Dan Carbin is a young(ish) professional who has been actively engaged in politics in three countries for more than two decades. He pays his bills working as a public affairs consultant in Toronto.
In just over a month, Toronto is going to have a new mayor.
And when you head to the polls on October 27th to vote for the new leader of our city (as well as city council members), we want you to be informed.
So over the next three weeks we’ll be profiling the three leading candidates for mayor – Doug Ford, John Tory, and Olivia Chow – with the goal of cutting through the clutter and offering the straight goods you need to assess each candidate’s suitability for the job and how their election would impact you and your city.
We started off with a profile of John Tory and followed up last week with one of Doug Ford, but today is all about everything Olivia Chow brings to the table…
OLIVIA CHOW: The Anti-Ford
What went wrong?
This was supposed to be Olivia Chow’s election for the taking; as recently as the spring, Chow had a significant lead in virtually every mayoral poll. Whether the opposition was Rob Ford, Doug Ford, John Tory or anyone else, the public’s answer was always the same: they wanted Olivia.
Serving as a downtown city councillor for 15 years between 1991 and 2006, Chow captured headlines for championing social causes and riding her colourful bike to city hall. She was the very epitome of what Don Cherry would sneeringly refer to as a “bike-riding pinko”. More importantly, to Torontonians fatigued by the past four years, Olivia was the anti-Ford. She has served the NDP loyally since the 1980s, as a volunteer, left-leaning school trustee, city councillor, and most recently, as federal MP for Trinity-Spadina from 2006-2014.
Entering the race, Olivia’s political star seemed to be in the ascendency. While Rob Ford was causing international embarrassment and John Tory was pondering whether he could overcome his reputation as a perennial also-ran, Olivia was winning plaudits for her dignified and resolute presence in the wake of the passing of her life and political partner Jack Layton. Chow seemed well positioned to benefit from the swell of public sympathy and support that accompanied Layton’s passing.
But things clearly haven’t worked out as hoped for the Chow campaign. Olivia now finds herself in a distant third place in the race behind John Tory and Doug Ford. She has retained the support of just over 20% of the electorate with only three weeks to go until Election Day. Many commentators are already writing Chow off, suggesting that the campaign is increasingly shaping up as a two-person race between Tory and Ford. Unless the campaign dramatically changes course, it appears as though Chow’s bid for mayor will end in disappointment.
Her Plan:
The Chow campaign released a full election platform on October 3rd that identifies three priority areas of focus: transit, after-school care for kids, and youth employment.
Chow promises to invest $28 million more per year to support additional bus service, increased affordable housing, and other social programs. She commits to keeping property tax increases “around” the rate of inflation to pay for the new services, although recent comments suggest that she certainly wouldn’t be too concerned if taxes were to go up slightly faster than inflation.
Chow’s transit plan is based on a modest commitment to beef up public bus service through an investment of $15 million per year. Her campaign claims that this investment will help improve transit immediately, rather than having to wait for new subways and LRTs to be built. The plan is certainly practical and affordable, but seems unambitious when compared with the far-reaching SmartTrack plan advanced by John Tory or even the subway-heavy transit plan championed by Doug Ford. At a time when the public is clamouring for major investments in public transit, Chow appears to be pushing for a cautious, go-slow approach. Her position on the hotly debated downtown relief line epitomises her hesitancy. While her platform declares support for the idea of a downtown relief line, it stops short of committing to ever building one. Chow’s preferred approach is a commitment to simply proceeding with studies that could eventually pave the way for the line years in the future.
Somewhat paradoxically, although Chow has been attacked by critics in the past as a “tax and spend lefty”, she appears to have risked her campaign on the idea that fiscal probity will resonate with the public on the transit file. Instead of promising billions in new spending to support ambitious (some would argue fanciful) new transit plans like Tory or Ford, Chow has focused on a modest investment in bus service and a continued build-out of already promised LRT investments. She has also risked significant political backlash in vote-rich Scarborough by publicly opposing the council-endorsed subway plan that is backed by both Ford and Tory in favour of a cheaper LRT option.
The Inside Scoop:
Chow was initially viewed as a strong contender for mayor because she was high profile, progressive, and viewed favourably by the general public. Although a staunch New Democrat, political analysts thought that Olivia would be able to connect with voters across the political spectrum. After all, as a city councillor she had managed to work very productively with the right-leaning Mel Lastman administration.
There are issues that seemed to have doomed the campaign, however. The first problem is that Chow has been hopeless for the majority of the campaign at communicating her vision for the city and plan for the next four years.
In debates, speeches, and media appearances, Chow has appeared wooden, inarticulate, and simply confused. In short, she has been unable to connect with the public. Chow’s protestations that her communication challenges are associated with the fact that English is her second language – she immigrated to Canada 44 years ago as a 13 year old – have hardly helped matters.
From a strategic perspective, Chow also seems to have miscalculated. Her early campaign strategy appears to have been to convince as many centrist voters as possible that she wasn’t really that progressive and could be trusted with their vote. This approach blurred the differences between John Tory (a real centrist) and Chow, to her detriment. Through smart campaigning and more effective communications Tory has managed to both hold on to centrist voters and build support amongst progressives.
Chow’s campaign appears to have realized, arguably too late, that a much better strategy would have been to tie John Tory to the Fords from the beginning. By hitting out at Tory as a Ford sympathiser, one-time financial backer, and long-time family friend, Chow may have been able to create a clear choice for the public: to support the real alternative to the Fords (her) on the one hand or Ford or Ford-lite (Tory) on the other.
The Path to Victory
Three weeks from Election Day, polls suggest that Olivia Chow finds herself somewhere between 15 and 23 points behind front-runner John Tory.
Although polls are notoriously unreliable these days and political surges can and do happen, there really isn’t much time for Olivia to start turning things around. To succeed, her campaign will have to push two messages relentlessly and persuasively over the last few weeks of the campaign.
The first message is that John Tory and Doug Ford, despite their recent falling out, are old chums, political supporters, and ideological bed-fellows. The Chow campaign needs to convince voters that a Tory mayoralty may not have the same human drama as during the past Ford years, but will be more of the same from a values perspective. City Hall, her campaign could argue, would still be controlled by a conservative whose beliefs are not aligned with the 60 per cent plus of the city who traditionally vote for left of centre candidates.
The second key message Chow needs to communicate is that she stands for meaningful progressive change in areas that matter to voters – whether it is social policy, employment, urban planning or transit. Instead of muddying her message by trying to be all things to all people, she needs to clearly articulate how she alone offers an alternative to what her campaign could position as the Ford/Tory conservative agenda.
Given the challenges that the candidate has had in persuasively communicating her message throughout the campaign, effective advertising and social marketing will be crucial over the next few weeks if Chow hopes to build her support.
Vote for Olivia Chow if:
– You wish the past four years at City Hall never happened and David Miller was still mayor.
– You wear the moniker “bike-riding pinko” as a badge of honour.
– You could never vote for a conservative and believe that a Tory by name is a Tory by nature despite recent protestations to the contrary.
#NOTABLE
Images: Most body images by Mitchel Raphael
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