I didn’t expect much from Olivia Chow at Monday’s big mayoral debate. When she ran in 2014, she started with a large lead and whenever she spoke in public her numbers dropped. Her English seemed uncertain, though she came here from Hong Kong aged 13 in 1970. She kept checking her notes to see what she felt passionately about, yet she’d been a dauntless school trustee, council member and MP.
It was weird. She finished third.
This time Chow started with her “story.” Everyone does. It must be what they’re told by the high-priced advisers.
Candidate Ana Bailão literally says, “I’m running for mayor and want to share my story.” She doesn’t even ask if we’d like to hear it. Former top cop Mark Saunders, who didn’t bother showing at the debate, has one kidney. Ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer, who wrote Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare, says he had to explain to the prince that “strange as it may seem, (your) memoir isn’t about you.” It’s about who and what you encountered, it’s about the world, you self-involved narcissist.
I’d been looking forward to councillor Josh Matlow, who seemed the most pissed-off candidate. Everyone I know who cares about Toronto is pissed off. Why not vote for the pissed-off guy? It could go on a bumper sticker. But he may’ve been told to be more positive and optimistic; he didn’t get pissed off till closing statements, although I think it almost always works. Look at Pierre Poilievre. Even Justin Trudeau, Mr. Sunny Ways himself, had his first big parliamentary moment yelling at Tory Peter Kent that he was a “piece of s—t.”
But after that Chow got way better.
She stopped worrying whether her nouns and verbs agreed and dropped her “story” in favour of what she saw at a food bank lineup yesterday or how nobody on city council ever doubted she’d keep tax rises at reasonable levels.
It felt convincing; others onstage didn’t.
Matlow said “incent” versus “encourage” and talked about RGI. (I had to Google it — it is Rent-Geared-to-Income.) Even the host used ODSP and OW. What are they running for — chief of jargon?
Candidate Brad Bradford said Chow’s math “doesn’t pencil.” Vote for the accounting nerd! When Matlow challenged Chow on taxes, she went near-populist. She talked about taxing the homes of the rich to build for the needy. She was kind of on fire. What happened to that formerly awful candidate?
Here’s a theory. In 20 years of city politics, though she was probably an NDPer, there was no formal party politics; it suited her. You can be yourself and make deals with vrai humans versus party robots. Ottawa’s rigid politics crushed those strengths; everything goes through the leader (even when he’s your husband, as Jack Layton was) and the odious party apparatchiks. The height of creativity is getting to ask a question some staffer probably wrote for you.
We’ll see how this unfolds as the campaign proceeds.
Passport passions
Conservative academic/journalist Andrew Potter catalogues in the Substack The Line why he abhors design changes in the new passport:
“The lengthy list of apologies for past transgressions; the acceptance of Canada as a genocidal state; allowing the country’s 150th anniversary to be turned into an orgy of national self-hatred; ordering national flag to fly at half staff for an entire summer while blithely ignoring, for months, the factors that went into that decision; letting 24 Sussex turn into a ruin; the obscenely casual, almost sabotaging, attitude toward the appointment of a governor general; the general indifference to the Crown, the Royal Family, and what it symbolizes.”
A 20-something I know opines: “I love when he lists all the good stuff Trudeau’s done. As a Canadian nationalist I support every one.” (Try rereading that list with a positive tilt.)
Potter doesn’t own pride in Canada and doesn’t twig that others, like the young, might be proud precisely because of those shifts.
For them it’s not Make Canada Great Again. It’s Make Canada Better — every chance you get.
This column originally appeared in the Toronto Star.
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