Long before the election results flashed up on the big screen, the crowd in the auditorium of the Daniels Spectrum was resigned to defeat.
The roughly two hundred people at Olivia Chow’s election night headquarters in Regent Park are the kind of citizens predisposed to optimism, but even they didn’t dare believe their candidate, trailing badly in opinion polls going into the vote, would pull off a win.
When the numbers finally came in showing that Chow had placed a distant third with only 23 per cent support, the room went silent not so much with disappointment as with quiet acceptance. John Tory won with 40 per cent, while Doug Ford took 34.
Chow’s supporters didn’t perk up again until she took to the stage to deliver her concession speech. In a ten-minute address, punctuated with chants of “Olivia! Olivia!” she told the crowd that moments earlier she had called Tory to congratulate him, but also to urge him to take up the social causes she had made central to her campaign.
“Children are going to school hungry in this city. Too many young people are looking for jobs, and too many families are looking for affordable homes, and too many cars stuck in traffic gridlock, and too many people are living in poverty,” Chow said. “John, you’ve just been given a chance to do something about it.”
Despite the heavy defeat, she told her supporters to “stay engaged, stay involved, keep fighting for what you believe.”
“Ask that question: What can we do with each other for each other? Then go out and be the answer yourself,” she said.
Chow had spent the final day of the election taking her message to the street, canvassing in central Scarborough, Ryerson University, and North York. Her final stop was at the corner of Jane and Wilson, where she met with beleaguered transit riders waiting for overcrowded buses in order promote her plan to improve TTC service.
Back in March, she held her first campaign appearance at the same intersection. Yet while she finished her campaign only metres from where she began, politically she was miles away from where she was back in the spring, when she seemed poised take City Hall back for Toronto’s progressive forces after four years of right wing misrule.
Chow started her mayoral bid brightly and led in the early polls. Her ability to inspire voters was evident at her campaign launch on March 13, which she held in a jam-packed church near the St. Jamestown neighbourhood where she grew up after immigrating to Canada from Hong Kong. That day she charged that Mayor Rob Ford had “let us down, over and over,” and pledged to be a mayor that would restore dignity to City Hall and be a role model to Toronto’s young people.
In the early days of her campaign she emphasized her newcomer background as often as she could, hoping it would connect in a city where nearly half the population was born outside the country. Simultaneously she presented herself as a candidate palatable to centrist voters by pledging to keep tax increases in line with inflation and steering clear of proposing any major investments that could open her up to accusations of being a tax-and-spend politician.
For many voters, Chow’s newcomer backstory and her resiliance in the face of tough personal and political battles have turned her into a star. On Monday dozens of students at Ryerson stopped to take their picture with her, a few of them becoming emotional at meeting her for the first time.
“She wants to build a better place for us, that feels really good,” said Sandy Herrera, a developmental psychology student who came to Toronto from Ecuador. She asked Chow for an autograph. “I don’t think there’s many role models that I can kind of identify with. I want to be like her.”
But ultimately Chow failed to convince enough voters fed up with the scandal-filled Ford administration that she was the candidate capable of beating the mayor or, once he dropped out of the race on September 12 to be treated for cancer, his brother Doug.
Her momentum didn’t last through the summer. Her campaign, which she pitched as being focused on children and families, job creation, and transit, began to falter, and lost her frontrunner status in late July, weeks after Mayor Ford returned from his stint in rehab. After Labour Day, she moved away from her moderate stance and pivoted left in an apparent attempt to energize her progressive base, promising “real progress now” and announcing a plan to increase the land transfer tax on the most expensive homes. But it wasn’t enough, and throughout the fall she consistently polled in third.
In a scrum after her concession speech, Chow admitted that in the campaign’s early going she had focused too much on beating Rob Ford instead of recognizing the threat Tory posed.
“I didn’t underestimate John Tory, but Rob Ford was the one I was running against and when he went into rehab things changed quite completely,” she said.
Although in her speech she vowed that she would “keep fighting for the causes that matter,” she told media it was too soon to say whether she would consider running for mayor again in 2018 or taking a shot at the leadership of the Ontario NDP.
With an overwhelming majority of Torontonians casting their ballots for right-wing candidates Monday night, many progressive voters in the crowd at Chow HQ weren’t sure what’s next either.
A campaign volunteer named Byron Morris said it was “awful” that Doug Ford was able to capture so much of the vote.
“Toronto is becoming a different city than it was ten years ago,” he said. “And we as progressives have got to figure out how to crack that nut.”
bens@nowtoronto.com | @BenSpurr
