Just who is Sarah Thomson and why does she want to be mayor?
Torontonians can be forgiven for not really knowing.
We’ve heard from Thomson about why she says she wants to be mayor – sort of.
It’s the usual stuff about wanting to bring a business approach to the workings at City Hall.
In that sense she’s indistinguishable from mayoral frontrunners George Smitherman and Rocco Rossi.
The About Sarah section on her website weaves an interesting tale – couch surfer at 15, to management company exec, to self-made media entrepreneur and founder of Women’s Post magazine.
What little else we do know about Thomson – that she once ran for Hamilton council and fibbed about how many votes she lost by – suggests some hubris on her part.
As for her push to be mayor, it’s still all a bit of a mystery, including how Thomson’s managed to attract a fair bit of mainstream media attention.
Some of the bump from the press can be attributed to her Tory connections. If you haven’t noticed, the Big C conservative media dominates what passes (most times) for political discourse these days.
The fact Thomson’s the only credible (?) female candidate in the mayor’s race also makes her a default choice for scribes looking for an opinion that’s different than Smitherman’s or Rossi’s. Although, Thomson never quite delivers on that count. Politically, they’re all more or less three peas in a pod.
But Thomson may have suddenly gone from upstart to wild card.
Her first major policy plank, a $6.6-billion, 58 kilometre expansion of the city’s subway system, using road tolls to partially pay for it, has breathed some life in an otherwise moribund candidacy, I think for all the wrong reasons. Presto, the Star’s editorializing right on cue about killing Transit City.
Subways are not the way of the future. Light rail is. Transit City, the city’s Light Rail expansion plan, will cost half as much and end up covering more than twice the distance, some 120 kilometres, than envisioned by Thomson’s plan. A light rail network will also take less than half the time to build. Thomson’s also talking privatizing her transit expansion plans in whole or in part through private sector funding, construction and maintenance agreements. But I digress.
While doubtless that Thomson will occupy anything but the bottom rungs in the 2010 mayoral race – my guess is she’ll throw her support behind Rossi, perhaps for a council run – the more ink she gets, the more trouble she spells for frontrunner Smitherman.
The last thing Curious George needs is two candidates on the right, Thomson and Rossi, nipping at his heels, driving the agenda further right and dragging Smitherman right along with them leaving his more natural constituency on the centre-left ripe for the picking. Enter Joe Pantalone, whose campaign got a shot in the arm with news Friday (March 19) that kingmaker John Laschinger is now on board.
In the short term, though, Thomson’s the bigger problem for Smitherman. The hide and seek game he’s been playing won’t wash for too much longer with Thomson now firmly in the mix. Message to Smitherman: Come out, come out, wherever you are.[rssbreak]
