Unconventional Candour

by George Smitherman

  We had policies by the bucketful, all costed out. My platform called for holding property-tax increases to the inflation rate; building a subway (not LRT) extension to Scarborough, largely utilizing the RT route; cutting the vehicle registration tax by one-third; freezing hiring at city hall to eliminate thirteen hundred jobs through attrition; contracting out some city services, including (possibly) garbage collection, ski hills, and even bus routes; keeping Toronto Hydro in public hands; investing in parks, recreation programs, and the arts; making transit free for seniors during off-peak hours; and much more. The irony is that a comprehensive plan came across as an incremental approach in contrast to a slogan that promised a revolution. I realized a little too slowly that when people asked me for my vision, what they really wanted was a slogan.

  I also had government experience by the bucketful, especially compared to my opponents. Experience can be a two-edged sword, however. It can make a candidate look ready to govern, but it can also become the baggage that drags a candidate down. Ask Hillary Clinton, whose resumé made her one of the most qualified candidates ever to run for president but who lost to a buffoon with no government experience at all but a great slogan.

  Still, in the early days of the campaign I was feeling confident. We were having good success at fundraising and, of course, the polls showed me way ahead. Wherever I went, people were referring to me as “the next mayor.” The assumption was that I was a shoo-in for the job. Even Miller’s staff, no supporters of mine, were heard saying that.

  * * *

  Just as the mayoral campaign was getting rolling in early February, my world was turned upside down by the arrival on short notice of a sixteen-month-old boy. The adoption process had been in the works for well over a year, but when it came, it came fast. Because Michael bonded so readily, the familiarization process proceeded quickly and gave us just a few days to prepare. Christopher and I went out to Vancouver for three nights to see some of the Winter Olympics and came back home to find our lives had changed dramatically.

  The new normal was a house filled with energy and activity, with Michael taking full advantage of expansive and slippery polished linoleum floors to perfect his speedy sidesaddle crawling.

  Christopher took a leave from his position at Lindt to stay home with Michael. In a dedicated way, he took to narrowing some of the developmental gaps that Michael was experiencing, especially in terms of solid-food consumption. Those first few nights after taking Michael off formula were more than enough to test our patience and make us question our capability as parents. That particular self-doubt has never left me.

  The first-ever picture of me and Michael, within minutes of our meeting. February 2010.

  Our little Michael was born premature and after a tough experience in the womb. With a month in the loving care of the nurses at Humber River Hospital, Michael progressed to living in a loving environment with an extended foster family from Scarborough to Whitby. Despite his early hardships, he showed no inability to connect, and within seconds on our first visit he climbed into my lap. Our bond has been unbroken since.

  The wonder of this little boy is a credit to Christopher’s patient nurturing during those earliest days. And because I was running in the mayoral election, the job was shouldered mainly by him, with an incredible assist from Barbara Hall. (By then she was head of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, so she was prohibited from campaigning for me.) The Riverdale farm and the backyard pool at Barbara’s helped to idle a hot summer away.

  The G20 protests in 2010 had their start at Allan Gardens in our neighbourhood, and Michael, in his red stroller, and Christopher must have been quite imposing to have provoked the attention of Toronto Police, who conducted a hurried and, in Christopher’s eyes, terrifying search, only to conclude that the only bombs being packed in the stroller were organic.

  Michael and Christopher were regular attendees at my mayoral campaign office. But because the adoption had not been finalized, we weren’t able to show Michael to the world. Many commented after seeing Michael on election night that I might have won if only I had introduced him to the campaign earlier. Fact is that just a week before the election, our family was formalized with a lovely private ceremony at the 311 Jarvis Street Family Court.

  Michael’s adoption ceremony at the 311 Jarvis courthouse, with family, in October 2010. A week later, I lost the Toronto mayoral election to Rob Ford.

  Watching Michael develop was far more interesting to me than running for mayor. With Michael’s arrival, the election quickly took second place on my priority list. I recall such great delight in holding Michael aloft and looking out the window of our sixteenth-floor condo on Carlton Street down upon Maple Leaf Gardens and teaching him to say Toronto.

