Global News is holding one-on-one interviews with the top seven polling candidates vying to become Toronto’s next mayor on June 26. Candidates were asked to choose an interview location to talk about their policies and campaign promises. Links to each of the interviews can be found below as they are published. Here is more from Olivia Chow in discussion with Global News Anchor Alan Carter.
“Good luck!” comes the shout from across Augusta Street as Olivia Chow walks through the Kensington Market neighbourhood she’s called home for decades.
First elected as city councillor, then as a member of Parliament, people in Toronto know her name, which is not something that can be said of her competitors in the race to be mayor. Chow chose the area for an interview because of its history of hosting waves of immigrants to the city.
“I didn’t script that,” she says with a laugh after more supporters come forward, some asking for pictures with her. At one point a car pulls over and a man tells Chow in Cantonese that he’s put up signs for her.
“I will be a caring mayor,” she says when we sit down for a conversation in the Free Times Cafe. “But very firm and committed in terms of the things I want to get done.”
Chow has committed to returning civic government to a central place in building housing, in funding the arts and in restoring service and staff to the Toronto Transit Commission. All of it comes with a hefty price tag, which Chow doesn’t deny.
Her promises for transit may be expensive, but more people will be putting money in the fare box she says, rubbing her fingers together.
This is something she comes back to a number of times during the interview, “sometimes spending means you create revenue in a different way.”
Talk of spending might send shivers down the spines of some voters, but Chow says accusations she’ll be a tax and spend mayor are simply ‘fearmongering’ by her opponents.
Chow has refused to give a figure for how much she’ll raise property taxes, saying she’ll start with the needs of citizens first, look at funding from other governments next, and then work backwards to determine what’s needed.
“Fear not,” Chow says. “Ten years I was on the budget committee, I’ve never been extravagant, I’ve never voted for huge tax increases.”
Opponents like Mark Saunders say there is plenty to fear from a Chow mayoralty, citing a planned 25 per cent property tax increase.
For her part, Chow scoffs at the suggestion “That’s not who I am” she says.
Is she asking for too much trust from voters? Not at all she says, “look at my track record.”
Unlike other candidates who have called Ontario Premier Doug Ford names, Chow is steadfastly sunny about the premier with whom she says she shares a love of the city.
She remains upbeat even when describing plans for a public relations war with the Ford government if it refuses to back down on issues like moving the Science Centre or developing the Ontario Place lands.
“I would ask people to stand up. I would ask people to exercise their democratic right.”
Back on Augusta Avenue, a young man stops to introduce himself, telling Chow she knows his two moms. “You got so big,” she says looking up at him. Later she talks of a campaign years ago that featured the man, just a boy at the time, in an attempt to normalize same-sex parenting and stop schoolyard bullying.
Again and again, people approach Chow to tell their stories and their connection to her.
Away from the admirers she stops and says, “I think I’m the best equipped because I have the experience.”