Toronto City Hall’s council chamber was packed, mainly with angry cab drivers who felt mistreated by the city.

Tempers boiled as insults flew from the public gallery, and police were in the room standing by in case things escalated.

You’re a “flip-flopper,” hollered one driver, pointing at a woman who was sitting calmly as she gave her presentation.

“Bipolar,” accused another, Behrouz Khamseh, chairman of lobby group Taxi Action.

The woman on the receiving end was Tracey Cook.

It was April 2016, and Cook, Toronto’s executive director of municipal licensing and standards, had just unveiled a list of reforms to allow renegade ride-sharing Uber to operate its business here.

Previously, Cook had vehemently opposed Uber and led the charge in 2014 as the city sought an injunction against the company, saying the business was operating illegally in Toronto. That position was at odds with then mayor-elect John Tory, who said the service was “here to stay.”

But Cook had since “turned a corner” on the issue, and during that raucous council meeting in 2016, she faced the wrath of cabbies who called her out for changing her mind.

That clash was about Uber. But on another day, it could as easily be about Airbnb or pot dispensaries or food trucks or unlicensed group homes or noise complaints or dog parks. Cook has been at the centre of bitterly contested issues since taking the licensing job in 2012.

With a staff of 470 working under her, the department enforces more than 30 bylaws. Cook also oversees the drafting of the bylaws and reports to city council on how best to enforce them.

Cook knows that bylaws sometimes need to change with the times. As a result, she has had to learn how to cajole, wheel and deal and search for common ground between competing groups.

“I love seeing regulation done right,” says Cook, a 51-year-old former cop. “I like when we can resolve community issues.”

City Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker, who has spent the last eight years on the licensing and standards committee, says Cook is everything a bureaucrat should be.

“She is charming but doesn’t take crap from anybody,” he says. “She gives you her honest opinion and she has no hidden agenda. That’s really reassuring as a city councillor, because sometimes you do look at the professional staff and you wonder, are they giving me all the information? Are they skewing the information to one side and not the other because of their own personal beliefs?”

He says Cook has a strong moral compass, and calls it as she sees it.

As Cook recalls of the Uber decision: “I spent more time and lost more sleep trying to think through what do we need to change for the taxi industry so it can compete.”

But in the centre of that storm, it was her tough exterior, burnished during nearly 19 years as a Toronto police officer, that got her through another working day.

Tough situations are nothing new to Cook, who was raised in a tumultuous family home in Scarborough. “When I was a kid growing up, there was a lot of stuff,” she says, her voice cracking several times during an interview at her 16th-floor office at city hall.

As an infant, Cook was placed in a foster home and adopted shortly afterward by Joyce and Douglas Cook, whom she considers her parents. After Tracey, the Cooks adopted another child, a boy the same age, who is not Tracey’s biological sibling.

Doug and Joyce divorced when the kids were 6, and Tracey almost never saw her dad for the next 11 years.

During that time her relationship with her mom became increasingly rocky.

Her mother’s temper was severe and she flew into inexplicable rages, Cook recalls. “There were a number of times I had to call the police because my mother would get into it with my brother. Once she threw hot water on my brother.”

Joyce also spent days in bed in dark funks.

Cook’s brother abused drugs and alcohol and had multiple run-ins with the law. He now lives in a long-term-care facility due to a car accident and is under the supervision of the Public Guardian and Trustee.

As a single mom, Joyce worked to pay the mortgage and feed the family — which grew to include Joyce’s disabled brother — and she often held several jobs at once.

Despite the turmoil at home, Cook loved school and was a good student at David and Mary Thomson Collegiate. She played soccer and was involved in other activities at the Scarborough school. She wanted to help people and likes rules, she says. So after Grade 12, she applied to be a cadet with the Toronto police.

Though she was estranged from her father, she was following in his footsteps. He was a Toronto cop.

And as fate would have it, his job led to a reunion with his son and daughter shortly after Cook applied to the police service.