  This is not to say that I mailed in the mayoral campaign. I worked hard at it and attended over one hundred all-candidates meetings and countless other events. But there were problems within my campaign that never got resolved. The campaign team — a construct of prominent Liberals, Conservatives, and New Democrats — looked impressive but failed to gel. As a result, the campaign lacked strategic rigour. The chair was John Webster, a prominent Liberal who had run campaigns for Paul Martin, John Turner, and David Peterson. I was looking for a big gun to be in charge, and John was definitely a big gun. But as a senior bank executive, he was a distracted big gun and took little interest in the campaign. For campaign manager, I recruited Jeff Bangs, a Conservative who had been principal secretary to Ernie Eves when he was premier. Jeff and I did not hit it off and soon parted ways. I replaced him with Bruce Davis, a long-time Liberal acquaintance who had municipal experience from Mel Lastman’s successful 1997 mayoral campaign. I hoped that Bruce would help to develop a ward-based operation capable of seeding a storyline about our campaign. But Bruce also had a busy day job as chair of the Toronto District School Board, and important campaign tasks remained unaddressed. In retrospect, I think everybody believed I was going to run my own campaign, so nobody was motivated to take on the job. And there was no inherited infrastructure, especially if you shed your partisan identification.

  One area that gave rise to a lot of confidence was the fundraising component, headed up by dear friends like Pam Gutteridge, a skilled fundraiser and a woman who twice in my life helped to advance my career dramatically. After Tory dropped out of the race, Ralph Lean also joined the team. Lean is a Bay Street lawyer and Conservative who raises money in every mayoral campaign on one side or the other, depending which way the political wind is blowing. While the actual amount he brings in may vary, he is very skilled at dealing with the media. Accordingly, he got most of the credit for our fundraising success. But also highly effective was my own network, developed over the years. No person deserves more credit than the great Lawrence Bloomberg, who staked his very significant reputation in favour of my candidacy. We raised more than enough money to run the campaign and emerged with a surplus. Unfortunately, Toronto’s outdated campaign spending limit does not allow for a full-fledged campaign. There’s no room in the budget to buy TV advertising, for instance.

  Fundraising aside, we were weak at the strategic level, where data is analyzed and a communication plan developed to advance the campaign’s message. Not that the people involved were bad. In fact, the team included some very talented people: Gerald Butts, my first executive assistant, who was McGuinty’s principal secretary and did the same job in Ottawa for Justin Trudeau; Bob Penner, a political consultant who has worked on more than thirty-five election campaigns at home and abroad, mostly for the NDP in Canada; and Greg Lyle, a pollster with strong Conservative credentials. These were very smart people, but the construct of my campaign left nobody in charge and nobody accountable.

  Early in the campaign, we spent a ton of money on polling and focus groups, most of it to no avail. One focus group report in early February — from Jaime Watt and Navigator, a major political consulting firm — said my sexual orientation was unlikely to be an issue, which turned out not to be true. (More ab
out that later.) The report also urged me to embrace my “furious George” image. “George Smitherman should not run away from his perception as a bull in a china shop but instead embrace it as a unique strength for times when a tougher approach is required,” said the report. We largely ignored this advice. Instead, I tried to look like a statesman, not an insurgent. Maybe we went too far in that direction, but it would have been no easy task to outdo Mammoliti/Ford/Rossi on the outrage scale.

  There were also two ominous warnings in the Navigator report. First of all, my presumed association with the eHealth “scandal” was a problem. “Our [focus group] participants were not willing to give George Smitherman a pass on his involvement with eHealth Ontario and gave stern warnings that the issue would be a serious one for many come October [election day],” said the report. “They [saw] Smitherman as the original health minister who dodged a bullet and let another minister take the fall.” With hindsight, eHealth was to my campaign what emails were to Hillary Clinton’s — a stark reminder of a problematic past in a political environment where the prevailing sentiment was to throw the bums out.

  The second ominous note was that the voters were looking for other choices. “The electorate is largely unimpressed with the candidates and ideas already present in the race.” Of course, this was a month before Ford declared his candidacy.

