Unconventional Candour

by George Smitherman

  The penny dropped for me in March 2017 in a conversation with my dear friend Pam McConnell, the long time Toronto city councillor. Despite our partisan differences, she had been a comrade in arms since we met through Barbara Hall in 1994, and we worked seamlessly together when I became an MPP and represented the same area. McConnell invited me to lunch to talk about our respective futures. She told me she was not going to stand for re-election and encouraged me to run for her council seat in the 2018 municipal election, with her endorsement. (Tragically, she died a few months later.) Now I had a place to land, and it would be political mecca.

  But then in September 2017 Glen Murray, the Liberal MPP and cabinet minister who represented my old riding, resigned unexpectedly from the Legislature and created another opening. I was very tempted to run in his place. At the same time, I realized my candidacy would not be well received by the Liberal hierarchy at Queen’s Park and my prospects for being appointed to cabinet would be slim.

  There was no direct communication between me and Premier Kathleen Wynne. But I was told by her surrogates that I would be “big-footed” if I dared to run for that Liberal nomination in Toronto Centre. That is, the premier would bypass the nomination process by appointing another candidate in the riding. The Liberal Party even changed its rules to allow a leader to use his or her appointment power to derail a “controversial” candidate. (This will henceforth be known as the “Smitherman clause” in the Liberal rulebook.) No one had the courage or the courtesy to confront me directly on these matters. But I nonetheless got the message loud and clear.

  Wynne had other ideas for the nomination in Toronto Centre, once a safe Liberal seat. She reached out to city councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam, former mayor David Miller, and former city planner Jennifer Keesmat. All three turned her down. The eventual nominee was David Morris, a policy adviser in the provincial ministry of health. He lost the riding to Suze Morrison, the NDP candidate, by almost twelve thousand votes.

  Would I have done better, given my strong election team and deep roots in the riding? The margin would have been less, but it would be foolish to say I would have won the riding, given the province-wide swing against the Liberals. So in a sense Wynne did me a favour by opposing my candidacy. But I don’t take any pleasure in this. And I took no delight in watching the party I love get decimated in the 2018 election. If I feel any vindication at all, it is over the name of the election winner: Doug Ford. All those people who have scorned me for losing to his brother in 2010 now understand that the Fords are not so easy to campaign against.

  One last thought on the provincial election: It need not have been such a debacle for the Liberals. Kathleen Wynne gave Dalton McGuinty a shove out the door in 2013, but she was not smart enough to see that it was time for her to go five years later. Instead, she convinced herself that she was the messiah. She won unexpectedly in 2014 by running to the left of the NDP, and she thought that formula would work again in 2018. But it didn’t, because by 2018 she was widely detested. This hatred sprang from cold places in the human heart — homophobia and misogyny. But that doesn’t mean it could be ignored. It is doubtlessly true that, with a different leader, the Liberals would have done better in 2018. Now the Liberal Party faces actual extinction, thanks to her stubborn refusal to leave office before the election.

  The Wynne government also made strategic errors in the run-up to the 2018 campaign. One was the constraint put on spending in the health sector. Wynne’s greatest strength as a politician was her relentless progressiveness. But in attempting to balance the books while raising spending in other areas (education, infrastructure, the environment), she squeezed the health sector, which led to complaints about “hallway medicine.” This undermined the Liberals’ reputation for delivering public services.

  The irony is that when I was health minister I kept the sector within budget — while improving services — with a variety of reforms, including accountability agreements with the hospitals. These same mechanisms were then used by Wynne to suppress spending on health care in spite of the demographic changes that were forcing demand up. She thus compromised the gains in quality of service (shorter wait times, including in emergency wards) that had been achieved in the McGuinty years.

