Worst Behaviour: Apparently You Can Use Slurs in Toronto Now

Courtesy Rob Ford's Twitter. 

By Anupa Mistry

From the outside, Toronto seems like a utopia: the world’s greatest rapper calls this city home (that’s Drake, if you haven't been paying attention), gay couples are free to get married, our healthcare system is beleaguered but subsidized, and our film festival is a barometer for Oscars. Torontonians are a happy clash of cultures; almost half the population are native speakers of another language. Vogue recently named our bustling Queen West the second hippest neighbourhood in the world. THE WORLD, YOU GUYS. VOGUE.

But in the tense run-up to the municipal election later this month, there’s been a lot of drama that exposes the conservative, xenophobic face of this city’s power elites. Two female candidates, both women of colour, have publicly come forward about incidents of basic bullying hate rhetoric directed at them online and IRL, some originating from self-professed members of the ill-defined, amorphous mob known as Ford Nation.

Ah yes, so Toronto also has this mayor, whom you’ve probably heard of— and definitely laughed at. Observers of all stripes, from newspaper columnists to sidewalk Sallys, attributed RoFo’s electoral success to a platform built on outer borough discontent on the narrative of a bougie, fast-gentrifying, pedestrian and cycle-friendly downtown core that stood in direct opposition to humble, hard-working, average people. Rob’s very suss M.O. was to paint the city’s core—Manhattanizing fast, in part because of pro-business types like himself—as a wealthy, artsy-fartsy enclave guzzling a disproportionate share of the City’s fiscal resources. It also skirted over his record of boorish racism and outright homophobia.

To Ford, courting poor and/or brown constituents meant offering fast fixes while consistently, singularly voting against social policies that could directly benefit those communities across the city. His drug scandal has disproportionately impacted the communities and families connected to his dealer transactions. He refuses to acknowledge Pride. When Rob’s team announced that his cancer diagnosis was the end to his appalling stewardship of this city, a lot of people breathed a sigh of relief; surely this would be the end of Ford for Toronto. But in stepped big brother Doug Ford, with his steely death stare and watchful bull terrier stance, to announce he’d be leveraging political sympathy and antipathy toward the Ford family to run in baby bro’s stead. The deplorable, beyond surreal saga of the tenure of Mayor Rob Ford just got even more unbelievable, and that means that coming municipal election on October 27th is as locally anticipated—and as crucial, on a macro-level—as Obama ’08.

But the impact of this election should be felt beyond just who gets voted mayor and who gets voted into ward councilor positions (analysis has shown that the incumbency rate is high, at 90%), because over the past two weeks things have gotten really ugly. Kristyn Wong-Tam, a queer Chinese-Canadian councillor for the bustling Toronto Centre-Rosedale ward, and something of a media sweetheart, recently received an anonymous letter (sent from a ‘Ford Nation supporter’) filled with a bunch of racist, sexist and homophobic crap. I don’t need to repeat what was said because it pretty much amounts to geospecific YouTube trolling—it’s the same unsophisticated, fear-filled wailing that dominates Internet comment sections.

Around the same time, mayoral candidate Olivia Chow, also Chinese-Canadian, began to experience and public acknowledge a rise in racist and sexist bullying, both online and IRL. A recent investigation by the Toronto Star found Chow’s team had removed almost 1,800 “racist, sexist and other offensive posts” since announcing her campaign in March. Just last week at a community debate, open mic time was sabotaged in order to publicly fling xenophobic garbage at Chow.

Chow and Wong-Tam aren’t the only women of colour currently campaigning for political office— young women like Munira Abukar, Idil Burale and Suzanne Naraine are also angling for councilor status—but they’re a significant minority amidst all of the dudely vibes of local governance. And Chow represents the first serious mayoral bid by a non-white candidate (period) since Carolann Wright-Parks ran in 1988.

Candidates of colour are consistently questioned on their capacity to lead or portrayed as pandering to their ethnic communities, when the reality is that everyone does it—even our Prime Minister. Add being a woman to that and you’ve erected a candidate specific hurdle that the straight white men running for office are able to gleefully glide past (because they make all the rules, duh).

The sexist, anti-ethnic, anti-diversity diversion that is plaguing Toronto’s recent municipal election isn’t just an overt warning sign that things are really fucking amiss at a very high level – it’s also a missed opportunity for political opponents to be leaders and rally around Wong-Tam and Chow and take an actual stand against the ideas that make this city great. No one is saying we have to vote in Chow or Wong-Tam or Burale or even Andray Domise, the phenomenal, Diddy-loving opponent facing off against the Ford family for Ward 2 councilor, but taking lateral strides to dissuade this kind of public harassment and discrimination wouldn’t just be setting a great example— it’d be upholding the Canadian Charter of Rights.

