As candidates enter the final weeks of their bids for mayor, the polls put Olivia Chow far ahead of her hundred-plus competitors. From the archives: an inside look at her political ambitions
woke up with a strange feeling on the left side of her face. Her ear was also a little sore, but it had been like that for a week. It was only when she went to the mirror that she realized she couldn’t smile. Her skin drooped; she looked older and more tired. But she felt normal, thoughts whirring inside her head at the same pace as always. So she went right on with the phone interview on Newstalk 1010 she had scheduled for 7:30 a.m., before going to her family doctor.
Her condition also gave her time to think about the future. The most effective politicians are born strategists, always plotting several steps ahead. And the natural next step for Chow, her inner circle believes, is to become Toronto’s mayor. The polls back them up: in the weeks before Rob Ford won his appeal of the ruling that would have tossed him from office, Chow beat all potential opponents, including Ford. In one scenario, she took 40 per cent of the vote, Ford 35 and Adam Vaughan 13.
Layton was known within the party as the vision guy, and Chow the one who made the wheels turn. “He was the louder of the two, he was the orator, the one who spoke the truth,” says Bob Gallagher, who worked as Layton’s chief of staff. “Olivia was always the one who reached out to the middle-of-the-road folks and would craft the motion in a way that would actually bring people on board.”a biopic about Layton’s struggle with cancer, studded with flashbacks to his early years with Chow.
When I asked her what she felt were her major accomplishments in the last year, she pulled a list from her desk to tell me about them. She proposes private members’ bills often enough, but they get waylaid, for some reason or another, on their way to being passed. For example, she proposed a bill, prompted by the 2009 vigilante incident at the Lucky Moose Food Mart on Spadina, to give shop owners greater leeway to defend themselves.
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