If the election were held tomorrow, Olivia Chow would win. If the election were held next week, Olivia Chow would win. If the election were held next month, Olivia Chow would win.
If the election were held 10 and a half months from now (which, in fact, is when it will be held), the answer is less clear.
Chow has every conceivable advantage in this race: she will be the only candidate on the left she has the support and organizational infrastructure of the NDP and an impressive chunk of Liberals she has top strategists she has a base of potential volunteers and donors who are eager to contribute.
Polls suggest she need do little more than spend the next 10 months not smoking crack.
There are worse positions to be in. There are, however, also better ones.
Little good flows from having no incentive to do or say anything that might compromise a lead that predated the doing or saying of anything.
It’s simple enough to build a campaign around cautiousness – much harder to keep it compelling for months on end. And although her team is likely aware of this obvious pitfall, that does not itself mean they’ll overcome it.
Chow is preceded by an aura embodying whatever progressive vision you imbue it with.
No human being advocating defined policies could actually live up to it. It may not matter in the end, but impossible expectations are a terrible opponent to have.
Officially, Chow is not yet running. She’s just “actively considering” it. Meanwhile, the race is slowly beginning, and David Soknacki has already been in it for over two months.
The former councillor for Ward 43 Scarborough East announced his intention on September 25, becoming the first challenger to Mayor Rob Ford to do so. (Karen Stintz, a month later, became the second.)
Soknacki is playing the long game, aiming for a year-long arc of gradual ascendence, like David Miller and Rob Ford did before him.
And as Miller had the Island bridge and Ford had council expenses, Soknacki has zeroed in on emergency services budgets – particularly the sacred cow of the police – as an issue he can thoroughly own.
“On the centre and the right, councillors are afraid of tackling these issues because they fear they’ll upset powerful bargaining units and constituencies,” he observed in a Monday morning, December 9, speech to a smallish breakfast crowd at the Sheraton Centre. “And dwell thereon on the irony, if you will.”
“On the left,” he continued, “councillors are afraid of proposing reforms because they’ll be labelled as soft on crime or indifferent to public safety.”
When Mayor Miller responded to a 2005 spike in gun violence with a move to hire 150 more police officers, Soknacki – his budget chief in the 2003-06 term – opposed the measure as shortsighted, emotion-driven and fiscally irresponsible.
“Such statements from the conservative chair of council’s budget advisory committee are sure to stun some of his right-wing colleagues at City Hall who’ve long been pushing Miller to hike the police department’s $700 million budget to put more cops on the street,” wrote Don Wanagas, NOW’s City Hall columnist at the time.
“But Soknacki says the chief magistrate had it right when his community safety panel started targeting troubled communities with after-school programs, enhanced parks-and-rec opportunities and job skills training to help prevent at-risk youth from falling into crime.” (The following year, Wanagas left NOW to become Miller’s communications director.)
Soknacki is the kind of fiscal conservative other conservatives pretend to be.
For people like our current mayor, preferences tend to stand in for values: notions of intelligent spending and smart investment go out the window if it’s something he likes, e.g., an unnecessary, inefficient subway extension.
Soknacki openly prefers LRT for Scarborough (“I favoured serving more people rather than less”) and admits in a subsequent scrum that he would be open to cancelling the subway if the opportunity presented itself.
His shtick is that he’s starting off with nothing to lose and so might as well be honest.
Personally wealthy from a spice business – a business, he pointedly remarks, he built himself and didn’t inherit – Soknacki can overcome a lack of name recognition through a significantly self-financed campaign. Candidates and their spouses aren’t subject to contribution limits when funding their own runs. (The law is profoundly anti-democratic in this regard but won’t be changed in time for the 2014 election.)
He will further fragment the right-leaning side of the electorate, enhancing the likelihood of a Chow victory.
But he has less baggage and more credibility than Stintz, and a far deeper understanding of the issues than John Tory. (The other probable challenger is Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, a social conservative who revels in his villainy.)
Soknacki may not win this time. But he’ll still serve as a model for what a right-winger could be.
Setting up David Soknacki
• City of Scarborough councillor representing Ward 8, 1994-97
• City of Toronto councillor representing Ward 43 (Scarborough East), 1999-2006.
• Won Scarborough council seat when incumbent Frank Faubert chose to run for Scarborough mayor. Won Toronto council seat in by-election after Faubert died in office.
• Chair of Budget Advisory Committee under Mayor David Miller, 2003-06.
• Succeeded on council by his former executive assistant, Paul Ainslie who was initially appointed to fill an empty seat in a nearby ward.
• Chair of Parc Downsview Park, 2007-12.
• Columnist for Metroland community newspapers, 2007-13.
jonathang@nowtoronto.com | @goldsbie