  Another error was the sell-off of Hydro One, a cherished public agency. For progressives, this was the single most offensive piece of public policy during the Wynne years. Hydro One and its sister company, Ontario Power Generation, were symbols of “public power,” dating back more than a century to the time of Adam Beck. But Ed Clark, the former TD Bank head who became Wynne’s senior economic adviser, persuaded her to sell off a majority share of Hydro One to raise money for investments in infrastructure. She thus caused public confusion about the government’s agenda and provided an easy target for both opposition parties in the election campaign. They could attack the high executive salaries at the privatized Hydro One (Ford memorably labelled the CEO as the “six-million-dollar man”) and suggest that privatization was the cause of higher hydro rates (totally false, but the argument resonated nonetheless with the electorate).

  The last strategic error was the pre-election budget, which detoured from the track of a balanced budget and forecast six more years of deficits to pay for more social programs, including free daycare. Having spent five years bowing to the wishes of the bond-rating agencies and promising a balanced budget, the government had abruptly changed course. That left many Liberals, not to mention the general public, with their mouths agape. It also had the whiff of panic. In that respect, it was like the Peterson government’s promise in the middle of the 1990 election campaign to reduce the provincial sales tax: desperation on steroids.

  In the wake of all this, the 2018 campaign itself was almost an afterthought. The premier’s bus arrived on time at all the scheduled stops, but in places where the Liberal Party barely existed on the ground. And in the last week of the campaign, Wynne delivered a premature concession speech. That further confused Liberal-inclined voters. The result was a Liberal caucus reduced to just seven seats — a historic low. If Wynne had stepped down eighteen months earlier, the Liberals could have saved twenty-five to forty seats. In the post-campaign bloodletting, many Liberals were pointing fingers and asking questions like: why was David Herle (Wynne’s campaign chair) reportedly paid $70,000 a month to oversee this disaster?

  But my focus was on the upcoming 2018 municipal campaign.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Run Over by a Ford Again (Different Model)

  As previously mentioned, my political career took another turn when, in early 2017, my dear friend Pam McConnell invited me to lunch. Pam was the city councillor for Ward 28 on the east side of downtown, comprising about half of the riding I used to represent in the Ontario Legislature (Toronto Centre–Rosedale). I had no idea why Pam wanted to see me. But I had known her for decades and, as I have noted in chapter 3 and elsewhere, we had worked together successfully and shared many local priorities, notably the redevelopment of Regent Park.

  When I arrived for the meeting at a restaurant in the Eaton Centre on that March day in 2017, Pam hit me with a surprise: she told me she was in poor health and had decided not to stand for re-election, although she made it clear that she would have run if she could have. “It’s only fitting that you run in my place to finish the job we started together in Regent Park,” she said. I didn’t commit immediately to run in her place, but I certainly left her with that impression. “I am sad for you and also humbled that you would choose me as the person to carry on your legacy,” I replied.

  Pam’s pitch had come at a pivotal time for me. I was not enjoying the primary business relationship I was in, and I had already made the first $20,000 payment on a newly developed condo on Bloor Street in the ward. This purchase was made NOT with an eye to returning to politics. Rather, I had recognized that my friends, my doctor, my bank, and so much else were all on the east side of downtown and I wanted to move back there. That being said, I also knew that in my heart an
d mind I had never entirely ruled out a return to politics.

  What Pam did was give me licence to consider something that I had up until then pushed away. Pam also gave me some assurances that the New Democrats — with whom she was aligned — and her own team would abide by her wishes and support me because she had already discussed the matter with them and gained their support. In other words, I would be running with her blessing. (With hindsight, I should have gotten that in writing.)

  It was an offer that was too good to refuse. So I decided to take Pam up on it and run for city council, thereby imposing on my family the adjustments that come with moving and switching schools in Grades 3 and 4.

  I returned to politics better suited than ever, because I was humbled, informed, and inspired by my varied experiences — personal and business — since I had left the battlefield in 2010. My motto was “old and improved.” The fundamental things that drive me — my sense of the need to fight injustice, my passion for progress, and my independence — were still the same. What had changed was my perspective. Take public parks, for example. As a parent, I appreciate them much more. The same for public education. Also, I have a greater concern for the need for affordable housing and the importance of limiting public debt so that it will not be a burden on my kids’ backs.