It’s important to note that this isn’t the first time a municipal election in Toronto was marred by hate: in 2010, mayoral candidate George Smitherman was the recipient of a ton of homophobic propaganda. The Ford bros. project of confusing hard-right stupidity for populism has stoked a fire in the rapidly diluting fabric of Old (Straight, White) Toronto, but directly attributing these ideas to some freak fringe of the city serves to distract from the fact that it’s this freak fringe that is in power. Despite the fact Toronto’s entire PR angle is that it’s this diverse utopia, mainstream institutions are pitifully indicative of that breadth. I mean, there’s a reason Drake had to go stateside to make it.

This piece was published in conjunction with The Hairpin, a place on the internet to read smart things, often by women. 

Caste Your Vote: On Who's Allowed to Take Part

By Desmond Cole

For the past six years, I’ve been hosting a public conversation about citizenship and inclusion as project coordinator of City Vote, an effort to extend municipal voting rights to all permanent residents of Canada. Support for the initiative, while on the rise, is still lukewarm at best. A 2013 poll determined that just over half of Toronto residents are opposed to the idea – an improvement from my early days on the campaign, but still surprising in a city where half of the inhabitants were born abroad. Last year Toronto city council endorsed a motion on permanent resident voting by  21-20, the narrowest of margins (the city has asked the province, who has the final say on the issue, to consider it).

City Vote supporters often ask me why people oppose giving non-citizens the local vote. While I don’t have a complete answer, I’m convinced that the presumed supremacy of our country’s British parliamentary democracy is an important factor. The British colonized this land and imposed their system of government, not only on all those who would come after them, but on the people who were already here. The treatment of Canada’s indigenous people as outsiders, as aspirants to British civilization, can teach us a lot about the struggle to enfranchise today’s non-citizen immigrants.

When people object to City Vote’s mission, they cite reasons they feel are practical and almost unquestionable: that non-citizens do not understand Canadian history, society and culture; that they have not demonstrated the proper loyalty; that giving non-citizens a vote would devalue the votes of citizens; that non-citizens value other things above voting, and therefore have no use for it.

All of these arguments were made about indigenous people as Canada established and amended its voting regimes. All of them rely on the apparent superiority of our current form of government, and by extension, the superiority of the white British elites who established it and used their power to categorize and regulate all non-whites.

When Canada held its first federal election in 1867, the country’s diverse indigenous inhabitants were not included; with few exceptions, the same was true for the provincial and municipal elections that preceded and followed Confederation. At first, most jurisdictions saw no need to make rules for prohibiting indigenous voters, who were assumed to be government property. But in 1865, British Columbia explicitly banned “Indians and Chinese” from voting in its elections. Even before Canada became a country, “Indians,” whose land the British had taken as their own, were excluded alongside “Chinese,” who had migrated to work or trade. 

In 1885, Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, argued that Chinese people were not fit to vote because they possessed "no British instincts or British feelings or aspirations.”

“The Chinese are not like the Indians, sons of the soil. They come from a foreign country; they have no intent, as a people of making a domicile of any portion of Canada…. They are, besides, natives of a country where representative institutions are unknown, and I think we cannot safely give them the elective franchise.”

— Sir John A. Macdonald

Macdonald’s fear that people raised under foreign governments couldn’t be trusted is, sadly, still with us. Likewise, for the indigenous “sons of the soil,” Macdonald and Parliament had created the Indian Act, to regulated their day-to-day existence. Parliament had also provided in 1868 for “voluntary enfranchisement”, a system which gave indigenous people the right to vote if they agreed to renounce their status as Indians. Professor Larry Gilbert has written that enfranchisement was “based on the theory that aboriginal peoples in their natural state were uncivilized. Once an aboriginal person acquired the skills, the knowledge and the behavior valued by civilized society, the aboriginal person might qualify for citizenship."

The arbitrary classification of today’s immigrants, who are encouraged to graduate into civilized Canadian citizens before being granted the privilege of voting, is nothing new. Rules about voting have been applied differently to different groups of people, and race has always been a defining factor.

Ahyouwaighs, or John Brant. Painting by Charles Bird King.

Take the example of John Brant, an indigenous man who was elected to the Upper Canada Assembly, but whose election was subsequently nullified. As professor Veronica Strong-Boag wrote in 2002, “lease-holding, the proprietorship said to exist on Native reserves, was held not to count as property for the purpose of suffrage. Thus many of Brant's supporters were disenfranchised."

While indigenous people’s property rights were said not to count, the rights of white British subjects were upheld, and were sometimes even accepted in spite of the rules. As recently as 1969, British subjects who had lived in Canada for a year were eligible to vote, even South African citizens, although the country left the Commonwealth in 1961. Not by coincidence, South Africa has long contained Africa’s largest percentage of white inhabitants.

