Enter Mayor Chow

I started working at Toronto City Hall in the office of Councillor Vaughan for a student placement. I had wanted to be placed with NDP leader Jack Layton's office, but was told that spot had already been filled (-shakes fist-). Still, for my burgeoning interest in policy making, the chance to work in a political office was exciting to me. It was the waning years of the Miller administration, during the G20 summit in Toronto, and I was much too junior to understand the power that existed on the 2nd Floor of City Hall, let along the ability of this office to impact policy.

When Rob Ford was elected Mayor (and naive me, thinking there was no way that could ever happen after he lost every vote on the Council floor 44-1) his first promise was to slash Councillor budgets. As the youngest and least tenured staffer in Adam's office, it made sense that my 2 years was coming to an end. I managed to snag a last second job with Councillor Layton (serendipitously) and thus began my 12 years alongside one of the hardest working politicians I have ever met. Some people just say that about people they work with: I don't.

In fact, my opinion of most elected officials is that they are not often representative of the best of us. They are just charismatic figureheads with a machine of intelligent, hard working people behind them providing them with the knowledge base required to perform their role, and those hard working staff doing so with very little recognition. I can recognize elected officials who pour their whole being into the role, understanding that the role of a representative for those who chose you must be taken seriously and not used for personal gain alone. However, this opinion does not stand in the way of my understanding of the power dynamics in political circles, and how this power is wielded in City Hall.

So yes, Rob Ford is now Mayor (and I viewed him as hard working, albeit substantially flawed and unprepared to deal with the role of Mayor) and those were some difficult years for a young, bright-eyed policy maker with designs on wanting to improve City services for Toronto residents. Everything was designed to slash, burn and sell. I learned quickly what it meant to starve-the-beast as the City's treasury was 'unburdened' of its reserves for misguided tax stabilization. And then came Rob's personal troubles and health issues which derailed his political ambitions.

I had already known Olivia Chow (she was my bosses' step-mom, married to Jack) and I had volunteered on her previous campaigns for MP. When she entered the race for Mayor in 2014 I was very hopeful. Surely the pendulum will swing back in a progressive way. Ford and the conservative bloc had their chance, I thought it had performed poorly, but this again exposed my youthful inability to see outside the walls at City Hall. The campaign turned out to be a frustrating one, and at dinner one evening after a tough performance at a debate, Olivia joined us (Layton's office) to ask us what we thought was going wrong. My co-worker and I felt strongly that the campaign team wasn't letting OC, be OC. Too much was scripted and her message didn't feel like it was coming from the heart, despite a campaign centred on compassion. Tory would win and begin two more terms of 'the right' controlling the narrative at Council.

After 4 years of Ford, 8 years of Tory, and a 3rd Tory election by another landslide, substantial changes to Council structure putting a significant strain on Councillors (and especially those who put a lot of themselves into the job) you could understand if progressives at Council were becoming exhausted. When Mike decided to not run for re-election, I could hardly fault him. We worked hard for over a decade together and led some significant initiatives, pushing back against administrations we felt were not making decisions in the best interests of the City and often with success. But we were stuck. How can we continue to do this with no real chance to make the type of changes needed, if the Mayor's office would stand against it, and continually kick the can down the road on important policy matters.

Then like his predecessor, personal troubles derailed Tory's run as Mayor. His resignation signalled that perhaps change was in the cards. The progressive candidates for Mayor avoided jumping into the race once Olivia made it known she would run, and it was only a late endorsement from Tory which helped move the splintered-right vote toward a single candidate. However, Olivia ran a campaign with people behind her who knew her and her strengths best. A front-runner from the beginning, this time OC and her team made no mistakes and ushered her supporters to the advance vote to seal that pick in. Finally, after my entire career, a progressive Mayor was coming back to City Hall.

Except I didn't work there anymore. When Mike left, I took some advice to try and broaden my policy making background, and those I was close with at City Hall told me there would always be a spot, or role for me on the 2nd Floor. I joined StrategyCorp as a Manager on the Land Development team, and to apply my vast knowledge of City Hall and it's processes to other projects in the firm's portfolio.

Professionally, it was a slight boon to see Mayor Chow elected. Who knows how to talk to progressives? Will they even be fair? They are going to run the City into an ideological hole! These a sampling of the questions I received from various people in my work, all of which I calmly tried to explain that Olivia and her team is experienced and pragmatic. They know the difference between being in power, and ruling strictly from an ideological perspective. You always have an eye to the next election, this is what helps you to determine the timing of new policy and the substance of announcements. You also spend the time you are sitting in that office at City Hall to grow your base. Olivia and her team have done tremendous work to shed the 'doomsday' labels applied by opposition voices, even bringing her most obvious critic, Doug Ford, to her side. Her approach to Council being inclusive, has made many votes during her term sail through Council. Her opposition is limited to smaller groups of Councillors who do not seem to be able to organize in the way 'the left' did against previous administrations. It seems the Chow administration's most difficult files will be those external to City Hall, and the ability of her team to anticipate and strike a position which keeps her progressive base happy, expand on that base, and not provide her opposition fuel for their currently small fire, will be important to maintain that level of support inside City Hall.

It has been an impressive start for Mayor Chow to many observers, and I will spill countless words over an infinite number of paragraphs as I write about the action at City Hall in the year ahead, much of it focused on Mayor Chow's performance as the 'Strong' Mayor of Toronto their team's approach on major policies. And it is an exciting time at City Hall: the 2025 budget cycle is about to begin, a crackdown on motorists blocking traffic was just announced, and policies to get traffic moving are actually working. There is much to review and discuss, but I wanted to end this entry by confessing that it stings just a little bit to have organized and worked on failed policy change after failed policy change, continually voted against by Mayor Tory's Budget Committee members, and now with a significant opportunity to make real change, I am left working outside the system. I am not a real believer in a higher power (except the baseball gods), but it does feel like the universe restoring a bit of balance for getting the job with Layton originally!