Four in, and now we wait…

In the hangover-like aftermath of last week — which started with a pair of jockeyed candidacy registrations and ended with the mayor, having handily won the media war, leaving on a jet plane (to Hollywood) – Toronto voters are turning their attention to the rustling curtains stage left.

Olivia Chow has been telling the media, somewhat disingenuously, for weeks that she’s considering a run for mayor. The time has come for her to leave the book tour, end the stagey circumspection, and get in the pool.

The mayor’s race has started in earnest. There are no other left-of-centre candidates even musing about a run. And unless she wants to lug the meta-story of her ambivalence into the campaign, the way John Tory is shadowed by the endless discussion of his win-loss record, I can see no tactical reason for further delay.

While we wait, the questions pile up. It seems to me that as Chow and her strategists prepare to jump into the fray, they must prepare the NDP MP from Trinity-Spadina to address a few very key issues that will dog her candidacy.

1. Why do you want to be mayor?

Chow has been away from Toronto politics for a long time. After 14 years as a City of Toronto and Metro councillor, she resigned her seat in November, 2005, to make a third run at Trinity-Spadina. A lot of municipal water has flown under the bridge in those intervening nine years – countless transit plans, new legislation for the city, the establishment of new tax levies, the Ford-era budget wars, etc.

None of this is to suggest that Chow has ignored urban issues: she’s served as the NDP’s transportation and infrastructure critic since 2011, and continues to be an outspoken advocate for housing, affordable daycare and a national transit strategy.

But from where I sit, she has to explain to Toronto voters what she intends to do for this city in particular, not cities in general. And that’s a big difference.

2. Does your transit plan offer anything that’s not already on the table, and will you distance yourself from the Ontario NDP’s rejection of the use of revenue tools to fund future expansion?

To recap: Rob Ford and Karen Stintz are for the Scarborough subway. David Soknacki wants to scotch their plan as costly and ineffective, and return to the LRT proposals. John Tory wants to build a relief line, and Stintz thinks she can pay for it by selling Toronto Hydro.

Perhaps, if you looked very closely, in the policy thickets, you might find some space to insert yet another transit platform. But it’s not clear to me how Chow intends to differentiate herself on this vital issue. What’s more, she will be asked, and rightly so, whether she agrees with Andrea Horwath’s stubborn refusal to offer up a realistic strategy to fund transit expansion (the middle-class friendly Horwath has ruled out every kind of revenue tool but a corporate tax hike, the proceeds of which are destined for several policy goals). Chow, I predict, will spend a lot of time talking about the need for a national transit strategy, and also needling the provincial Liberals. Necessary, but not sufficient. She’ll have to get specific.

3. How do you avoid becoming the Barbara Hall of the 2014 mayoral race?

The parallels are there for the taking. In the aftermath of Mel Lastman’s scandal-plagued second term, Hall, touting lofty going-in polling numbers, left her provincial sinecure and swanned into the 2003 race as a kind of sensible saviour. She had lots of Liberals and a few Tories in tow, but her message lacked focus. She couldn’t compellingly answer Question One above, and then got caught up in a mini-scandal over pre-election campaign spending.

Hall’s most debilitating problem, however, may have been her attempt to strategically position herself as a calming, level-headed leader – the politician who is above politics. Tory and David Miller, by contrast, got right down into the muck. On the campaign trail, they communicated scrappiness and passion and drive, subtly conveying to voters that they represented the opposite of Hall’s tactical detachment.

4. Do you intend to end Rob Ford’s foray into privatized waste collection?

Potentially, Chow’s kryptonite. As the presumptive candidate of the left, and almost certainly backed by the labour movement, Chow will be confronted with hard questions about the future of outsourced garbage collection (and likely other civic services). Ford, of course, wants to privatize everything, while Soknacki, Stintz and Tory will tell voters that they’re satisfied with the contract, subject to the usual review. City officials, after all, have repeatedly stated they get fewer resident complaints since outsourcing garbage collection west of Yonge Street to GFL.

Chow’s dilemma is articulating a clear position that doesn’t expose her to political accusations that she’ll simply take the city back to the era of labour disputes that led to the 2009 garbage strike. At the same time, she will want to signal progressive voters that she’s different from the rest. And of course she wants to ensure that the public sector union membership will turn out to help with the logistics of the campaign. It’s the tightest and highest of wires.

5. What do you say to suburban voters who see you primarily as a partisan candidate who has spent the bulk of your political career tending to the interests of downtown progressives?

The Fords have spent the past three-and-a-half years encouraging Torontonians to hate one another based on where they keep their stuff, all while propagating The Big Lie that only wealthy people may live in the core while the suburbs remain the exclusive preserve of the great unwashed.

While they’ve irresponsibly stoked this corrosive atmosphere of civic antagonism (the mayor deserves to be booted from office for that crime alone), the Fords didn’t invent the meta-narrative of downtown/suburban conflict in post-amalgamation Toronto. And the hard truth is that we haven’t had a mayor who found a way to engage the entire city on a sustained basis. Mel Lastman did focus on some downtown social issues during his mayoralty, while Miller sought to direct his crime, poverty and transit agenda at suburban communities. But neither fully broke away from their core geographic constituencies.

Tory has a regional profile because of his radio show, although the Fords will seek to pigeonhole him as a Rosedale blue-blood. Soknacki, with his wonkishly progressive stance on issues like transit and the island airport, seems to have figured out a strategy for connecting with downtown voters, as well as his more suburban, conservative base. Stintz will be squeezed. So how does Chow reach beyond her party and her part of the city? Does she do it with tactical pledges, or through a personal appeal to the much more ethnically diverse communities of the suburbs? And how will she connect with voters who don’t care for the NDP?

On that last point, Miller cancelled his NDP membership and picked a fiscal conservative (Soknacki, as it happens) to manage the money. But even those symbolic/substantive gestures weren’t quite enough for him to escape accusations of doctrinaire leftish-ness. In any event, Chow must at least follow Miller’s lead and situate herself as meaningfully, discernibly non-partisan, especially if she wants to prevent some centre-left voters from de-camping to Team Soknacki.

photo by Randstad Canada