Today, there are no voting exemptions for property holders who are not Canadian citizens. As Ryerson professor Myer Siemiatycki has pointed out, Toronto’s municipal voter’s list includes property owners who are not residents of Toronto, but are still extended the right to vote, if they are citizens. Meanwhile, Siemiatycki notes, non-citizen property holders who do live here (and pay taxes here, and send their kids to school here, and otherwise contribute to and use the city) are excluded from voting at any level of government.

Before 1971, almost 80 per cent of immigrants to Canada were European – in other words, white. Between 2006 and 2011 more than 80 per cent of immigrants came from Asia, African, the Caribbean, and Central and South America.

As the makeup of our country has changed, so have restrictions for voting rights. For more than a century, proof of property rights, residency and taxation were good enough to allow British subjects to vote at the local level. Today, citizenship is the new standard for today’s mostly racialized immigrants. Yet non-citizen British subjects could vote in municipal elections until 1985 in Ontario; they retained the municipal vote in Nova Scotia until 2007.

We must also remember that other classes of non-citizen residents – temporary foreign workers, refugees, student visa holders, and people without any documentation – are not part of the current conversation to extend voting rights. Indeed, the mere mention of these groups, particularly undocumented people, is a non-starter for politicians.

So it was with indigenous people in the early days of Confederation, when politicians like Conservative George Foster had to assure his colleagues that enfranchisement was not meant for all indigenous people: “it is not the intention nor is it in the power of this Bill to enfranchise the wild hordes of savage Indians all over the Dominion.”

The fact that we can even have a conversation about non-citizen voting proves that we have made great strides towards a more inclusive country. But the continued resistance to change is based on an outdated and ultimately racist view that outsiders, particularly racialized ones, must prove their allegiance to a British system founded on assumptions of white supremacy.

During the 1885 debates on electoral reform, Liberal MP Peter Mitchell stated, “I would give to everyone who has assumed the same position as the white man, who places himself in a position to contribute towards the general revenues of the country, towards maintaining the institutions of the country the right to vote.” Although few today would be so blunt, the same attitude applies. 

The Meaning of Chow

By Kelli Korducki

“I'm not male. Not white. Want to start there?”

This was how, in an April Twitter chat, Olivia Chow fielded a question from Toronto Star reporter Daniel Dale on how she might politically distinguish herself from the Miller years. A non-answer on the policy level, Chow's response touched on questions that had been bubbling since well before she announced her candidacy.

From the moment city chatter settled into election mode—roughly sometime between Crackgate and early 2014—there was speculation over whether Chow could rally the Chinese communities in Scarborough and North York to tip the vote in her favour. As Ethnic Aisle contributor Simon Yau pointed out in Toronto Life, Ford's fiscal conservativism can be an appealing sell for practical-minded Chinese immigrants like his parents, who prioritize hard work and self-sufficiency over expanding municipal services through tax hikes. But Yau explained his parents weren't necessarily opposed to voting for Chow: “She's Chinese,” he noted, “and that may be enough.” Maybe something as simple as ethnic solidarity would bring a definitive end to any hope of Ford More Years.

And so we have Chow: the only not-male, not-white frontrunner for the mayoralty. As of the most recent polls, it looks increasingly likely that she'll be bested in this race by the very male, and quintessentially white John Tory.

The scare-quoted “ethnic vote” is something we've touched on here at the Ethnic Aisle, in the context of white candidates clumsily trumpeting inclusivity in exchange for ballots. But the meaning of the term changes when the candidate in question is herself an ethnic minority, for whom being “down” with ethnic communities is perhaps more than an obligatory performance.

While Chow hasn't explicitly positioned herself as a minority candidate (how that would even take shape is anybody's guess), her first major campaign fundraiser was held at a dim sum banquet in Scarborough, where Chinese community leaders sung her praises to a receptive crowd using both Cantonese and Mandarin. Chow also adopted Toronto's newly introduced 437 area code in order to secure a triple-eight number sequence in her campaign's official phone number; in Chinese culture, the number eight, and triple eights especially, are seen as arbiters of good fortune.

And yet there has been little talk of Chow potentially becoming Toronto's first non-white mayor, or what that would signify for the ethnically diverse city she would represent. In the meantime, the “anyone but Ford” cabal is evacuating her camp faster than if a hurricane personally knocked on every one of their front doors. Maybe she's too progressive or not progressive enough; maybe it's a question of charisma. Or, maybe—and here we can all share a communal wince—it's “not-white, not-male” that's the sticking point. Slurs have been hurled (“Go back to China!” at a recent debate by a Ford-supporting heckler); her accented English hasn’t gone undiscussed. Still, there's no real way of knowing whether Chow's ethnicity has helped or hindered her mayoral campaign. We can only presume that it's done both, and almost certainly one more than the other, but we're left to gut feelings and educated guesses to determine which—and, well, neither one of these research methods is exactly scientific.