Her brother landed in trouble and had to appear in court, where his father was a sergeant on duty. The two reconnected, and soon after, so did Tracey with her dad.

Cook told her father she had applied to be a cadet, and he suggested she move in with him and his new wife while going through the hiring process. He wanted her in a more stable home while she was applying to join the force.

She took his advice, and on June 4, 1984, Cook was hired as a cadet, a program, since disbanded, in which civilians trained to be police officers.

“I’m 18 years old, in a cadet uniform, serving summonses in Regent Park in an unmarked (Dodge) Omni,” she recalls fondly.

She went through her training at police college in Toronto, and in 1987 was sworn in as a constable.

Her 18 and a half years on the job would include investigating youth crime, child sexual abuse and gangs, and eventually working as a detective on fraud cases.

Early on, she had to go undercover on street corners as a prostitute during downtown “john sweeps.”

“I was the world’s worst hooker,” she recalls with a big laugh. “I was so not good at it. I didn’t make a lot of arrests.”

During these early days on the force, Cook was also coping with problems at her mom’s home, which Cook had purchased after her mother had trouble carrying the mortgage.

Cook remembers an incident from her mid-20s. She was living upstairs while her mother and uncle shared the basement.

It was a long weekend, around 11 p.m., and her brother showed up at the front door, high on crack.

“He wanted to barge his way in — I knew that wouldn’t be good,” Cook recalls.

She stopped him at the door. Meanwhile, a neighbour came over to intervene. He got into a full-scale brawl with Cook’s brother, who he didn’t know. Cook, dressed in her pajamas, got caught in the fray.

Police were called. Her brother was arrested at the scene. The neighbour was bleeding from punches to the face. Cook also got hit.

Joyce went to Scarborough to bail her son out. Upon her return, she verbally attacked her daughter.

“I was cutting the grass,” Cook remembers. “She just started on me that it was all my fault.”

Her mother told her words to the effect of “you turned a simple issue into a street brawl — how dare you. I’ve been sitting on a hard bench all day in court.”

Years later, in 1999, as Joyce lay dying in hospital from liver cancer, Cook would come to understand her mother’s behaviour. After speaking to her mom’s friends and doctors, she concluded her mom suffered from a mental disorder.

Despite the wounds she carried deep inside, Cook was thriving in her career.

In 2002, a few years after her mom died, Cook had left behind the world of policing to become director of security in Canada for Coca-Cola. She did that for seven years, followed by a stint as a vice-president of Securitas Security Services.

She would later see a posting on the City of Toronto’s website for the licensing position and decided to apply. Senior city managers liked her mix of experience in law enforcement and private sector management. She started in January 2012.

Cook now admits that when she began she wasn’t familiar with all the responsibilities of the job.

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One of her first big challenges was food carts.

The city sought to amend its bylaws to allow for more and more varied food trucks and carts while balancing the interests of established restaurants. But when the restaurant industry wanted no food truck within 250 metres of a restaurant, “I said ‘that’s not happening,’ ” Cook recalls.

Reforms in 2014 required that no food truck operate within 50 metres of an open restaurant. The next year that dropped to 30 metres.

But she did have a blind spot when it came to dealing with another file — Uber, particularly UberX, a ride-hailing service she admits she “never saw coming” when it launched in Toronto in September 2014.

“The day UberX launched, I said, what the hell is this? . . . I don’t think at that point I’d ever heard a damn thing” about it, she says, chuckling at herself.

Her “awakening” on Uber came in the spring of 2015 during a session she attended at the Ontario Chamber of Commerce where the topic of the “sharing economy” was discussed.

“I’m like ‘the sharing what?’” Cook says. But “I started to see what was happening. Airbnb was bubbling up … and I realized the mayor (Tory) wasn’t wrong. He clearly knew what was going on, what was coming. I think that’s where I turned a corner and said we have to look at this differently.”

The city still pursued its injunction against Uber, arguing it was a taxi company violating city bylaws. Uber won in Superior Court in 2015, when a judge ruled there was no evidence the company was a taxi broker that violated Toronto’s rules.

