Olivia Chow has been elected as Toronto’s new mayor following a crowded byelection on Monday night. But who is Olivia Chow?
The 66-year-old was most notably a former NDP MP in the later part of her career and was the first Asian-born woman to be elected a city councillor for Toronto in 1991 where she served for more than a decade.
Chow moved to Canada from Hong Kong when she was 13 years old. Her family lived in an apartment in St. James Town.
She was introduced to politics after working for NDP MP Dan Heap, whom she credits as her mentor. Chow was then elected as a school board trustee for the TDSB in 1985, a position she held for six years.
In addition, Chow supported an anti-homophobia curriculum in the 1980s and helped bring nutrition programs to Toronto schools in the 1990s. She had also fought back against exploitative immigration consultants in the 2000s.
She joined her late husband Jack Layton on Toronto’s city council in 1991. Chow and Layton were married in 1988. Layton would later go on to be Canada’s federal NDP leader.
During her city council tenure, Chow would turn her attention to federal politics.
In 1997 and 2004, she ran as an NDP candidate for Trinity-Spadina but lost both times to Liberal incumbent Tony Ianno.
In 2006, Chow finally won the riding and was elected as a parliamentarian in the House of Commons as an NDP MP, joining her husband in federal politics. However, months after the 2011 federal election, Layton passed away after a battle with cancer.
In 2014, Chow resigned her seat in the House of Commons and went back to her roots to run in the Toronto election. She ran against John Tory and now-Premier Doug Ford but came in third place. Tory won that race and marked his first term as mayor.
She tried getting her federal seat back in 2015 but lost to Liberal candidate Adam Vaughan and had since stayed out of politics until this year, when she announced her bid for mayor of Toronto, her second run for the top job.
Following her 2014 loss, Chow called on one of her mentors, Marshall Ganz, a longtime organizer with the United Farm Workers credited for helping shape Barack Obama’s field operations during his 2008 U.S. presidential run. Chow took Ganz’s political leadership course at Harvard University and returned with the curriculum that inspired the Institute for Change Leaders, the organization she founded in 2016.
For much of the last decade, she ran the organization to train community organizers. Supporters said the organization’s work could help shape her term as mayor.
“When I first met Olivia Chow, I was a student at the University of Toronto, I was involved in campus activism and organizing,” Coun. Ausma Malik told Global News.
She said Chow invited her and others to her home and helped them to enter the worlds of politics and advocacy. When Malik ran for school board trustee and later councillor, she said Chow’s example as a racialized woman in government — and her advice — helped with the push.
“She is someone who knows how to get things done, to improve the lives of Torontonians,” she said. “What we can expect from her leadership, for me based on a really strong record …, it is about someone who is going to be really clear-minded and collaborative in reaching the solutions that we need for our most urgent priorities.”
In the lead-up to the Toronto byelection vote, Chow dominated the polls for most of the campaign. An Ipsos poll done for Global News conducted June 9-13 pegged Chow as the frontrunner with an unassailable lead.
The byelection on June 26 was triggered in February after former mayor John Tory admitted to having an “inappropriate relationship” with a former staff member and resigned.
— with files from Global News’ Isaac Callan and The Canadian Press