Underdog (18 page)

My wife, Denise, who is just as passionate as I am on the issue, asked Mr. Obama's former chief of staff, David Axelrod, about why his boss took so long to make a statement about same-sex marriage when we attended a Toronto speaking engagement he headlined in October 2013. When she dared to suggest that, according to his boss, it was perfectly okay for gays to fight and die for their country but not get married, Mr. Axelrod was quite taken aback by her chutzpah. He contended heatedly and arrogantly that if that was the way she saw it, that was her issue, and turned away from her to chat with someone who would not make him so uncomfortable.

But Mr. Obama is the epitome of your typical opportunistic politician – the kind who put their fingers to the wind and base their decisions on what will win them a popularity contest instead of on pure logic or common sense. It is sad to say this, but I've covered very few politicians who actually have the guts, the moral fibre, or the political will to stick to their principles. Aside from the handful at City Hall, our former prime minister, Mr. Harper, stands out, if only for his unwavering support of Israel alone, in spite of what we've seen from the dangerously milquetoast President Obama and the entirely ineffective and perhaps anti-Semitic United Nations.

GUTS ARE A RARITY
in politics. I've seen evidence of cowardice far too many times. In early December 2011, I was invited to a public open house hosted by a new councillor, Mary-Margaret McMahon, representing a tony Toronto neighbourhood off of Lake Ontario called the Beaches to see proposed renovations to a café located on a prime piece of Toronto's waterfront. In a rare upset in the November 2010 election, Ms. McMahon had defeated long-time councillor Sandra Bussin, partly due to my revelations earlier that year about a questionable twenty-year sole-sourced lease deal with the café's owner, George Foulidis, that allowed him to essentially own all food and beverage rights and control the use of food and liquor by others, even those who wished to hold charity events, on this prime stretch of waterfront. Ms. McMahon invited me to the open house more than once, secretly hoping, I suspect, that I'd do the dirty work of keeping up the heat on him. But when I arrived, Mr. Foulidis and his brother very publicly tried to force me to leave. I stood my ground, refusing to leave the public meeting I was invited to attend, while capturing his threats on camera. The councillor took no action to diffuse the situation. She sat there watching like a scared mouse, doing and saying nothing. It was perfectly fine to invite me and to complain about Mr. Foulidis behind his back, but she was too weak to stand up to him in person.

Sadly, Toronto's most recent mayor, John Tory, has been as indecisive during his first 18 months in office as I predicted. He has made a great show of meeting and consulting with other big city mayors, he has held endless photo ops or press conferences virtually every day, and he has either deferred important decisions, like the contracting out of garbage east of Toronto's Yonge Street, or appointed
panels to review the most controversial issues, instead of having the backbone to make the hard decisions himself. The one that drove me to near distraction was Tory's task force on Toronto Community Housing, named just after the city had done its own $119,000 review of the housing authority. When I exposed the fact in early March 2015 that top Toronto Community Housing Corporation officials had secretly voted themselves 20 per cent bonuses, Mr. Tory didn't have the balls to criticize either the magnitude of the bonuses or the lack of transparency in a public institution that serves the downtrodden. I suspected from that day forward that Mr. Tory would talk a good game but, as I'd worried since before he was elected, would forever be beholden to his many connections and wouldn't have the spine to make the really tough changes needed at City Hall. I continue to hope I'm proven wrong but so far I have not been.

As much as politicians constantly yap about vision, most have absolutely no long-term vision whatsoever. How could they? They operate on four-year time frames, forever focused on getting re-elected. Sticking their necks out and doing what's right could cost them votes in the next election. It was actually shocking to me how little voters paid attention to the antics of their councillors – allowing long-time troughers like Howard Moscoe, Joe Mihevc, Pam McConnell, and Kyle Rae to roll from one term to another with little, if any, opposition. (Mr. Rae actually ran unopposed in the 2000 election.) Any attempts by new blood to break through were invariably thwarted by name recognition and the ability of sitting councillors to use the perks of their offices to buy votes. They were able to use their expense budgets (at the time, fifty-three thousand dollars, on top of their salaries) to create fridge magnets,
fancy calendars, or glossy newsletters full of pictures of them rubbing shoulders with their constituents or various A-listers at events like the Toronto International Film Festival, to which they all received free tickets. They could hold town hall meetings. They could push for publicly funded grants for the special interest groups most likely to help them on election campaigns. They could and would ensure that powerful unions – particularly the police and firefighters – not only endorsed them but actually erected signs for them and worked on their campaigns. The firefighters were renowned for holding their support over the heads of councillors, actually intimidating councillors into voting them sizable wage hikes to guarantee firefighter support at election time. Trouble is, it's extremely difficult to get lousy, incompetent politicians out, at all levels of government, because there are no term limits and none of them are prepared to vote to impose term limits (and put themselves out of a job). Politics is supposed to be a calling, but for most it has become a very lucrative career with fairly decent pay, good perks, a pension, and the potential to wield tremendous power over their constituency – and all on the taxpayers' dime. No wonder Rob Ford's support of the taxpayer resonated so deeply with disenchanted voters, even after his death.

