Brace yourself for one of the nastiest mayoral races in Toronto’s recent history.

That’s the warning that is emerging from the campaign teams of the top contenders in the race to defeat disgraced incumbent mayor Rob Ford in the October election.

And the main target in this election won’t be Ford, but Olivia Chow, the NDP MP who will officially kick off her campaign on Thursday after resigning her seat in the House of Commons on Wednesday.

Indeed, Chow fully expects to be under constant attack from Ford Nation fanatics and the more vocal supporters of candidates John Tory, Karen Stintz and David Soknacki as a “tax-and-spend” downtown New Democrat who is supposedly out of touch with middle-class and suburban voters.

But the nastiest attacks will centre on a 1990 story about how Chow and her late husband Jack Layton were living cheaply in a subsidized downtown Toronto co-op housing building designed for low- and moderate-income families.

Chow and Layton’s combined income at the time was about $120,000. The rent on their three-bedroom apartment was just $800 a month.

Because the story is now 24 years old, many of today’s voters have never heard of it. Others, though, have a long memory, are still furious about what they call “a scandal” and won’t let it die.

“You mean the Queen of Public Housing, sponging off of the taxpayer,” one reader emailed me last week after I wrote a column about how Chow was all set to enter the race. “I would call that theft,” he added.

“What annoys me about her is how righteous she can be,” a female reader wrote yesterday after Chow had resigned her federal seat, referring to Chow’s background fighting on behalf of the poor while at the same time having lived in housing predominately meant for lower-income families.

Chow’s campaign managers are braced for these attacks, noting Chow has run in many municipal and federal elections where the co-op housing issue has surfaced.

But she has never run in a city-wide election, where the stakes are higher and voter passion and scrutiny is greater.

What’s worse for Chow is that Ford, a take-no-prisoners politician at the best of times, has declared “war” on all his opponents. You can bet that Chow, who is running neck-and-neck with Ford in the most recent polls, will be Ford’s main attack target.

That’s why it’s important for voters to understand the background of what Layton once called “a brilliantly executed smear attempt.”

In June, 1990, the Toronto Star published a story inside the paper, not on its front page, about how Layton, then a city councillor, and Chow, who was then a public school trustee, lived in a three-bedroom apartment at the federally subsidized Hazelburn Co-operative at Jarvis and Shuter Sts.

At the time, Layton earned $61,900 a year as a councillor plus $5,000 as a University of Toronto lecturer. Chow earned $47,000 a year as a trustee. One-third of their salaries was tax-free.

Their annual income was double what was considered as a “moderate” family income in Toronto. Provincial co-op housing officials said they knew of no other couple in Ontario living in a co-op unit whose income was as high as Chow and Layton’s.

Layton told reporters that earlier in 1990 he had started to voluntarily pay an extra $325 a month to offset his portion of the federal mortgage subsidy for the building.

Almost immediately after the story appeared, small groups of protesters started to stage noisy demonstrations outside the co-op building and to demand that Chow and Layton move out.

A quick investigation by city officials revealed the couple had done nothing illegal and that in fact co-op buildings were designed to encourage a mix of income levels in order that the apartments weren’t filled with just low-income families.

Despite being fully cleared of any wrongdoing, Chow and Layton moved out of the co-op within a month of the article first appearing and into a house they bought together.

As a “scandal,” the co-op issue didn’t amount to much.

Still, watch for it to surface again and again in the coming candidate debates and on radio talks shows as we move closer to election day. Each time it does, Chow will be forced on the defensive — a position no politician wants to be in.

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Ultimately, though, Chow should be judged not so much on the co-op story, but on what she proposes in her platform, how she performs in campaign debates and on how well she can think on her feet.

By running a campaign that’s more than just a feel-good exercise, Chow may succeed in convincing voters she has the depth and experience to lead this city — and succeed as well in putting the co-op story behind her forever.

Bob Hepburn’s column appears Thursday. bhepburn@thestar.ca

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