Uber had argued it is a technology-based communications service linking passengers and drivers, therefore not subject to the bylaws.

Uber and the city later agreed to play ball, and Cook came to council last year with her reforms. UberX was licensed in the city on Aug. 16, 2016.

Looking back, Cook says she doesn’t condone the fact that Uber was initially “flouting” the city’s rules but now understands the company’s strategy. “They pushed the envelope to have the dialogue and (the public) embraced it hard.”

She believes “a pretty decent balance” has been struck. “We had to remove some of the overregulation,” she says.

The changes include rules ending the requirement for taxi drivers to take city-run training programs, the addition of 30 cents for UberX trips, and regular inspections for both Uber and taxis.

Currently 49,585 UberX drivers are licensed by the city, compared to 5,500 taxis, and 17,500 individuals licensed to drive taxis or limos.

Since her awakening of sorts on the sharing economy, Cook has been speaking at tech conferences recently, about government’s role in embracing innovation, balanced with responsibilities to the public.

Still, her critics in the taxi industry remain.

“She has disappointed the cab industry big time,” says Sajid Mughal, president of the iTaxiworkers Association of Ontario, a lobby group representing Toronto’s cab drivers.

Khamseh, the chairman of Taxi Action who called her bipolar last year in council chambers, says he still holds that view given her about-face.

“She did everything she could to accommodate Uber to stay here.”

Cook’s detractors notwithstanding, Josie Scioli, a deputy city manager for Toronto, says that since taking over as head of licensing, Cook has “been able to win a lot of hearts” at the city.

It’s because she’s a team builder, breaks down “silos” in different departments, and is very focused, Scioli says. The two have co-operated closely and become work friends.

“Tracey never feels sorry for herself, believes anything is possible and advocates for everybody. Her (upbringing) may have been difficult, but those steps were important,” says Scioli, who calls Cook a “great leader for the city.”

Toronto police Insp. Joanna Beaven-Desjardins, who leads 42 Division and has been close with Cook since they did their police training together in 1987, says Cook’s blend of law-enforcement knowledge and the skills she learned in private security make her an ideal fit in her role.

“The relationships she builds are really helping the Toronto police and the City of Toronto,” says Beaven-Desjardins.

Beaven-Desjardins cites an anti-human trafficking project launched about 18 months ago when Beaven-Desjardins was commanding Toronto’s sex crimes unit. One area the unit tackled was unlicensed holistic spas and illegal massage parlours.

Beaven-Desjardins’ unit and Cook’s licensing team brought together police, bylaw officers and community services for victims of the sex trade, and educated everyone on the laws and how to get help for victims.

Last year, Beaven-Desjardins launched a similar project at 42 Division and brought Cook and her team in to help.

“She’s a genuine, generous, caring person. She puts herself last in everything,” Beaven-Desjardins says. “Everything she’s accomplished she’s had to work for.”

Cook now earns $220,000 a year, and lives with her husband, Frank, in a comfortable house in Don Mills. Frank has four adult children from a previous relationship — Cook has no children of her own — and the couple enjoys hanging out with their six grandchildren, all boys. In her spare time, she’s pursuing an executive MBA through Queen’s.

The next potential clash on the horizon for Cook is licensing and standards for Airbnb expected in mid-November. The city is trying to balance the desire of homeowners to make some rental income with the needs of other homeowners and residents who don’t want to “live next door to a hotel,” Cook says.

Key to this discussion is concern about Airbnb’s impact on the availability of long-term rental housing in Toronto, and the city’s “significant affordable housing shortage,” Cook says.

In addition, marijuana and its legalization next year has kept her team busy. Her department has been chasing after illegal storefront operators — unnecessarily so, some critics say.

It’s all part of a job she loves. It’s a complex and sometimes thankless task, but as verbal abuse on that emotional April day at city council reminded her, “it’s never boring.”

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