  Of course, politics has changed, too, at least at the provincial and federal levels. Within political parties, the grassroots have atrophied and a lot of campaign work has been professionalized. Accordingly, power has shifted, with all the parties adopting structures that emphasize central control. The parties have evolved around the all-important “data,” and their emphasis has shifted from ground wars to air wars. There is a heavy reliance on ads (often negative), emails, and robocalls from centralized phone banks rather than on the door-to-door and street-corner engagement that are the hallmarks of grassroots politics.

  But at the municipal level, grassroots politics still exists. And I looked forward to re-engaging on the east side of Toronto’s downtown, where for more than a century the underprivileged and those just looking to make a fresh start have flocked in search of a community and have found it. I had been one of them. And I wanted to reconnect with the institutions there that are trying their best to help those in need face life’s toughest challenges — like the Fred Victor Mission and Dixon Hall, Central Neighbourhood House, the Good Shepherd, and the Harbour Light; Sound Times, St. Jude’s, Neighbourhood Information Post, Progress Place, 40 Oaks, the Christian Resource Centre, the Muslim Resource Centre, and so many others in between or not yet formed.

  During the most rewarding years of my life, I dedicated myself to the service of these people and places, and they gave me the space, comfort, and love to do it. They taught me lessons about building community that I took elsewhere, especially Regent Park’s community succession model, which simply but wisely proclaimed that as long as all the good jobs in the community are going to people from outside the community, the residents are screwed. There, focus was placed on educational achievement through Pathways, a national organization, rooted in Regent Park, that helps youth from low-income communities to graduate from high school and successfully transition into post-secondary education, training, or employment.

  So, running on that turf wasn’t a new experience for me. Nor was City Hall new to me, as I had been Mayor Barbara Hall’s chief of staff from 1994 to 1996. (That’s where I first met Pam McConnell.)

  Before formally launching my campaign, I first had to align my private life and work with my political ambition. That meant I had to move myself and my children from our house in Toronto’s west end to an apartment just north of Regent Park. (The condo on which I had made a down payment had not yet been built.) I had to place the kids in new schools and simplify my business activities to focus 100 percent on politics. As the sole income-earner in the family, I also had to survive for a while on less than we had become accustomed. Plus, I had just met Rolando in Cuba, so I was pursuing that relationship.

  Then, in the summer of 2017, Pam McConnell died. This changed the political landscape dramatically, although I was not fully aware of it at the time. First, Toronto City Council had to appoint a replacement to fill the vacancy for a year before the election that would come in October 2018. I didn’t put my own name forward for consideration for the appointment because I knew that one of the longstanding conditions was that potential nominees would have to commit not to run in 2018. (I lacked the audacity of Lucy Troisi, a former civil servant, who lied to everybody and said she wouldn’t run and then ran anyway. But more about that later.)

  There were thirty-one applicants for the open seat. Troisi won on the second ballot, mostly with the support of the right wing of council.

  As the interim councillor, Troisi made a name for herself by, among other things, wildly opposing the establishment of a daycare centre in an under-used Victorian-era home in Cabbagetown, a constantly gentrifying part of the ward. The daycare was of industrial scale — up to eighty-two kids, with eighteen staff — and the proposal sharply split the community. Some residents called the proposed daycare centre an “outrage,” “frankly ludicrous,” and “completely incongruent” with the neighbourhood. Others were in favour of it, either because they had young children of their own or because they were embarrassed by the reaction of their neighbours.

  Troisi sided with the antis. “The protection of this delicate neighbourhood is imperative,” she said in opposing the daycare centre. The committee of adjustment, which had the final word, sided with her and killed the project.

