TORONTO – Former TTC Chair Karen Stintz is the latest candidate to enter the race to unseat Mayor Rob Ford handing in her nomination papers at city hall Monday.
Stintz has been a city councillor for 10 years, first being elected in 2003 in Ward 16 Eglinton-Lawrence and is among the mayor’s race many right-leaning candidates.
“The city, I believe, needs a responsible and accountable mayor who can get things done,” she said during an interview with Global News Monday. “And I have a track record at the TTC, one of fiscal accountability and customer service, so that’s the thing I want to bring to city hall.”
Stintz served as chair of the TTC from 2010 to 2014, stepping down recently to focus on her mayoral campaign.
She said Monday that improving customer service was her primary goal while head of the public transit agency. She cited the introduction of wi-fi hotspots at two subway stations, studying time-based transfers and instituting Presto pay-cards as some of her major accomplishments.
Transit and gridlock are likely going to be major issues in the upcoming campaign as all the major candidates have so far said it’s a battle they want to take on.
The city tacked on a 0.5 per cent levy on property taxes in the 2014 budget to pay for the extension of the Bloor-Danforth line into Scarborough. Stintz voted for that decision in October (though she previously supported the LRT) and while her mayoral rival David Soknacki has detailed his desire to reverse the decision, Stintz said Monday “those transit debates are behind us.”
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“What I think is the people of the city want to see shovels in the ground. They want to see us build transit and I’m committed to doing that,” she said.
She added that, if elected mayor, she will continue to work for better public transit but did not say exactly how she would pay for it.
The provincial government is studying the implementation of revenue tools – something that may take the province to an election this spring – to pay for public transit including a downtown relief line, but Stintz wouldn’t lend her support behind hiking taxes to build transit on Monday.
However in a tweet sent last May during one of the many debates on transit at city hall, Stintz criticized the mayor for not supporting dedicated funding.
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