As bad as the indecisiveness and lack of political will to make the tough decisions was at City Hall, it was far worse at Queen's Park. The only difference was the highly-practised Liberal machine that was adept at turning a sow's ear into a silk purse and spinning negatives into positives for the media. Ms. Wynne, far more NDP and union-friendly than Liberal in her leanings, was notorious, and continues to be so, for naming pricey panels and roundtables to consult and
make it look like she was on top of issues – instead of actually making difficult decisions. By the time she'd been in office for ten months, there were more than forty consultation panels underway on everything from looking into whether Ontarians had an appetite to force restaurateurs to list calorie counts on their menus to a sixty-three-thousand-dollar panel put together – get this – to examine how her government could be more open and transparent. To make it seem like she was truly interested in actually hearing what Ontarians had to say – and that this was not another expensive exercise in futility – she would put a token confused-looking Progressive Conservative or two on each panel. The most ridiculous panel had to be the one on openness and accountability, which delivered its report on the same day news broke about possible criminal charges directed at Mr. McGuinty's chief of staff for essentially sneaking an outsider – the boyfriend of another member of McGuinty's team – into the premier's office in order to delete controversial e-mails related to the cancellation of two gas plants in Oakville and Mississauga.

At the federal and provincial levels, party discipline keeps politicians somewhat in check, if and only if the party's leader chooses to do the right thing. Mr. McGuinty governed with no scruples. He repeatedly promised he wouldn't raise taxes, only to do exactly that. He was so hungry to win at all costs that he had no problem throwing $1.1 billion down the drain on cancelling two gas-fired plants to save a few Liberal seats. He took his eye off the ball too many times to count, letting the bureaucrats at eHealth, charged with computerizing the medical records of all Ontarians, and those operating the Ornge air ambulance fritter millions of dollars away on bonuses, loans, unscrupulous perks, and expenses. There
was no oversight. Little wonder he had such a pathetic, incompetent, and arrogant bunch in cabinet. Faced with increased heat and scrutiny, ministers like Dwight Duncan, George Smitherman, and Chris Bentley bailed while the getting was good. Mr. McGuinty prorogued the legislature to avoid being questioned, and subsequently quit, escaping to Harvard where heaven knows what he did to indoctrinate young minds about politics. There are no words to describe this obscene mismanagement of public money. He ought to be in prison.

Provincial PC leader Tim Hudak kept a stranglehold on his caucus through threats and intimidation, and by dangling critic portfolios over the heads of his MPPs – the one opportunity they had to establish a media profile for themselves. Party discipline is to be expected. But because he was a weak, uninspiring leader with almost no connection to voters, he created a team of mindless puppets, most of whom had very little of interest to say, despite the never-ending fodder offered up by the Liberal regime. One of the few firebrands in the caucus with an intellect and media savvy, Peter Shurman, was quickly sidelined when Mr. Hudak started to feel threatened by the well-liked and respected MPP. The cover story was that Mr. Shurman had found a loophole in MPP expense rules, allowing him to claim the rent for a Toronto apartment because his principal residence was in Niagara-on-the-Lake and he represented the riding of Thornhill. But the story behind the story was that Mr. Hudak and his inner circle, worried that Mr. Shurman might try to challenge his leadership, threw the loyal MPP under the bus after Mr. Hudak had approved the expense. In September 2013, when Mr. Shurman refused Mr. Hudak's request to pay back the money (some forty-eight thousand dollars), he was stripped of his finance critic duties
and cast aside in the House. It was the equivalent of squashing a flea with a sledgehammer. In November 2013, Mr. Shurman gave up his Toronto apartment and moved full-time to his Niagara-on-the-Lake home, commuting back and forth to the legislature in Toronto. In early December, Mr. Hudak decided that his former finance critic was wrong, as well, to charge for his mileage to Toronto. By then, Mr. Shurman had had enough and resigned his seat effective December 2013. The Ontario Progressive Conservative caucus thus lost one of its few bright lights, leaving it with a team of barely mediocre yes-men and -women, many of them lazy and well past their due date.

