In the end, we were not successful and the Wellesley Hospital was closed, but not before the board successfully championed the idea before the courts that the capital that was contributed to the hospital by the community should not be transferred to St. Mike’s. We won that fight to the credit of Libby Burnham, who showed us all that you can fight city hall (so to speak). That created a legacy for the Wellesley that was used to create a long-term care home, a supportive housing facility, a park on the site (the latter two bearing the names of DiPede and Magill), and the Wellesley Health Institute, which continues to champion research focused on urban health.
As a minor concession to the neighbourhood, we were also promised an urgent care facility. This emerged over time as the Sherbourne Health Centre, located on the former Central Hospital site adjacent to Allan Gardens. Progress was slow, however, and in my first term as an opposition MPP at Queen’s Park I spent lots of time speaking to Tony Clement, my predecessor as health minister, to move it forward. Today it houses critical services and programs for the same communities that the Wellesley strived to help.
Considering that tough things were said about the risks to the gay community faced by the loss of Wellesley, St. Mike’s CEO Jeff Lauzon moved promptly to name Dr. Phil Berger, a highly regarded Wellesley physician leader, as the head of family health at St. Mike’s. Further steps taken by Lauzon stand out as a great example of the surviving organization’s openness to adapting its own culture in order to accommodate the needs of the perceived loser in the merger battle. Full credit to St. Mike’s for taking advantage of the opportunity to make itself better by instilling the best of the Wellesley’s very proud history and values. I even forgive Lauzon for making my closest friend Jason Grier the first person he fired at the Wellesley, where Jason, having left Ottawa, was serving as director of public affairs.
Many years later, when I was minister of health and Ron Sapsford was my deputy, I often invited people into my office to show them the Wellesley boardroom chair that I was granted for my service in the campaign to save the hospital. I was letting them know that, while I was very nice (good cop), Sapsford (bad cop) had even closed my local hospital.
* * *
After the Wellesley campaign, my mind returned to the upcoming provincial election in 1999. My riding, then known as Toronto Centre–Rosedale, was represented by a Conservative, Al Leach, the minister of municipal affairs. He had won a tight three-way race in 1995 against the Liberal incumbent (Tim Murphy) and NDP candidate Brent Hawkes. They were all within a thousand votes of each other. But by 1999, the Harris Conservatives were deeply unpopular in Toronto. This was an opportunity for me, and politics is all about opportunity. You have to pick your spots. And in my political career, I have picked some right and some wrong.
I had long ago concluded in my own mind that I would run. In 1995–96, I spent my days supporting Barbara Hall and trying to protect Toronto from Harris’s cuts, especially those aimed at the poorest Ontarians. One day, while walking from city hall to my home in the Moss Park area, I came upon the depressing sight of a woman smoking crack in the stairwell of an old mansion turned rooming house at the corner of Sherbourne and Shuter. The Harris government had been pursuing an agenda of targeting marginalized street people and those on social assistance. Seeing this woman that night triggered something in me. “I’m going to run against Harris and work for that lady,” I said to myself.
When it was time to revisit my decision and actually get to work I discovered (not entirely surprisingly) that I wasn’t alone in my aspiration. James McPherson, a political unknown but the son of a doctor, was being advanced as a potential Liberal candidate by the Ontario Medical Association, the doctors union. The OMA had contracted a known Liberal organizer to help in McPherson’s campaign. I was in Florida at my stepmother’s home when I got wind that McPherson and his crowd were manoeuvering to take control of the Toronto Centre–Rosedale provincial riding association. I outmanoeuvered them by rallying my troops, beginning with a call to the unrivalled Wanda O’Hagan, yet another woman of distinction I had gotten to know through Barbara Hall’s 1994 campaign. Wanda, along with her husband, Dick, a former aide to both Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, and who died late last year, always stood by my side over my years in politics. On that day, she agreed to stand for president on our slate as we sought to take over the riding association. Friends Jason Grier, Tom Allison, Tom Jakobsh, and Guy Bethell also joined the team.
