From that day forward, the Ontario Legislature ceased to be a bastion for homophobia from any quarter (at least until very recently, that is, with the election of Doug Ford as premier with support from social conservatives).
It is really remarkable what five years and a Charter can mean for the progress of LGBTQ people and other minorities. For the Liberal Party, the page was turned, and my Toronto Centre team shifted to attract tons of energy from the gay community to aid the party. We took it upon ourselves to join David Caplan and Dominic Agostino (two MPP colleagues) in making sure Liberal events were strong on hospitality and fun. I will never forget the stampede of people who wanted their picture taken with one-time Toronto mayoral candidate Enza Anderson, a trans woman, in our hospitality suite at a province-wide gathering of Liberals in London. It struck me that the farther one hailed from Church and Wellesley, the keener the desire to have a photo with Enza!
* * *
Beyond the cozy confines of Queen’s Park, however, there was trouble in my riding: specifically, six murders in Regent Park in the first six weeks after I was elected. If there had been six murders (or even break-ins) in Rosedale, there would have been a community uproar. But because it happened in Regent Park, the post–Second World War era public housing project in downtown Toronto, there was little in the way of a community-organized backlash. No emergency meetings were called and no protest rallies were organized. Upon asking why, I was told that it was up to me and my dear friend Pam McConnell, the city councillor for the area, to call the meeting. It was an important moment of cultural awareness for me, and from that moment on I knew that building a dynamic community voice representing Regent Park’s residents was to be a priority of mine.
At this time, I lived just steps north of Regent Park on Sword Street. I knew first-hand that it was a stigmatized neighbourhood because the youths I met from there always told me they lived down Parliament Street or across Gerrard Street or Dundas Street. They would not even admit to living in Regent Park.
The housing project was badly designed, with park-like settings that proved very convenient for drug dealers. By the turn of the century, its buildings were in declining condition. Everyone said it had to be redeveloped. But I came to realize that, as much as there might be an inclination to tear Regent Park down and build anew, the people living there needed to have a big say in whatever plans were made. When I look back on my accomplishments as an MPP, helping to create a distinct community voice at Regent Park ranks among my proudest. For months, we met every Saturday under the watchful guidance of community organizer and humanitarian Carmel Hilli at the Toronto Christian Resource Centre at 40 Oak Street, right in the neighbourhood. Gradually we developed a structure for a democratic organization — the Regent Park Neighbourhood Association — that would speak for the community, and we had it ratified by the community. Ahmed Hussen was one of the early leaders of the association. We used the Barbara Hall model of maximum participation and consultation at the front end.
At the same time, I learned from Carolyn Acker and Camille Orridge, respectively the executive director and chair of the Regent Park Community Health Centre, of their “community succession model.” Simply put, they concluded that so long as all the good jobs in the community were going to people from outside the community, it would remain mired in poverty. Pathways to Education, now a national success, was born and immediately set out to promote high-school and post-secondary success in the community. I am so lucky that in the earliest days of Pathways I was able to leverage a financial contribution for the organization from the six biggest Canadian banks. I am prouder still that the kids of Regent Park now graduate from high school at rates equal to the wealthiest neighbourhoods in Toronto, thanks to comprehensive tutoring, mentoring, direct financial assistance, and merit-based scholarships and bursaries.
It’s common in politics that some people are motivated by the perceived power of being in cabinet. It helped that I was an opposition MPP at the time. I wouldn’t have had the time to devote to these tasks in Regent Park if I had been a cabinet minister. So you could say that the most powerful thing I did as an MPP was when I had no power. The subsequent redevelopment of Regent Park has not been perfect. Regrettably, the final two phases still haven’t been built because of a lack of government funding, and some people who were uprooted with the promise they could return to the new housing have not seen that promise fulfilled.
