The Hall campaign had a superstructure of senior advisers reflecting the three political parties — the likes of Senator Keith Davey (Liberal), Libby Burnham (Progressive Conservative), and Michael Lewis (New Democrat, brother of Stephen and son of David). As a staffer, I was on a rung well below these folks. But as the campaign evolved and my commitment showed, my influence grew. I recall Hall proposing a short walk through Cabbagetown to get a bag of jujubes. In addition to sharing the candy, she wanted to share the news that tomorrow’s papers would show her trailing behind both Rowlands and Gerry Meinzer, a venture capitalist with zero political experience, in the mayoral race. “Don’t overreact to this, George,” she counselled me. She was right.
The campaign began to turn in our favour in the last few weeks. Rowlands, a great progressive in her earlier days, had not been a popular mayor. She approached the job like a bureaucrat, and she often appeared clueless and out of touch during her three years in office. On her watch, for example, the pop group Barenaked Ladies was banned from performing at City Hall Square on New Year’s Eve because a bureaucrat decided their name “objectified women.” Worst of all, Rowlands appeared not to notice the racially inspired Yonge Street riot that took place virtually outside her office door. In short, Rowlands came across as an old fuddy-duddy, while Hall appeared more modern. Hall was a progressive, even a lefty, but she also supported the Olympic bid, which was out of favour with the left. That point of distinction was symbolic and significant.
Rowlands also failed to understand that a big part of the mayor’s job is to get out in the community to celebrate ethnic and neighbourhood events. Hall never shirked that duty; she called on more events in Toronto than previously thought possible. We also got a boost from an editorial endorsement in the Toronto Star on the final weekend. We printed tens of thousands of the editorial and distributed the copies around the city, especially in North Toronto, literally before the ink even had a chance to dry. In the end, Hall won with 43 percent of the vote to Rowlands’s 36 percent. (Meinzer was third with 13 percent.)
After the election, I accepted a job on Hall’s staff as director of operations, splitting duties with the fantastic Jennifer Morris, who served as director of policy. I stayed for two years, during which time Hall helped to redefine our city. Among her notable achievements was the “Two Kings” policy, which rezoned some four hundred acres of “employment lands” around the King and Parliament and King and Spadina intersections and allowed residential and commercial development. This helped to attract $8 billion in investment to the city and transformed an area of derelict factories and warehouses, leftovers from the Industrial Revolution. While some argued that we should be trying to attract industrial employment back to the city, Hall recognized that those days were never coming back.
Elsewhere, three different processes were concluded that led to the re-emergence of our city in historic ways. Hall was there the night Damon Stoudamire was drafted by the nascent Toronto Raptors basketball team, and she welcomed him and his family to Toronto. The Raptors played initially in the SkyDome, an unsuitable venue for basketball, while the search was on for a more permanent home. And Hall appointed me to lead the Raptors Stadium Project, as we called it. It helped that my former boss, David Peterson, was the Raptors’ first chairman. Through him, I met Ralph Lean, Peterson’s law partner and a key part of the fledgling Raptors organization. (Lean would later assist in my mayoral campaign.)
I was with Hall, who before her election as mayor had served as the chair of the land-use planning committee, when John Bitove, the Raptors’ CEO, called and asked for her preference of the sites the Raptors were considering for construction of the new arena. Hall suggested she preferred the old post office building site at Bay and Lakeshore. The Raptors were also eyeing a site at Bay and Dundas (now the home of a Canadian Tire store and Ryerson University’s business school). On my first visit with Hall to see the Lakeshore site, I remember having to run the car up a curb on the south side of the building by Lakeshore just to be able to find a place to stop. It’s a far cry from what has emerged in the twenty years since.
Eventually, with an assist from the city through the transfer of a small triangle of land for a price of $1.8 million, the post office site was chosen. And when the Raptors were taken over by Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment (MLSE), the new arena became home for both the Raptors and the Leafs. I was lucky to attend the last Leafs game at Maple Leaf Gardens and the first at the new arena, then called the Air Canada Centre.
