Unconventional Candour

by George Smitherman

  I could hardly get any endorsements from city councillors, even though I met — mostly amicably — with all of them (except for the three I was running against). All the lefty councillors despised Ford, but some of them gravitated toward Pantalone, because of his NDP label, and most others just sat on the sidelines, a position the lack of municipal political parties largely encourages. And by the time those on the sidelines realized it had become a two-man race, they had already figured out Ford was going to win and decided it was not in their interests to try to stem that tide by backing me. Thus, my efforts to build a progressive coalition against Ford were frustrated. At one point, in desperation, I even reached out to Miller himself. But he never returned my call, which I can’t exactly fault him for even though I personally bailed him out on a huge issue (funding for new streetcars). In the end, I was endorsed only by Kyle Rae and Pam McConnell (my seat-mates in Toronto Centre), Joe Mihevc (St. Paul’s), and Chin Lee (Scarborough–Rouge River), although Adam Vaughan (Trinity-Spadina) and a few others provided some help behind the scenes.

  * * *

  After the election, the lefty councillors who backed Pantalone tried to make themselves feel better by saying his vote would not have gone to me anyway. But that was not the real issue. Rather, it was that even though Pantalone had zero chance of winning, his presence in the race prevented me from engaging in a head-to-head showdown with Ford. It was a selfish act by Pantalone, a man who made a life in Toronto politics mostly by messing around at Exhibition Place and keeping that place stuck in the 1980s.

  If there was a failure in my campaign, it was that I did not go after Ford more on character issues and at every turn. I should have torched the landscape around him by constantly raising the issue of his public drunkenness, his racist and homophobic remarks, and his unsuitability for the mayoralty. Instead, I mostly pulled my punches and tried instead to look statesmanlike while depending on faint hope that Ford’s unsuitability would shine through.

  One exception to this rule occurred at an all-candidates meeting organ-ized by the Toronto Real Estate Board (TREB). This looked like a trap for me, given the sponsors. Don’t get me wrong; I know many realtors and respect them. But as a group they can be pretty self-serving. And Ford had promised to eliminate the city’s land transfer tax (made possible by the McGuinty government through the City of Toronto Act). Elimination of that tax, which brings hundreds of millions of dollars a year into the city treasury, would wreak havoc on municipal services. It wasn’t doable, and, indeed, Ford never did it. But the realtors loved the idea.

  The TREB debate was held at that dreadful, low-ceiling convention barn that the Fords liked to frequent out on Dixon Road — the one where they hosted Prime Minister Stephen Harper (fittingly) for his last public event in the 2015 federal election. The audience this time was a single-issue advocacy group charged up for a particular candidate (Ford). To make it even worse for me, the organizers hired John Oakley, the small-time radio hotline host and Ford surrogate, as the emcee. I threatened not to attend, but TREB chair Richard Silver, who just happened to be my own personal realtor and an ally in AIDS fundraising, begged me to do it. I agreed for his sake. And since I knew it was pointless for me to try to woo the audience, I used the platform to set Ford on fire by recalling some of his most repulsive homophobic utterances and actions. (He had called gays “disgusting” and consistently voted against AIDS prevention measures.) Ford took the bait, and after the event he was swarmed by reporters questioning him on his views. Thrown off script, he looked very uncomfortable, his face dripping with sweat. In retrospect, I should have done it to him more often.

  And with hindsight, Ford’s drug use was another obvious angle of attack for me. We did not know the full extent of it at the time, but there were rumours. And during the campaign, someone released a bizarre audiotape of Ford seeming to give advice to somebody on where to buy OxyContin on the street. The story should have been very damaging to Ford. But his team successfully turned the narrative around by focusing the spotlight on me. They dishonestly got the guy featured in the audiotape, who happened to be gay (and obviously very vulnerable), to say, “Oh yeah, I used party drugs with George Smitherman.” I didn’t know this person, and what he said was absolutely untrue. Nonetheless, Newstalk 1010 and the other hotline radio stations accepted his story at face value. Fake news carried the day.