* * *
One of the first things I did after being elected to the Legislature was to hire a woman I had met during the campaign: Doreen Winkler. She had come to lobby me on behalf of Ontarians with disabilities. I was impressed with her empathy and her clarity in presenting arguments in favour of legislative action to enhance the lives of people living with a disability. Doreen had a master’s in social work, was blind, and read a computer only with the aid of sophisticated technology. When I sought to acquire that technology to help her, I was told that it wasn’t covered by my legislative budget. Correctly sensing that I was going to make a stink about the issue, Claude DesRosiers, the Clerk of the Legislature, stepped in and bought the technology with his own budget.
On another occasion, I staged a scooter-and-wheelchair protest at a newly renovated Pizza Pizza store on Parliament Street in my riding. Despite spending $250,000 on the reno, the store still left lips of six to eight inches on all its various entrances — just enough to prevent access for many people with disabilities. Shortly after our rally, the store was made accessible, and I am sure that has been very good for its business.
A couple of years later, when MPPs were given the opportunity to pre-sent Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medals to people in their ridings who had made a significant contribution to their communities, I declined to award them to the many constituents who had reached out to me and asked for them. Instead, I gave them to a wide array of neighbourhood heroes, including participants in the Pizza Pizza protest and pure community people just like them. We had a great ceremony for the recipients at the Legislature. I have found in life that, for every impressive person seeking an award or recognition, I knew an equally impressive unsung hero. I delighted in highlighting them and pride myself in my instinct to lift people and communities up.
Another issue I got involved in as an opposition MPP was the Marc Hall case. He was a gay kid who wanted to bring his boyfriend to the school prom. But it was a Catholic school, Monsignor John Pereyma in Oshawa, and the principal had vetoed the idea. Marc appealed to the Durham Catholic District School Board but was again rebuffed. My assistant, Todd Ross, who had suffered discrimination at the hands of the Canadian navy, and I reached out to Marc to let him know he wasn’t alone in his battle.
Eventually, only the courts offered a remedy for Marc, and we rallied the best possible legal representation to his side: David Corbett, now a justice on the Ontario Superior Court, aided by intervenor Douglas Elliott, a legal legend in the gay community. Elliot called me one day and said: “You do realize that Marc is only seventeen and cannot be held accountable for costs that might be assessed by the court, and you will have to be his litigation guarantor?”
“Sure,” I said, “so long as you realize if there is a judgment against us the first person I am asking for a donation is you.”
Todd and I also got a thirty-minute meeting with Cardinal Ambrozic, then the Catholic archbishop of Toronto, at his Yonge Street office (in my riding!). He articulated the Church line, and I stuck to mine. There was no room for compromise. Many meetings drift on for longer than the allotted time, but this one ended on the dot with Ambrozic rising after thirty minutes. In the end, Hall won his case in court and went to the prom with his boyfriend. My team and I pitched in to help to pay for the limousine.
In the same time frame I was named Grand Marshall of the first Sarnia Gay Pride Parade and walked with the colourful Liberal MP Roger Galloway, but not Sarnia’s mayor Mike Bradley. (I was surprised he was in hiding that day.) I also had a great time at the London Pride celebration, where I did
a little MC job and mostly hung out with entertainers like the great drag king Deb “Dirk” Pearce. Halton, York, Hamilton, Kingston, and Ottawa were some of the other Pride festivals I participated in.
* * *
Back at Queen’s Park, I was settling in as a rookie MPP. There were ten of us Liberals who had won our first elections in 1999. We provided something of an energy jolt to the caucus. To us, 1999 was a victory, not a defeat. Our leader, Dalton McGuinty, had withstood an onslaught of attack ads, our popular vote had increased, and Mike Harris’s majority had been whittled down.
Initially, my seat was in the far back corner of the Legislature, something Ian Scott loved to torment me about. “You backbencher,” he would say over and over with great hilarity. I soon got shifted to the middle of the back row, where my heckling skills could be better employed. One of my targets was NDP Leader Howard Hampton, who (along with other New Democrats) spent much of his time heckling McGuinty. (The New Democrats saw McGuinty as standing in the way of their path back to power, and like others they underestimated him.)