And what about those transit taxes – the ones Toronto city councillors spent ten hours debating, only to make no decision? Premier Wynne went through the exercise of naming a panel in September 2013, headed by Liberal teat-sucker Anne Golden, who made nearly ninety thousand dollars for her consultative efforts. Golden spent three months with her busy-work, proclaiming three months later that gas and corporate taxes should be hiked sharply to pay for new transit infrastructure. But instead of making a decision, calling an election, and allowing Ontarians to determine whether they wanted dedicated transit taxes or increased gas taxes, Ms. Wynne played a cat-and-mouse game, always intimating that transit would need to be funded but never really conceding whether or not her intent was to raise taxes to do it. In 2014, perceiving she needed to buy NDP leader Andrea Horwath's loyalty on another budget, Ms. Wynne suddenly took the tax idea off the table entirely. After all the energy and political capital spent on promoting, debating, and pressuring the public to accept transit taxes, the premier took the cowardly way out. Of course she'd try to convince us that she did it to respect the
democratic wishes of Ontarians. I would argue that her only interest was in saving her political skin. I hope this isn't so, but I am willing to bet those taxes will eventually find their way back on the table, seeing as Ms. Wynne won herself a majority government in June 2014. After all, she can say voters exercised their democratic rights and gave her a strong mandate. Going back on their promises never much matters for politicians in a democracy. It's a sad reality, but voters have come to expect it.

During the heat of a policy convention in late September 2013 – after embattled leader Tim Hudak and his inner circle had fended off calls for a second leadership review or, should I say, had bullied his detractors into submission – Mr. Hudak stepped onto the main floor of the convention centre in London, Ontario, and tried to prove he was a man of the people.

He walked into the crowd, microphone in hand, lowering his voice to a level that made it seem like he was talking directly to each and every one of the eight hundred delegates assembled in the room.

He made a few self-deprecating comments in an effort to come across less stiffly than normal, and then offered to take unrehearsed and unplanned questions from the audience. It would have been a tremendous departure from the normally highly staged version of the man. Perhaps it would even have signalled he'd learned a few things from the attempt
at an internal coup that had called for his head and become very public over the course of the two months prior to the September 2013 convention. I was ready to give him the benefit of the doubt that he'd heard the concerns of the party's grassroots about his inability to connect with voters and that he was really trying to bring a fresh face to the party.

That was until a Windsor delegate got up to ask him how he'd make himself and the party more winnable in the impending election. The question itself would have been perfect (and certainly appropriate) had the delegate not stuck his foot in his mouth by prefacing it with a highly misogynistic comment about NDP leader Andrea Horwath. The man said Ms. Horwath had earned herself the nickname “The Great Orange Pumpkin” down in Windsor. The name came about not just because she's NDP orange but also, according to him, because she'd “put on a little bit of weight.” Now, you could criticize Ms. Horwath at the time for many things – especially her decision to prop up an unelected premier mired in scandals and spending abuses. But to attack her personal appearance was disgraceful. The delegate would never, ever have dared say the same thing about a man – and it made me sad to note that as many people in the audience that day laughed as booed. Mr. Hudak had a chance to address the comment head on, thus gaining some much-needed points, by pointedly telling the delegate and the crowd it was inappropriate, but the PC leader decided to ignore it entirely and to jump full throttle into how important it was to win seats in Toronto and the GTA to gain a majority, or at the very least a minority. The lack of response was cowardly of Mr. Hudak. It would have taken nothing to register his disapproval and would have gone a long way toward diffusing what became a story. But he didn't, and the irony of his suggesting
to a room full of delegates – at least half of whom found the comment about Andrea Horwath amusing – that they've got to have what it takes to win seats in a cosmopolitan city like Toronto was not lost on me. He was just lucky that the comment was only made within the walls of the party's policy meeting and that none of the many reporters who attended, other than two of us from the
Toronto Sun,
bothered to mention it. At least the delegate had the good grace to resign from the party once I outed him in my column two days later. Hudak remained mum.