  Still, I was well ahead in the race as winter turned to spring. Then, on March 25, a boulder was dropped into the campaign pond with the entry of Rob Ford into the race. Typical for Ford, he announced his candidacy on a radio hotline show. His campaign consisted mostly of a slogan (“Stop the gravy train”). When I first heard he might join the race, I wasn’t too worried. Ford seemed to be a bit of a joke candidate. He had been a city councillor for a decade and had a high profile, but for all the wrong reasons. He was on the losing end of too many forty-four-to-one votes on council. He had publicly insulted fellow councillors — calling one (a woman) a “waste of skin” and another (an Italian Canadian) a “Gino boy.” He had said outrageous things about immigrants and ethnic minorities. He had behaved disgracefully in public, once getting tossed from a Maple Leafs game for drunkenness. This was not a man fit for public office.

  What I — and most of my team — didn’t realize at the time was that Ford’s candidacy represented a northern version of the Tea Party. He had hit a nerve in that segment of the public that was “mad as hell and didn’t want to take it anymore,” to borrow the old movie line. It should not have been a surprise to me that this sentiment would catch hold in Canada. But we did not anticipate that Ford, of all people, would effectively harness that energy and sloganize it. During the campaign, people kept asking me: What’s your vision? What they really meant was: What’s your slogan? Mine was “For a Toronto that works again.” It lacked the punch and pithiness of “Stop the gravy train.” Ford’s slogan, when combined with his quirky habit of buying his own paperclips (instead of claiming office expenses as a councillor), gave his message an air of authenticity that his supporters could rally around.

  The first in a long string of mayoral campaign debates was held in Scarborough several days after Ford entered the race. There were six of us on the platform — Ford, Pantalone, Mammoliti, Rossi, Thomson, and me. It was a format that would be adopted in practically all the one hundred-plus debates that followed. It proved to be both a liability for me and a benefit for Ford. With so many candidates on stage, none of us got enough time to make our points. That was bad for me but good for Ford. He did not have to answer a lot of pointed questions and could get away with merely repeating his slogans. And I didn’t get enough opportunities to go after Ford directly. (For a point of reference, think of Donald Trump’s performance during debates in the Republican primaries, when there were seventeen other candidates. He could inject himself into the proceedings with a quip or a nasty aside and then fade into the background while the rest of the candidates tore strips off each other.) To change the dynamic, I kept pressing Ford for a one-on-one debate with me. Ford once committed to do it: he reneged within twenty-four hours. Even though we hired a man in a chicken suit to stalk his events in an effort to goad him into fulfilling that commitment, we got nowhere.

  At the first debate in March, Ford opened with a reference to his wife and kids, presumably to contrast himself with me. (He repeated this reference at all subsequent debates.) And he and Mammoliti echoed each other’s ultra-conservative views of the world. Ford said he would make “customer service” his top priority as mayor. That is, he would personally answer everyone’s phone call. (This is a promise he more or less kept, to the detriment of everything else.) And Rossi went after me on eHealth. “You certainly know how to spend money,” he said. “You don’t know how to save it.” It was a line he would repeat at virtually every debate. Meanwhile, I had about six minutes out of two hours to make my thoughtful and complicated case for a more responsible government and my credentials to deliver it.

  In these debates — and, indeed, during the whole campaign — I never found a mechanism to leverage my experience in government. The record was generally good. I had run the biggest government department in Canada (the Ontario Ministry of Health) for five years, had reduced wait times and doctor shortages, and had kept a lid on spending (especially on prescription drugs). But we didn’t campaign on the good stuff in my record. Instead, we were pilloried — unfairly, I think — for the bad stuff (notably, eHealth). As for Ford, he won praise just for being authentic. As much as some of us might be inclined to write off his lack of intellectual depth, nobody should doubt the value of authenticity for a politician’s message. After all, Ford had voted No on virtually every expenditure that came before city council.