My principal target, however, was the premier himself, Mike Harris. I made an issue out of his frequent absences from the Legislature (even though, under arcane parliamentary rules, no member is allowed to refer to the absence of another). With the help of the legislative library and a day-by-day review of Hansard, I did some research that showed Harris had attended just one out of every three Question Periods, whereas Premier Peterson had attended 80 percent and Premier Rae more than 60 percent. It was the subject of my first question in the Legislature. Since it was tricky ground, it was a great start, and I hoped it would show my colleagues in the Liberal caucus that I had guts. The argument about Harris’s absences gained some traction; people began really giving him the gears about his spotty attendance record. In the fall of 2001, Harris announced he was quitting. I personally take some credit for helping to push him out of provincial politics, but it always amazed me just how out of gas Harris seemed to be as early as the 1999 election. He morphed from reformist crusader to cigar-and-putter aficionado in very short order.
In the Ontario Legislature with Sandra Pupatello and Dalton McGuinty.
In this and other initiatives, I was really a deployable asset of the leader’s office. I was never a candidate for the big critic roles, mostly taken by the class of 1995, like the Windsor twins, Dwight Duncan and Sandra Pupatello. Rather I got to do a host of things that were not only fun but also helped to hone my skills and knowledge. My first executive assistant at Queen’s Park was Gerald Butts, former principal secretary to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. By the time he came to work for me, Gerald and his equally impressive soon-to-be wife, Jodi, had a lot going for them. That made him an easy target for advancement. In the four months or so before Phil Dewan, then McGuinty’s chief of staff, made the smart decision to poach him from me, Gerald and I travelled hither and yon to call upon every GTA mayor. (I was the GTA critic.) That meant zooming about in my neon yellow VW GTI, with me changing gears, cradling the phone, steering and typing on the second generation BlackBerry that had but one line of text, almost like a pager. In many cases, I knew the mayor we were meeting from my work for Barbara Hall and for the federal government.
Ironically, given my poor driving habits at the time, one of the other issues I took on was auto insurance, which was gaining public traction. The Liberals had no well-defined policy in the area, and I set out to harness it and make it a winner for us. I held hearings in municipalities across the province, many of them with future MPPs like Phil McNeely in Ottawa-Orleans and John Wilkinson in Perth-Middlesex. After fifteen or so hearings, I put together a package of recommendations that became part of the 2003 Liberal platform and largely informed government policy for years after the election. I always thought McGuinty made me health minister because he was impressed by the way I handled that sticky file.
I was also the lead critic on a pension reform bill that Finance Minister Janet Ecker had brought forward to the house. She backed down on the so-called reforms after I packed the Legislature’s galleries with three-hundred-odd former National Trust employees who were about to see their pensions eviscerated by the bill. Even now people who benefited from my actions will stop me on the street to thank me.
Another role for me was being the lead party critic on the SARS crisis in 2003. I attended all the government’s press conferences, which were held daily during the height of the crisis. As the epidemic originated in China, it hit the Chinese-Canadian community in the Toronto area particularly hard. I remember visiting the Pacific Mall in Markham with Dalton McGuinty at the time and finding it eerily empty, especially as I had seen that place in full flight so often. But the economic and social impacts were felt across the city. It was an important lesson for all of us in managing a public health crisis. And it gave me crucial insights into health communications, especially the knack possessed by some clinicians for taking clinical data and making it comprehensible for everyday folks.
My favourite assignment of all was triggered when Mike Harris called it quits. I proposed to my boss that I attend the campaign launches of all the Tory leadership candidates, a feat I achieved for all but one of them because of car trouble. I recall attending Elizabeth Witmer’s launch at the Waterloo Inn. With a good hometown crowd, Witmer took time from her speech to call me out by name and tell me I was going to meet my Waterloo. In response, I got to call her a wolf in sheepskin clothing and reminded people of her role in the gutting of labour laws in the early Harris years. My aptitude for providing on-site commentary without too much collateral damage led to ever bigger stages and opportunities for me, culminating in my role shadowing Premier Ernie Eves in the run-up to the 2003 campaign. So familiar was I to the Tories that they began to expect me at their events. At the Conservative platform launch on the eve of the 2003 campaign, Eves made a point of autographing a copy of the document for me.