What we do know is that the past four years—the past Ford years—have been a boon to bigotry. We're well beyond the point of pretending the mayor has any possibility of redeeming himself from his demonstrated misogyny, his racism, his homophobia. These behaviours have left a starker stain on the Ford mayoralty than his obstinacy or self-destructive appetites.

Worse than the unflattering light they've cast on our entire city, the past four years have been shot through with the kind of hatefulness that's viscerally painful to confront head-on. Whether or not we were complicit in Ford's election, we were all unwittingly signed up for his reality show in 2010. It's easier to avert the collective gaze than to dwell on the magnitude of Ford's ignorance, and the stranger-than-fiction plot points of his reign have done a good job of distracting from its ugliness.

Chow is the anti-Ford, and not only because she occupies a space on the opposite end of the political spectrum. The reality is much grimmer: as a woman of colour, she is the embodiment of all that our mayor disregards. Her sheer personhood defies the politician a majority of voters selected to represent our city four years ago. That's a tough pill to chew, and an even tougher one to swallow.  

Is Zoning Racist? Does It Have to Be?

By John Michael McGrath

In a mayoral race that seems scripted by Twilight Zone screenwriters, it's sometimes difficult to remember all the minor and semi-major insanity along the way. One event in particular is likely only to be remembered by the hardest of hard-core nerds: the departure of campaign strategist Warren Kinsella from his quasi-official role with the Olivia Chow campaign. That's a shame, because Kinsella's exit from the race spoiled the chance to talk about some important elements of Toronto's policies.

In late August Kinsella was shown the door, if not pushed through it, after commenting that John Tory's transit plans wouldn't serve Toronto's priority neighbourhoods, which are de facto concentrations of visible minorities and poverty. “Is John Tory's SmartTrack, you know, Segregationist Track?” asked Kinsella, who quickly retracted and apologized. Perhaps in part because many Torontonians realized the accuracy of Kinsella's accusation, Tory has since amended his transit plan to unequivocally (as of publication time) include the already planned Sheppard and Finch LRTs, which would serve the neighbourhoods in question.

IIt's a shame that Kinsella made the accusation too ineptly for the Chow camp to exploit it. A real debate about the role of the City-as-government in making the city-as-place more welcoming and affordable for minorities is dearly needed. Moreover, Toronto's political left needs to acknowledge its role in building an increasingly exclusive, unaffordable city just as much as the right.

The facts are distressingly familiar: Toronto is increasingly stratified by income, race and class. We've known this at least since the Three Cities report in 2010. It's happening in a lot of places that fancy themselves “global cities,” including New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

The problem is well known and relatively well understood. The poor and working class are increasingly pushed to the economic and physical periphery of our cities while wealth floods back into newly desirable downtowns. Anyone who remembers what Kensington Market was like 15 years ago knows how dramatic this change can be. The harder question is what to do about it, because all the tools of your standard, 21st-century municipal government are designed to make it worse.

Building high-capacity transit into poor neighbourhoods may simply gentrify the poor out of them—unless we make high-capacity transit so abundant that easy access isn't a luxury. Affordable housing is an excellent idea and we need more of it, but don't kid yourself: municipal governments like building affordable housing in theory but are often unwilling to do so in practice. In Ottawa, a recently restored development charge for affordable housing was suspended because council was letting the money build up in the city's accounts without actually spending it. The City of Toronto has seen major cuts from the provincial and federal governments, which is a legitimate shame, but hasn't used its own levers to make up the difference either. There are plenty of political obstacles to actually spending money on social housing: housing money competes against other priorities like balanced budgets; developers and landlords can be leery of government interference; and cities are sometimes faced with the Hobson's choice of either making housing affordable or fighting homelessness (related, but not identical problems).

We get closer to the answer when we talk about “Inclusionary Zoning.” An increasingly popular measure on the left, IZ lets cities require that a certain number of units within a large development be affordable housing for low-income people, sometimes even artists. (NDP MPP Cheri DiNovo has repeatedly proposed expanding Ontario's planning law in this way, to no avail.) Here too, much good can be done but we often run aground on details. Witness the controversy around “poor doors” in New York, where the residents lucky enough to make it into affordable housing are given separate entrances from the people paying market rent. A development in Toronto's been accused of having a similar entrance. In at least one redevelopment, low-income residents requested separate entrances—to screw with our outrage, obviously.

