During her campaign launch last week, mayoral candidate Jennifer Keesmaat established the premise of her campaign: “It’s time for bold ideas and real leadership,” she said in the speech. “So let’s talk about some bold ideas.”

Amen.

Real talk about bold ideas is exactly what this city needs. I was out of town when she gave the speech, but reading it from afar, I was nodding along at that premise. And at the first plank she revealed in her platform to try to fulfil it.

The affordability of housing is — rightly — the biggest issue in this city, and in this campaign. The election could be defined by it.

Both incumbent John Tory and challenger Jennifer Keesmaat have indicated they think that’s the case, because both of them made it the first issue they addressed in their campaign.

Everyone recognizes the problem. The bidding for solutions begins.

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‘We need bold ideas in this city.’ Jennifer Keesmaat to run for mayor of Toronto

Opinion | Strong local democracy is worth fighting for

Are John Tory and Jennifer Keesmaat’s affordable housing plans achievable?

Keesmaat has put forward a plan to build 100,000 new affordable units in the next 10 years, by using city land including Green P parking lots and single-story subway stations. It is big, but she provided details of how her ambitious target was arrived at to the Star for an analysis piece by my colleague Jennifer Pagliaro, whose examination of the numbers and canvassing of experts shows the proposal is reasonable and may well be achievable. She also promises to revise the city’s definition of affordability in measuring such things, from 100 per cent of current market rent to 80 per cent; and further promises these new units should be affordable in perpetuity, rather than having their rent destabilized after 25 or 30 years, as it does under current plans.

Tory’s more modest plan — his campaign did not provide details or information to the Star for Pagliaro’s analysis piece — is essentially a continuation of the “Open Door” policy introduced in his first term, which he projects should build 40,000 new units in 12 years.

I think Keesmaat has set the standard here.

The former chief city planner has put forward the biggest plan, and one that seems achievable, to address the biggest issue facing the city.

One might expect Mayor Tory to respond — he knows something about setting the tone for campaigns with a big plan for a big issue. His victory in 2014 can be attributed to a lot of factors, but he took the lead in polls and never relinquished it after he released his SmartTrack transit plan. In practice, that has been scaled back and revised into unrecognizability, but on the campaign trail it sounded to many like the boldest approach to what seemed like the biggest issue.

If he learned a lesson from that experience in that campaign, it isn’t evident yet. In addition to a series of promises to continue policies he’s already implemented in his first term, his campaign has spent recent weeks dishonestly obsessing over a few tweets Keesmaat sent out before she was a mayoral candidate. Just this week, Tory tweeted out a campaign video claiming she supports a policy (secession from Ontario) that she has explicitly disavowed — given how livid Tory gets whenever anyone suggests he is anything less that perfectly honest, it’s weird he’d choose to associate his name with (and apparently base his campaign on) a transparent misrepresentation of his opponent.

Tory, better than most, should understand how the discussion points you find interesting when you are not a candidate may be different from the policies you pursue as a candidate or elected official. After all, before he was a candidate, he advocated tearing down the Gardiner.

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On the subject of the Gardiner and dishonest straw-man campaign strategies, I’m reminded of Tory’s losing mayoral campaign of 2003, when his campaign spent a lot of energy attacking an imagined David Miller plan to implement road tolls on the Gardiner — a policy Miller never proposed and always denied he supported. And, ironically, a policy Tory himself would support after he finally got elected. Hindsight, and all that.

Anyhow, it’s not time for hindsight on this campaign yet: it’s just getting started, and is ready to kick into high gear next week after Labour Day. There is still a lot of time for Tory, Keesmaat, and all the other candidates to capture the city’s imagination with bold new ideas about not just housing, but transit, traffic, taxes, public safety and all the other issues of urgent importance here in Toronto.

But in bluntly promising a campaign about bold ideas, and putting forward the biggest one yet on the city’ biggest issue, Keesmaat is most impressive out of the gate in the race to capture the city’s imagination.

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