  Lucy emerged as a hero to some. But a more experienced councillor would have managed the scale of the project and the process without having Cabbagetown residents come off looking like jackass NIMBYs opposed to a daycare centre.

  Enjoying the rapturous love created by taking stark positions favouring embattled constituents, Troisi moved on to oppose the expansion of services for intravenous drug users. To be sure, there were already five safe-injection sites in the ward, more than anywhere else in the city or in Canada. But Troisi’s call for a moratorium in the ward contributed to opposition to the opening of badly needed services in other parts of the city, such as Parkdale.

  Troisi took her moratorium message to all the affluent doors in the ward, but concerns of many other residents were ignored, and I saw problems in TCHC* communities that reflected neglect on her watch. If it had been just me against her in the eventual vote, I would have tagged her as “Lyin’ Lucy” (because of her broken promise not to run) and won the election.

  However, events conspired against me. First, my campaign was slow to get off the ground. That’s because in the early months of 2018 I was distracted by my efforts to exit a business, sell my house, and get Rolando, my new husband, back to Canada on a permanent basis. (After we married in December 2017, Rolando had to return to Cuba while we got his immigration paperwork sorted out, which required multiple meetings with lawyers.) And then there was my disastrous honeymoon with the kids in China, which I recounted in chapter 11. Suffice it to say that campaign mechanics took a back seat to these personal affairs.

  To a certain extent, this was not a big problem for me, because the city has very strict rules limiting campaigns. Candidates are not allowed to raise or spend money until May 1 of the election year. They aren’t even allowed to put up a sign until late September. Of course, these rules are designed to favour incumbents, who are permitted to keep sending mailers to their constituents and pad their name recognition. But name recognition was not an issue for me.

  I did, however, have a problem with data — a crucial element in election campaigns today. My database from my old riding was eight years out of date. In an urban riding, with a high turnover in residents, that made it virtually useless. And I did not get much help from Bill Morneau, the federal finance minister and Liberal MP whose Toronto Centre riding included my ward. As for help from the provincial Liberals in the riding: my former machine was seriously diminished after Glen Murray exited in
the summer of 2017 to run an environmentalist group, and Premier Kathleen Wynne had thought it best to keep the seat vacant.

  I couldn’t even get Pam McConnell’s data. I asked Pam’s daughter, Heather Ann, for it. “I’ll see what I can do,” she said. She never got back to me on that.

  Undeterred, I forged ahead and formally launched my campaign in late June of 2018 with an event in Regent Park. Heather Ann McConnell — accompanied by her father, Jim — spoke at the event and teared up while noting that my chosen campaign colour was yellow, the same as Pam’s. “I want to say how honoured we are to have George run under the yellow banner, which was both my mom’s favourite colour and the colour that she chose to run under,” she said. “For George to honour the legacy of my mother is very important to us.”

  At this point in the campaign, I was very confident. I had seen Lucy Troisi in operation, and I thought I could easily beat her by rebuilding my data door-to-door.

  My campaign team for the 2018 Toronto municipal election.

  Then, on July 25, Premier Doug Ford turned the election upside down. Out of the blue — there was no prior warning, unless you count a Toronto Sun column — Ford announced he was introducing legislation to cut Toronto City Council almost in half, from forty-seven members to just twenty-five. And he planned to implement this change immediately, for an election that had already begun and had just eighty-nine days left. In practical terms, this was head-shakingly ludicrous. It showed Ford lacked respect for our democratic traditions.

  I was not reflexively opposed to the downsizing of council. I saw it as facilitating more focused decision-making at city hall; there would be fewer speeches and more action. I also thought it could lead to a much more robust citizen involvement in municipal politics, because it would drive decision-making down to the local level, with community councils made up of a mix of politicians and appointed citizens. (Indeed, that was an idea I had favoured in my mayoral campaign.) What I did oppose was the thuggish way that Ford imposed the downsized council on the city in the middle of an election campaign.