However, municipal politicians of all stripes are loath to admit what the IZ concept implies: that the traditional urban planning, which makes up the bulk of city halls' work, is designed to be exclusionary in the literal sense. Right now, planning means keeping certain people away from certain places.

We dress that up in a number of ways, by fretting about “neighbourhood character” or “overdevelopment”, but the reality is that our planning laws function as tools for people who already own homes, as weapons against everyone who doesn't.

There's an interesting case in Thornhill, where a builder wants to develop shops and condo towers around an existing community centre marketed towards Muslims. The locals in the predominantly Jewish neighbourhood are vehemently opposed. Even if you assume there's no sectarian angle here (and for the record, the locals say their problem is density and overbuilding, not the faith of their prospective neighbours) there's a basic question of whose rights are paramount: the incumbent property owners, or a rapidly growing community which owns a parcel of land they'd like to have homes and shops on.

Should the would-be developers have to go elsewhere to spare their would-be neighbours the irritation? At least as importantly, where should they go? The GTA's greenbelt contains sprawl, thankfully, but also increases competition for the land within its bounds. The 21st century is going to be one of growing acrimony over already-settled urban space, instead of the 20th-century sprawl that was environmentally destructive but politically easy.

Multiply these decisions by thousands per year, and the segregation and stratification of our cities starts to seem less like a policy mystery and more like the obvious outcome of our preferences. Councillors and activists on both the left and right enjoy the catharsis of railing against greedy developers, and don't trouble themselves with the collateral damage of people who, unable to find single-family homes they can afford in an area they like, make do with higher prices and fewer choices.

The solutions aren't obvious, but most of them start with cities getting over their love of urban taxidermy and building more, and none of them start with freezing development, as seductive as that is to some. Not one of the US's expensive metros got that way because it built a lot of housing. Building more is also good for minorities. In the US, cities where building is easy tend to be less racially segregated. We can see this in the GTA, where cities that grew rapidly during particular waves of immigration have been reshaped by them (e.g. Brampton and South Asians, Markham and the Chinese). In New York, the Satmar Jewish community has managed to develop a ton of affordable housing because they're politically savvy enough to get the city to clear out the thicket of regulations.

One common objection to development is that fast-growing US cities may not be as racially segregated, but they can be segregated by wealth. However, the Pew Research survey that foundHouston to be the most wealth-segregated city didn't attribute the income inequality to growth. Given that income inequality is increasing in both fast- and slow-growing cities, that would be a hard case to make. And if you find income segregation distasteful in your city, consider that for many minorities, the alternative offered by slow-growing cities isn't the diverse neighbourhoods of a Jane Jacobs fairy tale: it's the impossibility of actually moving out of bad neighbourhoods. This American Life has the essay-length treatment of this, or you can listen to Chris Rock.

Growth doesn't need to mean the Manhattanization of Toronto (though I'm basically ambivalent about the height of buildings.) We could accomplish a lot by allowing streets of bungalows and detached homes to be rezoned for three-storey townhouses. And If you look around this city, you'll find plenty of old streets where three- and four-storey apartment buildings have long since become urban wallpaper—though they were thought to herald the end of the world back when the building permits were issued. As a bonus, building more affordable family-sized homes across the city instead of in a handful of condo clusters would help preserve Toronto's public schools.

For advanced credit, we could look at solutions like Germany's baugruppen, where in some cases as few as a dozen families have financed their own modest-but-dense developments with the help of decent, imaginative, progressive public policy.

Building more housing won't solve all the ills faced by the disenfranchised urban minorities, not by a long shot. It has nothing to say about racist policing or the shrinking middle class. But current policies are making thing worse than they need to and are justified with claims that don't stand up to evidence. We need to dismiss any argument that says we can have our cake and eat it, too: preserving the city in amber results in exactly the stratification we've seen. The point isn't to drop highrises everywhere, but to recognize that the status quo is unsustainable. The first step to building a city where we welcome anyone is to make room for everyone.

Toronto vs. Montreal: Ethnic Edition

By Supriya Dwivedi

I moved to Toronto from Montreal in the spring of 2013. The city was just coming to grips with the possibility that Rob Ford was abusing crack cocaine, and everybody I met had an opinion on the mayor, civic affairs, and the state of Toronto. Nuance was out the window: Ford was either the root of all conservative evil or an everyman’s hero just  trying to stick up for the little guy. My own opinion was one of muted bewilderment. It was very hard for this newcomer to grasp how someone with Mayor Ford’s history and record was elected with 47 per cent of the vote. 

It was refreshing to meet so many people who were engaged in spirited political discussion and committed to making their city a better place. The dissimilarity to Montreal in this regard was quite striking. Before the Charbonneau Commission over allegedly corrupt awarding of public construction contracts made it possible for Montrealers to speak openly about collusion around dinner tables and water coolers, few people found municipal politics worthy of much attention.