Other highlights in Hall’s mayoral term included the planning for the Bathurst Quay neighbourhood, the development around Fort York, and the future neighbourhood around the old Woodbine race track. Hall’s legacy, achieved in only three years in office, is remarkable. Credit also belongs to the city’s planning staff, led by Robert Millward, and council, which worked mostly as a team under Hall’s leadership.
Besides having a direct hand in the physical transformation of the city, Hall also changed the style of politics at city hall. Prior to her mayoralty, city hall was sharply polarized between left and right, with many issues on the seventeen-person council decided by nine-to-eight votes. Hall set out to change this with a consultative approach. She believed that whatever time was seemingly lost at the beginning by talking to a wide range of people was compensated for at the other end by the benefits of consensus. That model lends itself to collective victories. Hall’s adage, “I know of few good things that happened by one person working alone,” rubbed off on those around her. She singlehandedly surmounted the philosophical divide on council that was reflected by Councillor Tom Jakobek, a weird right-winger who preferred confrontation to consensus. Hall outmanoeuvered him and, rather than nine-to-eight votes, she started to win eleven-to-six and even twelve-to-five. She accomplished this by winning over independents like Howard Joy, the eccentric Kay Gardner, and the colourful Chris Korwin-Kuczynski to vote alongside lefties like Pam McConnell, Kyle Rae, and Peter Tabuns, as well as Liberals like Mario Silva.
Hall also tackled the bureaucracy, which was incredibly siloed when she became mayor, with fourteen fiercely independent departments. The closest thing to someone being in overall charge was a guy named Herb Pirk, the long-time director of parks and recreation, who had acquired the power to set the regular agenda for the “meeting of equals.” There was no city manager and very little co-operation between departments. Each one of them was free to build its own communications infrastructure, for instance. With approval and lots of engagement from council, Hall streamlined the whole operation with four overarching commissioners, themselves operating as a team. While the model was imperfect, it was at least a step in the right direction.
It was a difficult time for the city. We were just emerging from the recession of the early 1990s and city revenues were in decline. Then Mike Harris arrived at Queen’s Park and began filling in unfinished subway tunnels, cancelling needed social housing, reducing rates of social support for the most vulnerable, and wreaking havoc with political boundaries. (We are watching a replay of this today with the Doug Ford government at Queen’s Park.) Tom Jakobek, one of the craziest politicians I have ever met, was the budget chief at the time. He was a tremendously manipulative individual. Hall had to work the votes to protect against his proposed spending cuts on programs like seniors’ dental care and the arts. One of the great joys of my time at city hall was serving as Hall’s point person on the budget and conspiring with Councillor Pam McConnell, a woman who knew how to read a budget from her days at the school board. Hall’s council made tough decisions in those budgets but always agonized over impacts to vulnerable people.
At Gay Pride with Bill Graham and Pam McConnell, my local political colleagues and accomplices.
During Hall’s mayoralty, I also got my first taste of the nastiness that comes with taking smoking out of public places. And when a Cabbagetown restaurateur refused to serve Hall in protest over the proposed ban, I took it personally. That event remained close to my thoughts a
decade later when I was health minister and championed the Smoke-Free Ontario Act, which would bring an end to smoking in enclosed public spaces in Ontario.
One interesting footnote from the Hall era: during my time working for the mayor, I had responsibility for the Toronto Film and Television Office, which was responsible for coordinating location shooting around the city. Ordinarily, the purpose of the office is to facilitate filmmakers and help make Toronto an attractive place to make movies and television shows. But during my time at city hall, the Paul Bernardo trial took place just a few steps away at the provincial courthouse. It was a complete shit show, with major television networks from the United States as well as Canada camped out in ramshackle fashion in front of the courthouse. So I recommended to the mayor that we have the film office tackle the unseemly mess of satellite trucks by coordinating their positions and maintaining order. Of course, in doing so we incurred the wrath of critics who said we were legitimizing the sensationalism around the evil Bernardo. It was a good lesson for me: you can’t please all the people, ever.