Best photo op ever. “Ernie Eves Trough,” at the Hog Barn, Riverdale Farm, where the pig literally took the prop.
I was a hard-charging ambitious person, but my ambition was for my boss (McGuinty) and my party, not for myself. I always figured the ends justified the means (bye, bye, Harris), and if my brashness ruffled feathers, then so be it. I played hard, but I was never a leaker or a back-stabber. My loyalty to my leader was unquestioned, although during McGuinty’s leadership review period (after the 1999 election) some eyebrows were raised when I supported Alvin Curling for party president. Curling, a fellow MPP and someone who swept into politics with David Peterson, was seen as a stalking horse for the anti-McGuinty faction in the party. But that was never my motive; I supported Alvin (or “ambassador,” as I now call him, because he later became our envoy to the Dominican Republic) with a pure heart. I just didn’t want to see him isolated. The entire Toronto Centre delegation voluntarily joined me in supporting Alvin, fully aware of the risk. In the end, Curling lost the presidential race to Greg Sorbara, and McGuinty easily won his leadership review vote.
* * *
The culmination of my time in opposition was, of course, the 2003 election campaign. Some elections are more fun than others, and this one was fun, because we could see we were winning. I was on the road a lot during that campaign, helping out in other ridings because mine was seen as safe. Most enjoyably, I stalked Ernie Eves at many of his campaign events. I remember one day driving to an event with Andrew Steele, a young gun who was working with Bob Lopinski in the opposition leader’s office. I hope I never forget the very moment I was driving us along Highway 403 just past Wayne Gretzky Parkway when Steele looked up from his BlackBerry and over at me and told me sternly: “You are not allowed to crash the car when I tell you this, but you should know that a Tory operative has just called McGuinty an ‘evil reptilian kitten-eater from another planet.’” I was laughing so hard that I had to pull over the car. We finished the drive to London but never made it to the Eves event that day. The campaign head office quite rightly told us to turn back because the
re was nothing we could say that would top that.
Besides his campaign staffers’ gaffes, Eves was also hurt by his own drab performances, notwithstanding his natty appearance. (I once compared him to an aging Sea King helicopter: “For every hour of serviceable duty, he needs four hours of primping.”) But the real key to the Liberal victory in the 2003 election is that we presented ourselves as a party that was ready to govern. Unlike in 1999, we had a hefty platform that comprised seven booklets and was fully costed out. The ideas in it were (almost) all backed up by expert opinions. Much of the credit for this goes to McGuinty’s policy guy, Gerald Butts. (I have to take double or triple credit because I sometimes get left out of the stories about Butts’s ascent.) I had some input in the writing of the platform, especially in the sections on auto insurance, health care, and GTA gridlock. But I was not heavily involved in platform-making. My strengths were applied more on the political and operational side.
A few days before the October 2 vote, I hosted the wrap-up leader’s rally at Jarvis Collegiate in my riding. (McGuinty’s campaign team had confidence in me to fill the hall with a supportive crowd in addition to the throngs of supporters who travelled in from across the GTA, and the location was handy for the press.) It was a very loud event, with lots of cheering and placard-waving. I introduced the leader and said: “It won’t be long now.” Meaning, we were going to win it. Indeed, we did — resoundingly, with seventy-two seats to just twenty-four for the Conservatives and seven for the NDP. My victory party was in an old warehouse space off Yonge Street, just behind the Sutton Place Hotel. I also spoke at a GTA-wide Liberal victory party at the Masonic Temple a few blocks away on Yonge (also in my riding). I don’t remember much of what I said. I was pretty amped up. My life was about to change, dramatically. Was it a good or bad omen that two men wanted to sleep with me that night?
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