There was another aspect of life here that was quite unlike Montreal. From my very first day living in Toronto, the city’s diversity has been patently clear. The couples and groups around me at movie theatres and restaurants were rarely racially or ethnically homogenous. It was nice to live and work in a place where I didn’t have to explain that I needed to take a couple of days off for my sister’s wedding: everybody already knew what an Indian wedding entailed.

When I spoke about this difference, I was usually met with a look of pity, followed by comments along the lines of how awful living in Quebec must have been for my family. After all, everyone knows that Quebec, even Montreal, is a racist, and intolerant cesspool.  Get this: I actually did not grow up in Montreal, but in the town of Granby, about an hour east of the city in rural Quebec. Sometimes telling people this elicits audible gasps. People look at me as if I said I had grown up in Ferguson, Missouri. 

One of the greatest misconceptions regarding Quebec made by Torontonians – and let’s be honest, the Rest Of Canada– is that Quebecers are by and large an intolerant people. The data, however, indicates otherwise: racist attitudes are no more prevalent in Quebecthan in the rest of the country. Statistics Canada’s own figures indicate that racially and ethnically motivated hate crimes are more commonplace in Ontario, Alberta, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and British Columbia than in Quebec. Even during the the debate over the Parti Québécois’ Charter of Quebec Values (and its egregious suggestions as to what people should do about their hijabs or kippahs), pollsters found again and again that the attitudes within the rest of Canada towards religious accommodation were only slightly more open than in Quebec. (Which makes much more sense when you factor in Quebec’s practice of interculturalism and the French notion of laïcité, i.e. public secularity.) 

There was not a single day in my life growing up in Granby that I was faced with racism; ignorant comments about language, sure, but never racist. But the first time I went canvassing for former Toronto mayoral candidate David Soknacki, a voter referred to me as a “paki” and mayoral candidate Olivia Chow as a “chink.” Over the course of several months canvassing and talking to voters after debates or all candidate meetings, I heard my fair share of racial slurs. I am dismayed to imagine what Ms. Chow has had to bear. 

Initially, I was stunned into speechlessness that racial epithets were being used to describe me in 2014 Toronto. Over time, however, the casual racism became a part of campaign life, along with sleep deprivation and stress eating. Perhaps the oddest part of all this is the fact that many of those who referred to me as one of the “coloureds” weren’t actually doing so in contempt. More than once I was asked why I wasn’t working for Rob Ford. “He’s the only one that cares about the coloureds." Being referred to as a coloured person by middle aged Caucasian men while they touted Rob Ford’s white saviour complex as evidence of his commitment to racialized people was not exactly how I had envisioned campaigning in the fourth largest city in North America.

No, my sample size of one doesn’t result in hard conclusions on the comparative sociological underpinning of race relations in Canada’s urban centres. But having lived in both Montreal and Toronto, this is how I see it: At least Montrealers wholeheartedly acknowledge that the city, and Quebec, are constantly fraught with linguistic tension. In Toronto, lip-service pride in our multicultural heritage hasn’t changed the monochromatic makeup of the media, opinion leaders, judiciary or, of course, City Council. Perhaps it’s about time Torontonians realized that we’re not the accepting, diverse utopia that we pretend to be.

Toronto’s First Black Female (Almost) Mayor: An Interview with Carolann Wright-Parks

By Jaime Woo

In 1988, community organizer Carolann Wright-Parks became the first black woman to run for mayor of Toronto, against incumbent Art Eggleton. Born and raised in Beechville, Nova Scotia, the oldest indigenous black community in Canada, Wright-Parks had lived in Toronto for nearly a decade when she ran. She finished second in a field of nine with 24,479 votes, or 17.4 per cent. (Eggleton won with 64.9 per cent of the vote.) Wright-Parks was always realistic about the purpose of the campaign—to drive awareness rather than to win—but she nonetheless made history.

Her campaign was part of a string of elections that saw women land in second place, before the six years between 1991 and 1997 that Toronto was led by June Rowlands and Barbara Hall.

She was also the first and last visible contender of colour until Olivia Chow, a unfathomable quarter of a century later. Drawing direct comparisons is unhelpful: Chow is a career politician, Wright-Parks was not; Chow is running post-amalgamation, Wright-Parks faced only old town; and Wright-Parks challenged an incumbent expected to win, unlike the three-ring Ford circus. Yet, in her own words, Wright-Parks calls it "very shocking" that there have been few viable candidates of colour since her run.

In 1994, Wright-Parks returned to Halifax. She is now the Director of Community Economic Development and Strategic Engagement at the Greater Halifax Partnership. The following excerpts are from an interview done with Wright-Parks at the end of August.

