It’s September 2014 and Olivia Chow, John Tory and Doug Ford are on a mayoral campaign debate stage.
A man yells from the crowd: “Go home Olivia. Go back to China!” Another added: “She’s Chinese, not Canadian.”
Tory and Ford said nothing as Chow declared to cheers: “I am a Canadian. I am a proud Torontonian.”
Almost a decade later, Chow is on the mayoral debate stage again, but it has looked very different. She is not the only one sharing their story of their family struggling and persevering as immigrants to Canada — Mark Saunders, Ana Bailão and Mitzie Hunter have proudly done the same.
To some, it has changed the tone and made for a campaign more reflective of a city that has never had a racialized mayor despite the majority of its residents being visible minorities and close to half of them being immigrants.
Toronto ready for a change in leadership
“I get this feeling that Toronto is ready for a change. We no longer want a cis, white male. I think we are ready to move on,” said Velma Morgan, chair of Operation Black Vote, a non-partisan, non-profit that supports the election of Black Canadians to public office. “A city that is so multicultural, that is so diverse — it is time that the leadership represents that.”
It’s not surprising that former Liberal MPP Hunter would agree it’s time for a different kind of leader. She’s been preparing herself for top jobs since university, taking the advice she got from Jean Augustine, the first African-Canadian MP, to be ready “when you get the call.”
She fought to get into boardrooms and then politics not just because “if you can see me, you can be me,” but because as a Black woman from Scarborough she said she could “see what had gone unseen for a long time” and needed to change.
Toronto election campaign reflects a different world
Hunter said this campaign does feel different in a post-pandemic, and post-George Floyd world.
And she has been energized by the love from her Jamaican-Canadian community during the election — noting that she was asked, no, summoned to see some Jamaican-Canadian seniors on a busy campaign day. “What they said resonated with me, and they deserve better. And I am going to carry that forward and I’m going to do something about it. That is what representation is.”
At the Operation Black Vote town hall earlier this month, the presence of six Black candidates on stage in a northwest Toronto hall allowed for a rare familiarity and connection with the audience and their specific concerns.
“Our community is not monolithic. We have so many diverse voices. We don’t say community anymore, we say the Black communities, because depending on when you came here, depending on if you came from Africa or the Caribbean or if you are sixth-generation we all have different lived experiences,” said Morgan.
Black candidates showed different perspectives
Hunter, Saunders, Caesar-Chavannes, Chloe Brown, Knia Singh and Rob Davis could show their different perspectives while knowing what it means to be Black in Toronto, she said. (Chow also attended the town hall, Bailão, Matlow and Bradford did not due to conflicts).
For former police chief Saunders in particular, it meant not just sharing how his mother would travel from Milton to Little Jamaica for food and beauty products, but also facing questions about a police-centric approach to public safety. The Toronto Police Service has acknowledged “systemic discrimination” in their use-of-force on Black Torontonians — something he says he has tried to address through better training and accountability measures like body cameras.
In an interview, Saunders said his journey from immigrant to first Black police chief in Toronto has resonated on the campaign trail and he is proud to run on creating “a level playing field” for the many immigrants coming to Toronto. Part of the job of the mayor is understanding the reality of Torontonians and translating it for city hall — something that you need lived experience to do, he said.
Mayoral candidates share stories of the immigrant experience
Ana Bailão has also been sharing her immigrant story during the campaign — something she didn’t always do.
“I thought, my story is just like everybody else’s,” she said. “But more and more I feel like it is important to share so other people can see themselves.”
Bailão had to grow up fast. She was 15 when her parents brought her and her sister to Canada from Portugal. None of them spoke English and she had to learn quickly so she could translate at parent-teacher interviews about her younger sister. Her grandmother made her promise to go to university, she said, displaying her grandmother’s ring she always wears on her right hand.
She became interested in politics in part because she started helping students in the Portuguese and Latin community get their citizenship as well as working to prevent deportations, she said.
“This city is made up of people that come here with their aspirations and their resilience and their entrepreneurship, and that is what makes this city great,” said Bailão. “So we are not asking for anything. It is our right to be at the table — we shouldn’t have to ask.”
Her parents don’t understand why she is so determined to be mayor, but they are fiercely supportive. Her mother even coined an unofficial campaign slogan. When Bailão admitted to being a little nervous, her mother switched from Portuguese into English and told her: “Do your best and f–k the rest.”
Different generation, different approach to the issues
But to Chloe Brown, who is 32 and thus much younger than most of the leading candidates, these lived experiences mean less because they don’t reflect the Toronto we are in today.
The main candidates are all in some way part of the establishment power structures that got us here in the first place, she said in an interview.
While they have been in charge, she was having her music and shop classes cut from school. Her building had its superintendent removed.
“The way (the top candidates) remember the world and the way that I’ve experienced it, are two very different things,” she said. “I am focusing on people like myself who are politically homeless, but have been raised up by community members fighting to preserve programs.”
Brown, who came in third in the fall 2022 mayoral election despite a minuscule budget, has focused her efforts on connecting with younger working-class voters and in particular Gen Z via TikTok — in part because she has not been invited to many of the major debates this time due to early polling numbers.
We don’t yet know if this election cycle has been more or less toxic or racist than those in the past — the Samara Institute for Democracy has been monitoring social media and is expected to release a report after the election.
But the 2014 “go back to China” moment has stuck in the minds of those on Chow’s campaign because the other candidates just stood there and didn’t speak out or denounce the comments until later.
It was the same election in which Tory suggested white privilege does not exist, something he would acknowledge at a 2018 Operation Black Vote debate was a mistake that he’d learned from.
Debate comment in 2014 tip of the iceberg
The debate comment against Chow was the tip of a vitriolic racist-misogynist-xenophobic-personal attack iceberg of emails, social media, physical mail and in-person comments “worse than anyone can imagine,” said Jennifer Hollett, who was Chow’s digital director at the time.
Worst of all, “Olivia was used to it. It didn’t faze her.”
Chow is still unfazed by the attacks that still come her way.
“If you are clear in what you want to do, what you want to accomplish, it doesn’t matter what people think about you,” said Chow in a recent interview of how she has weathered the vitriol since the start of her career.
But in 2014, she did express a regret that she had not talked more about the racism, for all the young women watching her.
In 2023, many are still cheering her on, like Veronica Javier. At an Asian night market event during the campaign, Chow hugged Javier and her sister — a food truck owner and new restaurateur — like old friends and proudly talked up their accomplishments. Chow would be “a mayor like us and for us,” Javier later told a campaign rally.
Election of Toronto’s first racialized mayor would be historic
The election of the first racialized mayor would be a deeply meaningful moment for many Torontonians who have not seen themselves and their experiences reflected at the highest levels of city hall. But it would also be a new opportunity for accountability — because representation means little without action.
“All skin ain’t kin,” said mayoral candidate Celina Caesar-Chavannes, former Liberal MP, in a recent interview, where she spoke emotionally and forcefully about how the Black community in Toronto was harmed during the pandemic, a community left vulnerable due to inequity and lack of progress by all levels of government.
“Are you going to take the middle road that is going to be easy or are you going to do something inspirational and a little bit hard,” she said.
(If) “we are going to celebrate that we have a woman of colour as the mayor of Toronto for the first time ever … that just isn’t good enough,” she said. “What are you going to do?”
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