We aggressively knocked on fifteen thousand doors selling memberships and building my profile. “My name is George Smitherman,” I would say. “I live and own a business in the riding. I worked for Barbara Hall at city hall and ran the campaign to save the Wellesley Hospital. Would you be willing to join the Liberal Party to help get rid of Mike Harris?” Over fourteen hundred people signed up and we submitted those memberships and the funds to go with them. My opponent didn’t, so we had no real way to know how many memberships he was sitting on. In a riding executive meeting, we moved a motion to increase the annual membership fee from $10 to $25, which would make it much tougher for McPherson to function. He soon dropped out, never to be heard from again in the political arena. The Liberal Party later closed that loophole. Some people flattered me and Tom Allison by referring to it as the “Allison/Smitherman clause.”
As a footnote, the best door I ever knocked on wasn’t answered by a humpy naked dude, although that did happen occasionally. Rather, it was the door opened at 100 Wellesley Street East by a woman named Joyce Grigg, who traded in her NDP card for a Liberal one and until this very day serves as the heart and soul of Liberals in the east-downtown.
I had achieved a great deal of success in signing up members by knocking on all those doors, but I still couldn’t count on winning the nomination. There was still one other potential opponent to be considered: Tim Murphy, the former Liberal MPP for the riding who had lost to Leach in 1995 after winning the riding in a by-election following Ian Scott’s retirement. While Murphy no longer lived in the riding, he was rumoured to be considering the possibility of a comeback. (Such rumours persist in pretty much every election cycle.) Murphy and I had known each other for a long time and had campaigned together for Paul Martin in the federal leadership race in 1990. (Murphy later became chief of staff when Martin assumed the prime ministership.) Murphy had been one of just three Liberal MPPs to vote for Bill 167, the gay-rights bill, in 1994 and had taken it on the chin for the party’s flip-flop in the subsequent general election. Luckily for me, Murphy chose to exercise his political skills by becoming president of the provincial party, and to the satisfaction of his family he continued to earn a serious living as a lawyer.
Now I had a clear run at the nomination, which I secured by acclamation in September of 1998 in the Betty Oliphant Theatre at the National Ballet School on Jarvis Street. Following a nominating speech by Dick O’Hagan, I delivered a rousing address, promising to take the fight to Al Leach in the coming campaign. That night, I posed for a photograph with Barbara Hall, in what was a very early Liberal venture for her. I was wearing boxing gloves, showing my readiness to take Leach on.
With Barbara Hall and the boxing gloves, at the nomination meeting for Toronto Centre–Rosedale, 1998. The beginning of my formal political career.
But soon after that, Leach turned the campaign upside down by announcing he would not seek re-election. To replace him, the Tories recruited a star candidate, Durhane Wong-Rieger, a psychologist with a track record as an advocate for people who had contracted HIV and/or hepatitis C through tainted blood transfusions — a sad and terrible debacle in our history. A Chinese-Canadian woman with no baggage of her own from the Harris years, she was not nearly as easy a target as Leach. On the other hand, her complete lack of political experience made defending Mike Harris in downtown Toronto a little on the difficult side for her.
Further complicating matters was the entry of John Sewell into the race as an independent candidate. Sewell, the mayor of Toronto from 1978 to 1980, was a
high-profile critic of the Harris government. (He had led the local campaign against amalgamation, along with Kathleen Wynne.) His candidacy threatened to split the anti-Harris vote. So did the running of NDP candidate Helen Breslauer, a university professor whose husband, Dr. Bob Frankford, had previously been an MPP and was highly regarded among his peers. But Sewell didn’t have a party behind him. And Breslauer and the New Democrats still suffered from bad memories of the Rae regime. Brent Hawkes’s exit from partisan activities after the 1995 campaign further deflated them.