Sadly, the interchange was far too indicative of how the party's out-of-touch old guard felt. All Mr. Hudak's silence did was reinforce my belief that more than four years after I'd run for the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party in St. Paul's – the first by-election to occur with him as leader – both he and the party hadn't evolved one bit. Back in the summer of 2009, when the by-election was called, one could blame the fumbling on the part of Mr. Hudak's team at least partly on the chaos of a transition from one leader to another. After all, Mr. Hudak had won the leadership in June 2009, assumed office on July 1, and the by-election was called by the Liberals on August 19. He hadn't had much time to hire staff, let alone formulate a thorough policy platform. But after performing the full-court press to woo me – an openly gay and recently married Jewish lesbian – to run, Mr. Hudak and most of his team checked out. Half of his caucus – either too lazy to get off their duffs in mid-summer or, as I found out later, worried about being affiliated with a gay woman – didn't bother to show their faces even once to canvass with me. I was handed the B-team to run my campaign, including a campaign manager who took six days off to
vacation during a thirty-five-day campaign. I learned after the campaign was over that the party had done some polling early on and discovered that while I might narrow the gap, I had no hope of winning St. Paul's, a traditionally Liberal midtown Toronto riding. Still, this would have been a perfect opportunity for Mr. Hudak to showcase himself as the new leader, particularly in St. Paul's, and to show that he wanted to get a better grasp of Toronto issues.

Make no mistake: I am not the least bit bitter. Running for office was a wonderfully insightful and rewarding experience. I learned a tremendous amount about operating a campaign, which only helped me as a political columnist. I went into the campaign knowing full well that St. Paul's is traditionally Liberal red – and hadn't been Tory blue since the Mike Harris days ten years prior – and that it would take nothing short of an open revolt by voters to win a seat in midtown Toronto. Voters were angry, but as I quickly discovered, they were livid with then mayor David Miller, not with the Teflon Premier, Dalton McGuinty. But I really hoped, perhaps naively, to educate the party from within about Toronto's hot-button issues with which I was so familiar, like gay rights, transit, homelessness, education and health care, our severely aging infrastructure, poverty, and crime. I even thought I could help the Progressive Conservatives to reach out to more women and new immigrant communities, who traditionally vote Liberal, particularly because the Liberals are adept at wooing voters with their touchy-feely words of hope and promise. I also hoped a candidate like me would dispel the image of the Tories under Mike Harris. I thought Mike Harris was right for the times. I admired his tenacity and the courageous way he endeavoured to rein in
the bloated education and health care systems, despite the long list of professional protesters, and the forever disgruntled teachers unions who feverishly worked to derail his agenda. Even amalgamating Toronto made perfect sense. One Toronto government should have, by rights, exacted tremendous economies of scale – if there had been the political will to make it work. But unfortunately, there was not. As I've discovered, most bureaucrats and all but a few politicians are not hard-wired to be efficient, or effective.

Mr. Harris and his insiders were right for the late 1990s. But much has changed since then, and one big problem with the PC Party of Ontario is that the same cabal of well-past-their-prime insiders, eyeing tremendous business opportunities if the party should come to power again, have hung around. To put it bluntly, for these operatives, it's not at all about doing what's right for the party's fortunes but about doing what's right for themselves. This is what sickens me about politics, no matter which party is involved. The people who actually go into politics to perform a true public service have become few and far between. As we saw with Kathleen Wynne's majority win in June 2014, making promises and unapologetically breaking them and squandering billions of dollars on scandals seems to have become the new standard among Ontario voters, who were content as long as Ms. Wynne put on her understanding face, pretended to sympathize with their pain, and embraced their needs with lofty visions that she will never have the money to keep.

In the summer of 2009 the
Toronto Sun
gave me a six-week leave of absence so I could run in the provincial by-election. And “run” was the operative word. I knocked on 6,500 doors, pounded the pavement up to 14 hours a day, and wore out
three pairs of shoes on the hustings. My days were a whirlwind of early-morning glad handing at subway stops, visits to seniors' homes, and speaking engagements, as well as morning, afternoon, and evening canvasses. On a good day, I figured I hit 250 doorsteps. While many Tory MPPs didn't bother to show their faces on a single canvass throughout the 35 days, Mr. Hudak's predecessor and now Toronto mayor John Tory and a dozen city councillors more than made up for their apathy. Mr. Tory not only came out several times but e-mailed me messages throughout the campaign to keep up my spirits. His interest was very much appreciated and is something I'll never forget. Peter Shurman, then a fairly new MPP, joined me in canvassing as well, which turned out to be the beginning of a wonderful friendship and a true kinship when it comes to thinking what direction the PC Party of Ontario should take.