  In my earlier life, as I mentioned, I did use party drugs. I openly acknowledged this without prompting when I was minister of health in 2006 and was speaking at the Courage to Come Back Awards Ceremony, an annual event staged by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) to honour those who have beaten their own addictions and mental health challenges. I was trying to show empathy for the honorees. But my well-meaning admission of past drug use made it very tough for me to fight back against the Fords’ thuggish tactics, because Ford’s media cheerleaders would say his behaviour and mine were comparable. The irony, of course, is that Rob Ford dishonored Toronto by partying recklessly while he was in office and fessed up to it only after the smoking gun was discovered still smoking.

  I describe these kinds of tactics as thuggish for good reason. I have no respect for Doug Ford (now premier) and Nick Kouvalis, who ran Rob’s campaign. They are the lowest of the low. It was so telling that after the campaign the firefighters’ union hired Kouvalis to forestall the cuts to fire halls implemented by Mayor Rob Ford — the candidate Kouvalis had helped to elect. And I laugh aloud when I think back to a lunch I had with Bonnie Crombie, who wanted to sound me out on whether she should hire Kouvalis to run her Mississauga mayoral campaign in 2014. In customary fashion, I let her know that I was the wrong person to ask. I said my personal view is that Kouvalis is a person who gets off on dividing people. I was and continue to be shocked that John Tory reduced himself to this level by hiring Kouvalis to run his 2014 mayoral campaign. Ironically, Tory, who thrives on being all things to all people, also hired Tom Allison, a Liberal Party contemporary who was my first campaign manager, one-time housemate, and someone with whom I shared progressive values.

  Kouvalis went on to work for Kellie Leitch’s Conservative leadership run in 2016–17, which featured an assault on immigrants seemingly inspired by Donald Trump. Not only did she promise to subject new immigrants to a “Canadian values” test, but she also suggested that the immigrants would be required to pay for the test themselves. Kouvalis must have concluded that, if making Mexicans pay for a wall was popular, then getting immigrants to pay for her proposed screening tool would also be popular.

  As for Doug Ford, I cringe when I see him describing himself as Rob’s best friend. In his book, Ford Nation, Doug says he was “stunned” when Rob finally admitted to smoking crack cocaine. As Rob’s brother, best friend, work colleague, and neighbour, how is it possible that Doug was unaware of his brother’s reckless behaviour? And why didn’t Doug intervene on behalf of both his family and the city?

  Another person from the Ford campaign should be noted: Mark Towhey, the former army officer who went on to become Ford’s chief of staff in the mayor’s office. Towhey was Ford’s enabler-in-chief. During the campaign debates, he would sit in the front row like a security blanket, always within reach to pacify the candidate. On several occasions, he even heckled me if I laid a glove on his boy. I was just so sick when I watched Towhey turn on Ford years later, after the crack cocaine video emerged. The media fell for it and made Towhey out to be some kind of hero for holding out against the dark side for as long as he could. Let’s face the fact that Towhey was a key enabler and at best failed to respond to a series of obvious warning signs about Ford’s erratic behaviour until near the very end.

  * * *

  Back to the campaign. In mid-August came what appeared to be a game-changer: a news story in the Toronto Sun, of all places, reporting that Ford had been arrested in Miami a decade earlier on charges of DUI and possession of marijuana. Confronted by the Sun, Ford at first tried to deny it, which only made him look worse. “W
hen the joint story hit, I thought Rob was finished,” says Doug Ford in his book. “I guess the media thought so, too. At our campaign office, the telephone lines were lighting up like a Christmas tree.” But soon after the Sun’s story, an Ipsos Reid poll showed Ford still had a commanding lead over me, 32 percent to 21 percent. It appeared that Ford, like Trump six years later, was immune to negative publicity. In fact, as with Trump, damaging press may have helped him by reinforcing his campaign’s narrative, which was that the attacks on Ford were coming from the very people who were trying to keep the gravy train rolling.

