In her second run for mayor, Olivia Chow appears poised to win Toronto's top job. But she says she'll need the people to be on board to fix the city's most daunting problems.
“People know who I am, people know my values” Chow says during a sit-down interview with CP24.com two weeks ahead of Toronto’s mayoral election.
However Chow continued on as an MP, stepping down in 2014 in order to run for mayor for the first time. She lost that race, coming in third behind John Tory and Doug Ford. While being the target of most of the attacks might unnerve some, Chow seldom appears off-balance. She even looks like she's having fun.
“I have always been in very good physical shape; I run, I bike, I swim. I do long distance swimming. I do weights. I canoe, kayak, paddleboard. I do downhill ski and cross country ski in winter. I snowshoe, I skate. So I'm pretty active,” Chow laughs. “So I think that helps.”Toronto mayoral candidate Olivia Chow is photographed after a mayoral debate in Toronto, on Wednesday , May 24, 2023.
Chow cut her teeth in politics as a TDSB trustee in the late 80s and early nineties. She won a seat on Toronto City Council in 1992 and went on to serve 13 years, including seven after amalgamation. She held a number of roles as a councillor, including chair of the Community Services Committee and vice-chair of the TTC. She then had eight years as an MP from 2006 to 2014, when she stepped down to launch her first mayoral bid.
“The housing crisis is so much worse now,” she says when asked how the city she is running to lead today is different from the one she ran to lead almost 10 years ago. “He had to stay in a shelter and he got his laptop stolen, because he was evicted. He was desperate,” she says. “I get it,” she says when asked how she would resolve a situation where an encampment has taken over the only green space some people have to play with their kids.Like so many green spaces in the city, the downtown park has seen encampments spring up over the past couple of years.
Toronto is facing a massive shortfall of around $1.5 billion brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, a problem both the federal and provincial governments have been noncommittal about and which the next mayor will have to tackle. Chow says she knows that staff have said without that money from the feds and the province, the city would have to dip into one-time reserves, delay capital infrastructure projects and possibly cut services.
“The negotiation hasn't been successful because the people are not involved,” Chow says. “The people need to be involved. That's where the power is, right?” It is an idea which would undoubtedly help solve many problems for Toronto, but one that municipal leaders have talked about for decades and have yet to make a reality.
She says the city’s needs should be worked out first before any number is proposed for property tax increases, as opposed to first setting a hard limit for property taxes, which has been the method for the past decade or so. But despite her party affiliation, which is sometimes used as an attack point by her opponents , Chow says she has always worked with people of other political stripes to get things done.
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