 It’s not meant as direct commentary on the current election. Instead, it is an occasion to look at our city’s past, and reflect on how some things have stayed the same.

ON ANNOUNCING HER RUN

“I was not expecting to run. I'm an organizer, not usually a frontperson. It was purely the community who said, ‘Look, we'd appreciate if you did this because it would highlight the issues that we work so hard from day to day. It would give a face to the issues of anti-poverty.' I had no political experience at that time (but now I understand that that doesn't matter!) and was not politically sophisticated at all, but I knew what the agenda was.

“When I first announced, there was a pause because I don't think a black woman had ever ran before. A black man had been in city council in the 1800's at some point a long time ago (William Peyton Hubbard, a City of Toronto Alderman from 1894 to 1914) but I think I was the first black woman who had ever run, period. So, there was some pause, like 'is it serious?'

ON CANDIDATES FROM MARGINALIZED COMMUNITIES

“In politics you realize how candidates get beaten up even in the running. Your business is all out there, and it is what it is. For marginalized communities, when all your business is out there, it's very hard to concentrate on what you're trying to do when people are questioning your lifestyle.

“Like with black candidates: ‘They're only gonna represent black people.’ I got that a lot. That we're always corrupt and the racism around that. When volunteers were canvassing for me, people would go, "Oh, I'm not voting for her. She's only going to represent black people." My sisters, who went canvassing, heard that and were completely shocked. You get marginalized about who you're going to represent.

“I'd say, ‘Of course I am, but that's not going to stop me from representing you. This is why I'm running. I'm supposed to bring another dimension to the position of office in terms of understanding who I represent—it's a value-add.’

“If you're a black person, people make the mistake of saying, ‘I'm not here to represent black people. I represent everybody.’ But you are representing your community. I was representing a segment of my community. That's the reality of it. I never apologized for that.

ON THE MAIN ISSUES DURING HER CAMPAIGN

“During that period there was a lot of police violence against young black men. The issue of race in Toronto was extremely volatile, particularly about policing. And, if you were a poor single mother in the system, and God forbid you were black, people thought it was okay to treat you a particular way. We had to not only address this in the campaign in a practical way, but get it on the Mayor's agenda.

“Young people growing up in Regent Park and St. Lawrence and surrounding areas in the city did not vote. They did not care and were not interested because they felt they were not cared about either. I think people were at that particular time fed up with the dismissiveness around low-income communities and homelessness: things that were just not on the Mayor's agenda at that time. We wanted to let people know their voice counted. It counted on election night.

“The voter turnout was excellent during that campaign because we spent time in communities doing things that were not traditionally done in civic campaigns. I never really thought about [winning] at that time to be perfectly honest with you. We were so focused on the campaign issues.”

ON HOW TO HANDLE DISCUSSIONS OF RACE

“The way that we had been approaching it, people become really defensive and it shuts down the whole conversation. People want to protect what they have, and it becomes me-versus-you, us-versus-them type of scenario. I can paint a picture for you all day in terms of how racism affects my life but I want it to change so how do I create that opportunity for you to do that self-examination and to realize the impact of that? It flips the conversation a bit.

“How you begin is not trying to change their worldview, but to ask the proper questions so that people begin to examine it for themselves, and to challenge themselves around how they see the world and why particular worldviews hold other people hostage.

“When you tell me that you don't see colour, that is not a sophisticated or accurate analysis of the situation because you are seeing colour. You decided by saying that it doesn't matter—you decided that, but it does matter.

“How did you derive that? What do you believe? Questioning beliefs and values: how did you arrive here so that you believe this is true?”

To read the whole interview, go here.

Built Ford Tough: Ward 2 candidate Andray Domise

By Adwoa Afful

Ethnic Aisle: On your blog you define yourself, among other things, as an activist.  How do you define that term and how has that changed since running for council?

Andray Domise: I’ve been agitating for civic engagement for a very long time. Usually it’s in the form of get-out-and-vote efforts around election days. What troubles me the most is the level of apathy that I run into when I speak to the African-Canadian community, specifically the Caribbean-Canadian one: “there is no point, nothing is ever going to change, why bother.” We make up 8 percent of Toronto’s population. If we actually woke up and used the voices that God gave us and used the voting rights that we have, we can actually see a lot of changes happen in Toronto.

EA: Throughout your campaign you have been pretty vocal about issues related to systemic racism that African-Canadian communities face.  What are some the challenges in talking about systemic racism so openly?