  For my part I remember the street corner I was standing on in Kensington Market when I got tipped off the night before about the story. A friend had it on good authority that the Sun was running with the Florida arrest and he was breathless in anticipation that it would help me. I was blasé in my response because by this late date in the campaign I was convinced that the public wasn’t concerned about the personal issues. The voters just wanted their vehicle registration tax money back and enjoyed a little entertainment along the way.

  Was my sexual orientation an issue in the campaign? In at least three ethno-cultural communities, there were efforts to make it one. In the Bengali community, a picture of Christopher and me holding hands was posted on neighbourhood hydro poles. And on radio stations targeting the Tamil and Chinese communities, there were advertising spots that drew attention to my sexuality. For example, in an ad that aired on the Tamil radio station, one person asked another whom they would be voting for. “What kind of question is this?” said the other. “I am Tamil. We have a religion and culture. Take Rob Ford, for example. His wife is a woman.” Ironically, no politician had spent more time in the Tamil and Bengali communities than me, seemingly all for nothing.

  During the campaign, we did not make a big deal about incidents like this because my team felt it would only draw unwanted attention to my sexual orientation. This decision reflected a certain insecurity within my campaign. Even though I was the most well-known “out” politician in Canada at the time, some of my advisers did not want me to be photographed with Christopher by my side. Others counselled me against referring to him as “my husband.” And I myself did not speak up as loudly as I should have against the homophobia that I had experienced. Kathleen Wynne did that much more effectively after she became premier.

  My guiding principle of politics, informed by my own experience both as a minority and as a champion of the Charter of Rights, is that we are all in this together. Early in my political career I once spoke to a gathering at the Masjid mosque in my riding. I acknowledged they might have some issues with my sexual orientation. “But in a place like Toronto,” I said, “if we all wake up in the morning focused on our differences rather than on the things we have in common, we’re ruined. So I expect you to treat me with respect and, in turn, if your community is under attack, I will stand beside you.” I received a warm reception, and in the days following 9/11 I spoke up quickly when ignorant people initiated attacks on Muslims. (Because the assailants were so ignorant, they targeted Sikhs and other minority communities, too.)

  During the campaign Salma Zahid, now an MP, and Harpreet Hansra, two of my most loyal and trusted team members, organized a giant Iftar dinner at my Scarborough campaign office. It filled me with pride to know that my politics included hundreds of Muslims praying and then celebrating the daily breaking of the fast as guests in my house.

  The lowest point in the campaign (aside from losing) involved my very estranged older brother Art, who was manipulated into endorsing Ford. Naturally the Toronto Sun put Art on its front page. I still remember the first time I saw his mug staring at me from a newspaper box as I arrived for a meeting on the Danforth. My first instinct was to kick the newspaper box over, but I somehow restrained myself. Art ran in 2010 as a candidate for council in a North York ward. (He got a grand total of 268 votes and came fourth.) During the campaign, the Fords staged a “Fordfest” and invited any and all candidates who wanted to have their photos taken with Rob. My brother showed up. Doug Ford is no slouch; he tipped off the Sun.

  Whatever grief this might have meant for me is entirely secondary to the pain that it caused my mother. I called her that day, and she was crying on the phone. “I am so sorry for this,” she said. “I wish I knew how to stop it.” I think it is not well enough understood just how tough it is to be the family member of a politician, especially if the politician has a high public profile. This was one of many days when my mother paid a steep price for my participation in public life, but I know that there were many moments of joy and pride as well.

  Later that day, Christopher broke the ice as only he could and drew a belly laugh from me when he critiqued the shirt my brother was wearing in the photo on the front of the Sun. Sometime earlier, we had seen a promo for the CFTO evening news featuring Ken Shaw wearing a casual item from his closet, which he must have kept for nostalgic purposes. It was out of place for Ken, who usually looks so dapper. Thereafter, whenever we saw a really retro item of clothing, we would say it looked like a piece from the Ken Shaw collection.