In 1996, one year before Hall’s mayoral term ended, I was lured away from her office to work for David Collenette, then minister of national defence but also the “political minister” for Toronto. Collenette was a partisan guy who came up through the ranks, and it seemed like an exciting opportunity for me at the time. Plus, by nature I have a restlessness and curiosity that always makes me open to new things. Ironically, on the very day Barbara Hall and Max Beck were to host a going-away party for me at their home, Collenette resigned. (The reason given for the resignation was an ethical breach: he had written a letter on behalf of a constituent to the Immigration and Refugee Board. But the federal government was also embroiled in a scandal over the beating death of a Somali teenager at the hands of Canadian peacekeepers, so it was deemed convenient for Collenette to step aside, although he soon got back into cabinet.)
Getting the call about Collenette’s resignation over lunch, I naively assumed I was sitting on some good inside info. So I placed a call to Senator David Smith, a political Mr. Fixit for Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. “Smitherman,” he said without inviting a word, “you now work for Herb Gray.” Click. I laugh out loud when I think about how wet behind the ears I was thinking I was going to tell the well-connected “Smitty,” as he is known, something he didn’t know! (Coincidentally, Smitty was also my father’s nickname.)
Gray was the senior Ontario political minister, a role commensurate with his unmatched parliamentary longevity. Later, he was bestowed the honorific Right Honourable, a title typically reserved for a prime minister, in recognition of his being the third-longest-serving MP in Canada’s history. He was also the first-ever Jewish cabinet minister in Ottawa. I lasted a total of only about six months working for Gray, but I learned a lot in that time. I saw how Collenette and Gray managed power differently, and I met people like Eugene Lang and Jason Grier, who made lasting impressions on me and became good friends. Grier went on to work for me and serve as president of my riding association. But the fact was that, through no fault of Gray’s, back in the mid-1990s no one in Ottawa cared much about Toronto. The country had just emerged from the near-death experience of the 1995 Quebec referendum, so all the focus was on that province.
I read the writing on the wall and returned to Hall’s side to run her 1997 campaign for mayor of the new “megacity” against the media-anointed frontrunner, North York mayor Mel Lastman. The megacity had been created by Premier Mike Harris with the forced amalgamation of the old City of Toronto and the other five lower-tier municipalities (Etobicoke, Scarborough, North York, York, and East York) that made up Metropolitan Toronto. The campaign pitted Hall, supported by most of the other outgoing lower-tier mayors, against Lastman. Because of his longevity in office (he had been mayor of North York for a quarter-century), his populist veneer, and his outsized personality (embellished by appearances in ads for the appliance store he owned), Lastman had a huge profile as a cornball who gets stuff done. So it was an uphill battle for Hall from the start. But we campaigned hard, as only a candidate like Hall can, and we had no problem raising money.
Hall gained support from people involved in the arts, environmentalists, and others who appreciated the job she had done as mayor of the old City of Toronto. We could have raised $7 million for the campaign, but municipal regulations limited us to spending just $1.5 million, which ruled out a heavy advertising campaign. (That’s a wonky throwback rule that always prevents mayoral campaigns befitting the scale of the amalgamated city.) Accordingly, we sought attention in other ways. For example, we decided to do our campaign kick-off not only in the morning but also right under Lastman’s nose, at the North York Arts Centre (since renamed the Toronto Arts Centre), one of his legacies (actually a white elephant) as mayor of North York.
Hall arrived bright and energized for the morning event by subway and was greeted by more than five hundred cheering supporters. Among those introducing Hall that day was a young North York high-school student named Abid Malik, who later served as one of my most able and loyal staffers during my time as a cabinet minister.
It was a very complex campaign, the first of its kind to be run across the entire amalgamated city. As sentimentalists, we established offices in all six of the former lower-tier municipalities, and Hall attracted support from the previous mayors of Scarborough (Frank Faubert), York (Frances Nunziata), and East York (Michael Prue). Amalgamation was a fait accompli by then, so we did not explicitly campaign against it. But we picked up support from those who had opposed the idea. Mike Harris himself was a polarizing figure, and Lastman was seen at the time as being too close to him. (That changed later when Lastman publicly called Harris a “liar.”) On the other hand, Lastman could appeal to suburban voters on the basis that he was one of them, unlike the downtown-living former mayor of the old City of Toronto. We countered that Hall would be more effective at bringing everyone together. In the end, Hall managed to win the wards in York and East York and in the southern parts of Etobicoke and Scarborough.