Former Toronto deputy mayor Doug Holyday, who lost his MPP seat in the Liberal rout of June 2014, helped me fend off an angry beer-drinking voter who shouted at us that Mike Harris had “raped and pillaged the province for eight years.” Councillor Frances Nunziata marched, all five feet of herself, into a nunnery, regaling the sisters about what a devout Catholic she was. Anything to score more votes! Ms. Nunziata didn't mention that I was gay. Good thing. The sister in charge blessed me as we left. Rob Ford, then a councillor and not yet Toronto's most controversial mayor, taught me how to get my signs on even traditional Liberal and NDP lawns. Denise, who joined me on a canvass whenever I called to say I missed her, quickly earned the reputation of being feistier and more persuasive at the doors than me. Her specialty was to knock on doors of houses with Liberal signs on their lawns to try to convince them that voting Liberal by rote wasn't really the way to
deal with the issues of the day. She talked up my background as a political journalist and got to be known as “the closer.”

The amalgamated city's first mayor, Mel Lastman, who once told me in a fit of pique (after I'd criticized his spending in a column) that I didn't “love Toronto,” spent a morning with me canvassing in Forest Hill village. He also gave me an idea for a press conference on the HST just before voting day – which I gladly used, especially considering my team wasn't all that creative with their campaign tactics. Assessing what would entice voters during the sleepy final days of summer was particularly where the party missed the boat. My handlers instructed me to focus on Premier McGuinty's proposed HST, which had been announced in the budget delivered in March of that year. Since that combined tax was not due to come into effect until July 2010, this by-election was to be treated as a kind of referendum on the combined tax and proposed exemptions from the tax – or so the PC Party thought. The HST issue dominated the literature my campaign team dropped at the doors. The PC Party caucus office schooled me extensively on the Tory party line about the HST and strongly suggested I stick to that platform.

But they misread urban voters and had no clue how to connect with them, much as they did in the election of 2014, when they stuck almost obsessively to their narrow focus on jobs and only jobs. I was not given any advice on how to deal with the constant questions I got at the doors about why the provincial Tories were not in sync with their federal counterparts – since their federal colleagues were the ones urging every province to combine the GST and their provincial sales taxes into one. So I started winging it, creating my own script about the fact that Mr. McGuinty did not take
into consideration possible exemptions to the HST on home heating oil and other services that would impact vulnerable Ontario residents.

But the Tim Hudak team truly showed their ignorance about Toronto issues when they made no mention in their briefings about the thirty-nine-day acrimonious garbage strike to which Mayor David Miller and the CUPE thugs had subjected the city. That strike was settled a mere two weeks before the writ was dropped for the St. Paul's by-election. What an excellent opportunity that would have been to capitalize on the stranglehold unions have on taxpayers in this province and how self-serving they are – considering, as the CUPE strike showed, how prepared all union bosses were to bring down an economy in order to maintain their unaffordable perks and runaway salaries. As was proven five years later in the election of 2014, the greedy, entitled unions are willing to do anything and say anything – including spending gazillions of dollars on attack ads – to fulfill their demands, even though those demands have driven and will continue to drive the province down the road of deep debt toward an economic situation like that of Greece or Detroit. And Ms. Wynne was and is prepared to pander to their demands. When it became obvious that St. Paul's residents wanted to talk garbage strike, the fallout for the city, and how much David Miller had let them down, again I improvised with my own script. I told people at the doors that I was Mr. Miller's staunchest critic and, more often than not, they responded that, for that reason alone, I'd get their vote. Whatever worked! My campaign team, not understanding that my name recognition might carry weight even in traditional NDP polls, declared that certain pockets of the riding were the “badlands” and it was not
worth wasting my time canvassing there. But I insisted that I try, choosing to cover streets in the far western edges of the riding and to canvass the shops along St. Clair, which had been hard hit by the seven-year construction of the grossly over budget hundred-million-dollar-plus dedicated streetcar line. I surprised everyone by nabbing Tory blue sign locations in the midst of a sea of NDP orange and winning at least one poll in this traditionally NDP area. Unfortunately there were those intransigents who'd always voted Liberal and would do so to their dying days, no matter how much the party took advantage of them. While out campaigning with me one Friday evening, my dear
Sun
colleague Zen Ruryk asked one forty-something voter, out of frustration, why he would support the Liberals and what specifically they had done for him or Toronto lately. I laughed when the man couldn't answer Zen's question. One ninety-year-old lady told me when I knocked on her door that while I seemed like a nice, intelligent woman, she'd always voted Liberal and wasn't about to change for me.