AD: The challenges in talking about race aren’t actually challenging. From my perspective, people tend to like honesty. If I, as a Black candidate, am not willing to speak openly and frankly about what systemic racism does, what stereotyping and prejudice does, the damage that, for example, the chief magistrate of our city [does when] calling our young people “niggers,” and “thugs” and “fucking minorities,” if I can’t be honest about the damage that that’s causing, then I’m just remaining silent in the face of evil. [From] my perspective it’s not hard to talk about this stuff. I didn’t get into this necessarily to just get myself elected, but to try to change the political conversation that we’re having in Toronto, which to me is toxic and it’s self-defeating. [The]  part that’s a little disheartening is that people from within my own community are saying “you need to tone it down, you gotta to dial it back,  don’t be so harsh, don’t be so forward, you gotta take your time.” If this isn’t the time for us to have this conversation, when exactly is that going to happen?

Andray Domise on the campaign trail. Image taken from his Twitter account. 

EA: Why do you think that there is backlash when you talk about race from members within your own community?

AD: Because we’re frightened and afraid and a lot of us are cowards. A lot of us are afraid that if we speak about this stuff openly that there is going to be a backlash. James Baldwin once said the only time that non-violence in America is praised is when a negro practices it.  We tell ourselves it’s not okay to speak openly and honestly our experiences because we might make people uncomfortable.

EA: So do you see yourself as a lightning rod in this campaign, as the person who’s going to help agitate or reverse that pattern of apathy within the African-Canadian community in Ward 2?

AD: There are people like Idil Burale running in Ward 1, and she’s facing an uphill battle against Vince Crisanti. Idil is so amazing, she’s on the Somali liaison unit for 23 division, to help foster a better relationship between Rexdale police and the Somali community. And I look at somebody like Lekan Olawoye running in Ward 12 against John Nunziata, Kegan Henry Mathews who’s fighting an uphill battle against Giorgio Mammoliti. These people are doing the work by themselves, they’re doing it alone. The fact is if you have a problem with the way that we’re treated in the city and the way that we’re represented, it’s up to you to get your ass up off your chair and do something.

EA: You brought up Idil Burale who is running for council in Ward 1, and has worked to create initiatives that addresses issues like police carding, which disproportionately affects Black Torontonians. Would you ever consider collaborating with other councillors on initiatives meant to address issues that affect African-Canadian communities across Toronto?

AD:  Absolutely! Etobicoke North has the highest diagnosis rate for type 2 diabetes for young people for all of Canada. That’s because there is a lack of access to recreational facilities, lack of access to nutritional foods, lack of access to transportation and that has led us to have very sedentary and junk food laden lifestyles and diets. It affects the South Asian community also, but you know it’s magnified on us, it affects white people in the Ward, but it’s magnified on us.

EA: Your background is in insurance and you worked for large companies like SunLife Financial, and you talk a lot about proposing business based solutions to address some of the issues facing Ward 2. How can the business sector or the private sector help address some of the issues you’re campaigning on?

AD: We have a ton of green space and a ton of undeveloped land, you don’t even have to have a business background per se, you can simply take a look around. It’s a very, very undeveloped area. Development skipped over Etobicoke altogether and headed over to Mississauga. I was just over at Square One yesterday, and there is just so much development happening. Because they had all that open real estate Mayor Hazel McCallion saw this and said “we’re going to build right here,” and they’ve been at that work for the last 20 years and it’s amazing how much change has happened.

What really makes me sad about that is that the Applewood area of Mississauga is a very low-income area. You can compare it to Rexdale in a lot of ways, in the sense that it’s lower income and very, very diverse. You could do the exact same kind of work in Rexdale. You could have a partnership with those developers to say “look, if you want to build here that’s great, but what you’re going to do is provide neighbourhood services, green spaces, public spaces, rec centres, better access to transportation.”

EA: You have also talked eloquently about the stigma that surrounds Rexdale and other communities in Ward 2, as a result of being designated as a priority area.  What do you think the rest of Toronto has to learn from the communities in Rexdale?

AD: Churches and charities, they’re the glue that holds this neighbourhood together. People may not be politically active, but they are socially and consciously active, in the sense that they want the best for themselves and their neighbours. There are people who volunteer at the Rexdale community health centre, Pathways to Education, [and] churches. My own church, for example, before school starts we'll go and knock on doors in our neighbourhood and hand out $50 gift cards to Staples to make sure that people who don’t have enough money to get back to school supplies for their kids at least have something.  We have done the hard work of filling in the gap that our political classes refuse to fill. And something that I am really proud of is that we come together as a community in times of need and make sure that we provide for each other.

EA: What is your favourite spot in Rexdale, where do you go to chill or where do you go to re energize yourself?

AD: During the summertime, Pine Point is a really awesome place, and I just like to go jogging up there, or take the car up and read a book. The Humber trails are some of the best walking trails that you’ll find in Toronto. The amount of parks and trails that we have here in Rexdale is amazing.