In the dying days of the campaign, we got a boost from a gaffe by Lastman, who declared that there were “no homeless in North York.” (A day later, a homeless woman was found dead at a North York gas station.) We had momentum on our side, but it was not enough. Hall lost by barely five percentage points. If the race had been a week or two longer, she might have beaten him and Toronto might have been spared the embarrassment of a mayor who openly raised his fear of travelling to Africa because he thought his destiny might be a boiling pot. (Admittedly, afterward he did say sorry some fifty times in one sentence.)
* * *
After the 1997 municipal election, my dear friend Libby Burnham, a networked Conservative loyalist who hailed from New Brunswick and whom I had the good fortune to meet in the 1994 Hall campaign, invited me to lead the grassroots campaign to save the Wellesley Hospital, where she served as board chair. Located at Wellesley and Sherbourne, the hospital had been targeted for closing by Mike Harris’s Health Services Restructuring Commission, with its services to be transferred south to St. Mike’s. The Wellesley was not your ordinary hospital.
Though located south of Bloor Street, it had a north-of-Bloor pedigree that rose up to meet the challenge of attending to the diverse populations that surrounded it. It was a glimpse for me into the unique pleasure and challenge of effectively representing the richest and the poorest at the same time, a privilege I was to gain later as MPP for Toronto Centre–Rosedale. The hospital had sown deep connections with the surrounding community since it began operating in 1911 behind the stone fence that still partially stands on that corner. In 1996, it merged with the Central Hospital, just down Sherbourne. Together these hospitals were open to their neighbouring communities, including the gay population, marginalized street people, sex-trade workers, low-income tenants, and new immigrants. They were also in the forefront of the fight against AIDS. There was heartfelt fear that St. Mike’s, as a Catholic hospital, would be less rece
ptive to gay people, many of whom have a challenging relationship with the Catholic Church.
The Wellesley’s openness to marginalized communities had built strong community loyalty, and the breadth of the health care offerings was impressive — ranging from the Ross Tilly Burn Unit to a mobile health bus for homeless care, a well-regarded birthing centre, and leading research into arthritis. The Wellesley had also been one of the primary teaching sites for nurses, and even today Wellesley nurses dot the landscape of Ontario health care. That said, not every hospital with those loyalties could leverage them. That’s where I found the special sauce of the Wellesley Hospital: the ability of a very large organization to find strength from its community roots.
The writing was on the wall for the Wellesley. The well-regarded CEO had fled, and the Wellesley was being led on an interim basis by a practising physician who lacked sophistication in matters of politics and organizing communities. She was no match for Libby Burnham and her board, which included seasoned community veterans Dennis Magill, Aileen Meagher (a former Larry Grossman staffer), Tony DiPede, and Don Rickard. Together they crafted the campaign to save the hospital and the “Staying Alive” slogan. Rickard, a lawyer, made sure that the campaign did not go afoul in the use of public funds.
Among a variety of tactics, we got thousands of signatures on a petition and, in true downtown activist style, staged a spirited protest march to push the petitions on a gurney along Wellesley Street to the offices of the Health Services Restructuring Commission (HSRC), at the corner of Bay and Wellesley. The protest was a bit borderline, as we did not have a permit and there was a lot of anger among the hundreds of marchers. I recall at one point giving Dennis Magill a knowing look as if to say, “Let’s keep our eye on things to make sure they don’t get out of hand.” It was in this heated environment that the HSRC’s Ron Sapsford, my future deputy minister at the Ministry of Health, arrived to receive the petition in the lobby of the building. Sensing correctly that the protesters who had gathered were very angry, he was polite but, in my recollection, quite petrified.
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