  By mid-June, I sensed my goose was cooked. A Forum Research poll showed me still ahead in the race, but my support had slipped to 29 percent, and Ford was just behind at 26 percent. (Everyone else was below 20 percent.) Ford had momentum, which is crucial in politics. We knew this inside my campaign, but we never quite got around to answering the question of how to deal with the new dynamic. Indeed, instead of confronting Ford and his slogan head-on, we appeared to be falling in line with his austerity message. I wasn’t being insincere. I strongly believed that the city bureaucracy had become bloated under Mayor Miller and I said as much in November prior to my Board of Trade speech. But coming from me, that message was nuanced with new spending priorities and lacked authenticity, especially in light of eHealth’s elevation thanks to advertising. By the time we figured out that this approach wasn’t working, the ballot box question (“Who can best deliver change?”) had already been framed.

  Furthermore, it was difficult for me to get an arm free to attack the new front-runner (Ford) when I was still under attack myself from the rest of the pack (Rossi, Pantalone, Mammoliti, and to a lesser extent Thomson) because I stood in their path. We fell back on the same strategy deployed unsuccessfully against Trump in the U.S. presidential race: “faint hope.” That is, we told ourselves that the next time Ford said something really stupid that would be the straw that broke the camel’s back and people would realize he was unfit to be mayor. And it wasn’t just my campaign that believed this. Media commentators were saying the same thing. It was yet another example of conventional wisdom being totally wrong. The elites were a little slow to realize that a lot of people were just happy that politics was entertaining for once.

  On July 5, Mammoliti pulled out of the race. His support was in the single digits (white men who wanted a red-light district, I suppose). But it drifted to Ford and gave him another boost. Momentum remained on Ford’s side. So in mid-July my campaign team had a strategy session at Bruce Davis’s house in Mimico. At this time, our internal polling still showed it was a close race, but there were warning signs. For example, I was supported by just 26 percent of Liberal voters. A background document prepared by Davis for the meeting described the political landscape in bleak terms: “Ford is riding an insurgent wave of discontent over government spending abuses. If
the ballot question becomes, ‘Who can best control spending?’ he could win.… His anti-spending message is clearly resonating with voters.… An additional challenge for a centrist candidate is whether to grow by tacking to the right or the left. This tacking question has more or less divided the campaign strategy group and has left us lurching from week to week, issue to issue.”

  The document recommended a new narrative for the campaign: “Change for the better, with George being the only one who can do it.… We must stop being defensive about his experience because of eHealth and we must talk about his successes.” As for Ford, the document recommended: “We need to define Ford not as the conservative or frugal candidate but as the candidate who is unfit for office.… [But] our campaign should not be involved directly or indirectly with this line of attack.… We must attack Ford’s policies or lack thereof and the dumb things he has said by highlighting Ford in his own words. Do not attack his character.”

  Here were two fundamental issues that dogged my campaign that summer: whether to tack left or right, and whether to go directly after Ford. On the first, we continued a two-track approach, a bit left and a bit right, and ended up satisfying no one. For right-wing voters, it looked like a pale imitation of Ford. And for progressive-minded voters, I was betraying my roots. John Filion, the lefty city councillor, clearly thought I erred to the right. “George Smitherman had chased after Ford so far to the right that supporters of the left-wing candidate, Joe Pantalone, weren’t inclined to move to him,” writes Filion in his post-election book, The Only Average Guy.

  This is a convenient argument for progressives who want to let themselves off the hook of the 2010 election result by suggesting that I was running like some big, bad, right-wing bear. Which of course is nonsense. Yes, I called for restraint on spending, which the city desperately needed, and for holding the line on property taxes, which the electorate wanted. But my platform also included calls for more investment in transit, parks, and the arts. Given my history, I thought progressives would cut me more slack than they did. Most telling for me was when a close ally in the LGBTQ community with whom I had collaborated on the relisting of sex reassignment surgery told me she voted for Pantalone because he was a New Democrat, as she was. But party labels were only a part of the problem. I think what really bothered many progressive voters was that I was critical of David Miller. A lot of the mayor’s allies on council felt that any criticism of him was also a criticism of them. In other words, they took it personally.