Olivia Chow is formidable, but Team Ford would have a field day attacking her in a mayoral election
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Aaron Vincent ElkaimNDP MP Olivia Chow at a Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario rally in August.
To state the blindingly obvious, Olivia Chow is an entirely plausible mayoral candidate. She knows city hall well, from her 14 years on council. People know exactly who she is. She carries with her some of the remarkable goodwill Jack Layton amassed over his years at city hall and in federal politics. She is, in short, quite a formidable Canadian politician.
Her status as the “unity candidate” du jour, however — the candidate around whom all of the please-not-Rob-Ford-again voters can coalesce — is something of an oddity. Why her, as opposed to someone else? What’s the case?
She has had a free ride until this week, when Doug Ford suggested she was ‘no Jack Layton.’ In a campaign, the Ford Machine would go after her record, and her ideology, with guns blazing
She stood in front of the Gardiner Expressway recently and demanded more infrastructure money from Ottawa. Fat chance of that. There is Forum Research’s latest poll, released this week, showing her out in front — by just more than the margin of error — of a three-way race with Mr. Ford and Adam Vaughan. Bully for her, but she won’t be running in a three-way race with Mr. Ford and Mr. Vaughan. And given that Ms. Chow’s and Mr. Vaughan’s left-wing downtown politics and priorities are essentially interchangeable, it’s a bit of an odd scenario to run.
Presumably, no one prominent will run to the fiscal right of Mr. Ford. But presumably, hopefully, someone prominent will run on a platform that reflects a basic world view that lies between Mr. Ford’s, and Mr. Vaughan’s and Ms. Chow’s. If I wanted to find a unity candidate, that’s the area of the ideological spectrum where I’d go looking.
It’s not impossible that Ms. Chow could win over Etobicoke and Scarborough; polls suggest she’s at least in the fight. But she has had a free ride until this week, when Doug Ford suggested she was “no Jack Layton.” In a campaign, the Ford Machine would go after her record, and her ideology, with guns blazing.
They won’t just accuse her of being a typical tax-and-spend federal New Democrat; they’ll also be able to accuse her and her lefty friends of running the city hall gravy train that Mayor Ford has been working so awfully hard to derail. It’d be dumb as rocks, sure, but it carried the day last time around against a far more centrist figure than Ms Chow. She could just as easily become a divisive figure, I think, as a uniting one.
If Ford Nation exists, its votes don’t travel: The Tories lost nearly 14,000 votes in the city in the 2011 provincial election versus 2007; even in Ford country, Etobicoke North, they gained only 247. But that’s not to say Torontonians want to swing back to a doctrinaire left-wing mayor.
Hopefully, they want someone who can muster city council’s more reasonable collective instincts, such as destroying Mr. Ford’s ridiculous transit “plan,” while tamping down its insane instincts, such as banning plastic bags because, hey, why the hell not? This is a time of austerity. Ms. Chow’s demands for more money from senior governments are not of the zeitgeist.
I don’t necessarily think Ms. Chow would try to cancel outsourced garbage collection or cleaning contracts on principle, even if she could. I don’t think she would try to lead council on a reckless, debt-accumulating spending spree.
As Mr. Ford has expertly demonstrated, Ms. Chow couldn’t do anything that council doesn’t want. But she is very vulnerable to such accusations from Team Ford, especially since she hasn’t really ever run anything more complex than a shadow cabinet portfolio.
If it weren’t for Mr. Layton, I suspect Ms. Chow would simply be seen as a strong candidate in a large field of potentially strong candidates. I doubt many people would see her as The One, and frankly, Mr. Layton isn’t a very good reason to elevate her to that position. A centrist currently on council, someone like Karen Stintz, would be far less vulnerable to the Ford attack machine, and far more credible in attacking the Mayor’s failures of leadership.
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