Chris Selley: Olivia Chow’s goose is begging to be roasted

If there were a super-compelling candidate on the Oct. 26 mayoral ballot in Toronto, anywhere from the centre-left to what passes for the centre-right in municipal politics, Olivia Chow’s goose might well be cooked. Crispy skin, all the trimmings and a bottle of off-dry Riesling for the table.

The only contender is Brad Bradford, a city councillor with a likeability problem. I don’t really understand that myself: he’s not what you would call compelling, but nor is Chow and nor was John Tory or David Miller before her. But the polls show Bradford roughly 10 points behind Chow, even after nominal conservative Chris Alexander dropped out with around 10 per cent support in the polls.

That’s against a feckless mayor who isn’t solving easy problems and whose overarching purpose in the job, other than to have it, is very difficult to discern.

Competent caretaker mayors are better than many of the alternatives (loved you, Rob Ford, but you shouldn’t have been mayor in your condition). But caretaking isn’t really Chow’s brand — or, demonstrably, her strength — and Toronto needs to think far bigger.

(Admittedly, this is difficult when Queen’s Park can on a political whim just derail anything the city wants to do, or indeed has done. For all its governance problems, this is a city that’s 18 times more populous, and has 95 per cent less autonomy, than six Canadian provinces. If you want to attract top game-changing talent to the job, you at least have to offer them actual power. And you have to actually want to change the game.)

Among the notable things that have not improved under Chow’s leadership is public transit. There is no larger issue in Toronto politics; it throbs like an unlanced cyst. The Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) is like an avant-garde art installation of upsettingly easy-to-solve problems. Some could be solved simply by having people in charge of hour-to-hour operations who care and are held accountable. There is no reason except negligence and a desire for company on coffee breaks for the only two buses on a route at night to travel in a pair.

All of the progress made in recent years on the TTC toward cleanliness, punctuality, professionalism and general salubriousness — mostly under Ford and in Tory’s first term, under high-performing general manager Andy Byford — has been undone and then some. And that has nothing to do with the fact TTC vehicles become more and more like an unsupervised mental-health ward. Admittedly, that’s one of the more difficult problems to solve, but you can still aim to get that vehicle where it’s going on schedule, at regular intervals, and you don’t need massive change or Queen’s Park’s approval to do that.

To pick one example: the subway is absolutely plagued by “reduced speed zones.”  They add on average 15 minutes to a subway trip from Vaughan to Union Station — a trip officially scheduled to take a considerable 42 minutes to begin with. For a daily commuter, that’s two-and-a-half hours a week lost. This has been going on for ages.

Anyway, in a Wednesday-evening debate, during an impossibly cringey exchange with debate monitor Cynthia Mulligan of CityNews, Chow was forced to admit she doesn’t actually ride transit

Question from Mulligan: “Yes or no. … Do you ride public transit at least eight times a month?”

Chow: “Yes, on my streetcar … not recently, because since I am …”

Bradford chuckles, the crowd laughs. (Laughter is poison for politicians.)

Bradford: “Yes or no.”

Chow: “What was the question?”

Mulligan reiterates the question.

Chow: “I used to, but can’t anymore because I’m mayor.”

“As the mayor, I am protected by the police, so I can’t. I have to be in a car,” she “clarified” the next day.

Either she’s facing some kind of specific credible threat, in which case she should say so — she needn’t provide specifics, obviously — or this is wildly off-brand nonsense. She is often seen out and about in public, hobnobbing with the hoi polloi (so long as they don’t conspicuously support Israel) without wearing a bulletproof vest or surrounded by crew-cut toughs. No such “no public transit” rule seemed to perturb her predecessors. Tory routinely rode the subway to work.

This is very faint praise, but I will credit Chow with feeling she had to be honest here. Dubious explanations aside, not all ultra-veteran politicians would have that instinct, especially when it’s such a potentially damaging file. (Bradford, for the record, says he routinely rides transit.) A mayor should actively be seeking out opportunities to ride public transit to events, even if it involves a security detail. It’s pure free political goodwill: people love seeing it. And she has an obligation as mayor to experience the daily frustrations of her city’s beleaguered transit-riders.

As I say, I don’t quite get the antipathy toward Bradford. He has arguably flip-flopped on quite a few issues as politics dictate, but not a lot more than your average politician. He can certainly claim to care more about Jewish Torontonians than Chow, who will attend every bake sale, church event, parade and hootenanny she can find, but not the Walk for Israel. I don’t think that’s a huge vote-winner, which is part of what makes it credible.

Alas, incumbency is a superpower in Toronto politics. At this point, I’m not sure Bradford has the kryptonite.

National Post
cselley@postmedia.com