As the campaign unfolded, Wong-Rieger showed her inexperience with a disastrous decision to boycott all-candidates meetings other than those held in Rosedale. We rented a chicken costume (worn by John Zerucelli, later director of operations in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office) and showed up at an all-candidates meeting at All Saints Anglican Church at Dundas and Sherbourne to mock her. Sewell was outraged by this stunt, which is ironic because he had practised guerrilla theatre himself as a city councillor back in the early 1970s. I vividly recall seeing him go nose-to-nose in protest with Tom Allison, my campaign manager. Perhaps only All Saints could have hosted such a colourful exchange without a fuss. After the chicken’s first appearance, the National Post ran a story and photo the next day. It is not often that local campaigns get noticed by the media, so I am still dining out on the story today, and by now Johnny Z is surely sick of me greeting him with an enthusiastic retelling.
As for Breslauer, the NDP candidate, she was not a forceful public speaker, so I contrasted well with her. The 519 Church Street Community, the physical heart of the gay community, has a history of hosting raucous all-candidates meetings, and I like raucous a lot. By 1999, I had attended several such meetings and had participated boisterously when provoked, such as any time the other party’s candidate spoke. Coming one election after the same-sex benefits issue had dominated the local vote, there was still a political tension in the air that night at 519. In her opening remarks, Breslauer said: “Just six short weeks ago I was pleased to be nominated in this very room to be the NDP candidate.” Following on her heels, I proclaimed: “Not six months ago in this very room, I was awarded the Tonya Harding Award by the Gay Hockey Association, and when I get to Queen’s Park I promise not to be Miss Congeniality there, either.”
The crowd loved the line, and Breslauer probably knew she was cooked at that moment.
Toronto Centre–Rosedale is an incredibly diverse riding in every way — ethnically, culturally, economically, and sexually. But I had a good story to tell that cut across these boundaries. I highlighted my work for Barbara Hall (who publicly endorsed me), my campaign to save Wellesley Hospital, my ties to the community (as both a resident and a business owner), and my strong opposition to the Harris government. That left no oxygen for the NDP or for Sewell.
I also took a new approach to campaigning, one that I profess until today is more realistic and effective when applied well. That is, voter motivation over voter identification. Campaign organizers have forever focused on the voter identification model, whereby political parties will hack and claw their way to each voter’s attention and beg them to confess their loyalty (one way or the other). They use a few codes to capture what was derived from the encounter. Then on election day volunteers run to the doors (and phones, too) where the encounter led to the identification of a living, breathing Liberal. All fine and good, but minds change, people lie, volunteers mistake signals, and lists are terrible. So in many areas the stability of the data is so hit-and-miss that it is practically worthless. Instead, I concluded that, in areas where there were known to be lots of Liberals, the more achievable goal should be voter motivation.
As always, I’m chasing after Barbara Hall, who helped inspire me to run.
Take a community like St. James Town, one of the densest in North America. Bounded by Wellesley, Howard, Sherbourne, and Parliament streets, it consists of nineteen high-rise buildings, including some public housing. It is ethnically diverse and working-class, with a high turnover in tenancies, and it is home to a lot of loyal Liberals. I used my resources to motivate them to get out and vote. That didn’t mean we neglected to knock on doors and deliver pamphlets, but our practice was “knock and drop” rather than depend on hard voter identification.
To this end, I held multiple BBQs in the riding, using my stepfather’s pickup truck to haul our BBQ kit. (One of these events, in Regent Park, attracted a young Somali refugee named Ahmed Hussen, who later became Canada’s minister of citizenship and immigration.) We concentrated voter identification on neighbourhoods where the lists were better and the doors were close together. Fortunately, the largest enclave of closely bunched Victorian houses in North America is in Toronto Centre riding.