  * * *

  After Labour Day, the mayoral campaigns ramped up — or, at least, this is the conventional wisdom. By then I had attended dozens of all-candidates meetings and worked my butt off all summer; yet we had nothing to show for it. Ever want a lesson in humiliation and rejection? Try soliciting interest from people while they are jostling for souvlaki at the Taste of Danforth.

  My campaign manager, Bruce Davis, and I had a long talk, and we agreed that the strategy of offering a balance of positions and sometimes skewing to the right (lest Ford open up too much distance between him and me) was not working. So I returned to my Liberal roots and began taking more progressive stands. I also got some key endorsements from several mainstream Conservatives who could not abide Ford: Isabel Bassett, Charles Harnick, and Dan Newman (all of whom had been ministers in Mike Harris’s cabinet), and Jaime Watt, a key Conservative strategist. None of it seemed to help. A Nanos Research poll on September 19 showed me trailing Ford by a staggering 24.5 percentage points.

  I soldiered on and got a small boost at the end of September when Sarah Thomson pulled out of the race and endorsed me. (I have referred to her as a flake, but I also consider her one of the most courageous retail campaigners I have witnessed.) But Pantalone and Rossi hung in there. It took Rossi until October 13 to leave the race — far too late to get his name off the ballot — and Pantalone stuck it through to the end.

  Still, momentum appeared to be shifting back to me near the end of the campaign. On October 18, with just one week to go, a Star–City TV poll showed the race was a dead heat, with Ford at 41 percent, me at 40 percent, and Pantalone at 16 percent. On October 19, in the last mayoral debate of the campaign, I made one last pitch for Pantalone’s votes by stressing my own “progressive values.” And on October 23, I was endorsed by David Crombie, a progressive former mayor who is still revered in much of the city. He joined another former mayor, John Sewell, who had endorsed me earlier. (Barbara Hall was prohibited in her role as head of the Ontario Human Rights Commission from issuing a formal endorsement of me.)

  On election day, I remember feeling a kind of serenity. Notwithstanding the late polls showing the race was tightening up, I knew I was going to lose. I remember killing time with Noble Chummar, a charismatic lawyer and law partner of David Peterson’s. “Sometimes the awards just aren’t proportionate to the effort,” he told me. True enough. The night ended very quickly, with Ford declared the winner just thirteen minutes after the polls closed. He beat me by almost 95,000 votes, 383,501 to 289,832. It is fitting that Pantalone’s vote represents Ford’s margin of victory over me, leaving at least some to believe he played the role of spoiler.

  Michael, reaching out at the end of my journey to be mayor of Toronto.

  “It will be written that I lost an election that was mine to win, and I accept that,” I said in my election night concession speech. “The only way
to survive, especially in politics, is to have no regrets and not spend a lot of time second-guessing. I won’t be spending a lot of time on regrets or second-guessing.”

  One footnote about election night: my campaign manager, Bruce Davis, barred Rocco Rossi from entrance to my would-be victory party. It was Bruce’s finest hour in the campaign!

  Did I think my political career was over that night? In politics, you never say never. But at the time I felt liberated. I had been a senior cabinet minister for six years, had allocated more than a quarter of a trillion dollars and experienced unrelenting pressure and media exposure. Now I no longer had to worry about being accosted while out doing errands. I didn’t have to take media calls at strange hours. I could go looking for a house to buy in neighbourhoods outside my riding. I also felt a sense of relief after a year-long campaign that was both physically exhausting and emotionally draining. After a hundred all-candidates meetings with the likes of Ford and Rossi, I may have been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. There were times when the campaign felt like a death sentence that could not be carried out quickly enough, like trying to campaign at events such as Canada Day at Downsview Park or Taste of the Danforth rather than just attending them for fun.