and offensive comments about women. She uttered them soon after she spoke favourably of Ford’s policy record.

“I would say probably for the first two years, despite some of his missteps, he was probably, by and large, doing the job that people expected him to do,” Stintz said.

She offered praise for some of Ford’s fiscal accomplishments, such as outsourcing garbage collection and signing money-saving collective agreements with the municipal unions. She said those are also her accomplishments, since she supported the measures as a councillor.

“So I take some issue with the fact that Rob speaks as if he’s the only one with a record. Because I have that record too, but one thing I don’t have is a belief system that is misogynistic, bigoted, homophobic, rude. I don’t break the law on a regular basis. It’s true — once I was caught going through a stop sign on my bike.”

Ford was recorded making a vulgar comment about Stintz in an audiotape recorded in April. He has now taken a leave of absence to address his substance abuse problem.

Councillor Doug Ford, his brother and campaign manager, did not respond to a request for comment.

Stintz addressed a gathering of the Women’s Executive Network at the Ritz-Carlton hotel on Wellington St. W. She spoke without notes and earned laughs with anecdotes about her family and career path.

Stintz, the TTC chair for most of the term, successfully pushed for a subway extension to the Scarborough RT rather than the approved light rail line she originally advocated. Mayoral candidates Olivia Chow and David Soknacki now want to return to light rail. Without mentioning her own history on the file, Stintz argued that transit plans should not be altered.

“The one thing we cannot do, whether you agree or disagree with the plan . . . is revisit a transit plan again. We have to break the cycle of changing our transit plan with every election. People ask me why doesn’t transit get built. I tell them transit doesn’t get built because we keep changing the plans,” she said.

In response to a question from an attendee, Stintz touted her plan to fund the eastern portion of the downtown relief line subway. The plan, which involves the sale of a majority stake in Toronto Hydro, would also require $1 billion, over a number of years, from traffic-enforcement and parking revenues that would otherwise pay for different items in the city budget.

Stintz refused to say what services she would cut to compensate for the redirected funds.

“No, those are decisions for council. We’ll make congestion a priority, and once we do that, we’ll find a way to fund it,” she told reporters after the speech.

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