In the end, while Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals lost province-wide in 1999, I won my riding quite handily with 39 percent of the vote to 30 percent for Wong-Rieger, 19 percent for Sewell, and 9 percent for Breslauer. (Interestingly, the headlines following the election focused not on me or my Tory opponent, but on Sewell. “Novice Liberal wins on renters’ votes: Sewell surprised by defeat,” said the Globe’s headline. “Sewell tries to swallow election defeat to Liberal,” echoed the Star.) The only poll I noticeably lost (I lost others but didn’t notice) was on Toronto Island, where I finished FOURTH, behind even the Tories. I decided then and there that the Islanders simply didn’t know me, and I set out to improve my standing with them. With my team, we participated in the construction of housing on the Island, and I met my future executive assistant, Scott Lovell, while hanging drywall and shouldering enormous wheelbarrows full of building materials. (I was only thirty-five then!) In later elections, as the Islanders came to know me as a strong ally, my votes there improved a lot. One time, in trying to slight me for the compact size of my riding, a northerner scoffed: “You could walk from one end of your riding to the other in a day.” Within a heartbeat, I replied: “You pay me a great compliment, sir, as the southern portion of my riding is an Island.”
A young Ahmed Hussen with my first Muslim supporter, Khadija Abdi.
Everybody can recognize the complexity of representing giant swaths of territory in northern or rural ridings, but few acknowledge the complexity of representing neighbourhoods that have major language barriers and where issues can be dramatically different on opposite sides of the same street, a contrast that can be seen in the Regent Park–Cabbagetown division on Gerrard Street, although I am proud to say it is much diminished today.
* * *
My first swearing-in as an MPP, 1999.
I was now, at age thirty-five and in my twentieth year in politics, an elected representative, the first-ever openly gay member of the Ontario Legislature (and, as I like to say, only the two-hundredth gay member in history!). And, as chance would have it, my maiden speech in the Legislature was on a gay-rights bill, which covered much of the same territory as the defeated 1994 legislation. What was different this time? In the intervening five years, the courts, citing the Charter of Rights, had instructed the provinces to change their laws to give same-sex partners the same benefits, rights, and obligations as their heterosexual counterparts. Jim Flaherty, the attorney general at the time, called it “the devil made me do it act,” because the Conservative government of the day was clearly uncomfortable about bringing it forward. Jaime Watt, a friend of mine and Flaherty’s, called me to ask if I could manage to bring the Liberals along to support the bill without complaint. I did, and I was given the honour of leading off the debate for the Liberals. In so doing, I helped to close a lousy chapter for both gay people and my party. In the public galleries that day were many friends and supporters from my riding plus my mother, stepfather, sister, and nephew. In my mind were memories of the 1986 and 1994 votes. And some of those who had been shackled and removed by latex-gloved security officers in 1994, such as Rev. Brent Hawkes, were in attendance as I rose to speak:
I’ve been in this place before, although recently elected, and the galleries have been imp
ortant steps along the path in my own evolution as a gay man. In 1986, when the government of the day was debating Bill 7, I sat in that gallery on the east side — I must say, I much preferred the view — and watched the government deal at the end of a very, very difficult debate. But at the end of the day, Ontario legislators from all parties — not equally distributed perhaps, but from all parties — supported what was then entrenchment of sexual orientation in the prohibited grounds for discrimination of the Ontario Human Rights Code. I was proud of my government that day.
On June 9, 1994, I stood or sat in that gallery, and I will not go on at length but I must say I don’t think that was the proudest day in the history of this place. Today, we have a chance to put that behind us.
I want to turn a little bit to the debate. What is this about? Well, these are not about special rights, these are about equal rights, and having gained them our community must now live up to them. I’m so convinced that we will because the indefatigable spirit of gays and lesbians has brought us this far. Today we set a new seat at the table.
And without further protest of any form from any party, Ontario swiftly and surely got caught up. A headline in the Toronto Star proclaimed, “Contentious bill voted into law quickly and quietly.” An accompanying column, which noted that thirty-one Tory MPPs and nine Liberals were absent from the debate, observed, “The absence of a recorded vote provided cover for those who still opposed the legislation but didn’t want to defy their party.”
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