{"id":49544,"date":"2014-08-25T07:30:18","date_gmt":"2014-08-25T11:30:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/?p=49544"},"modified":"2014-08-25T14:40:37","modified_gmt":"2014-08-25T18:40:37","slug":"49544","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2014\/08\/25\/49544\/","title":{"rendered":"LORINC: The mixed legacy of Karen Stintz"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nIn many ways, Karen Stintz\u2019s entirely predictable departure from the mayoral race last week provides a useful dose of clarity in a still confusing contest.<\/p>\n

On a host of issues, Stintz\u2019s position was ideologically, if not programmatically, indistinguishable from John Tory\u2019s. Yes, she favoured the [insert euphemism here] relief line whereas he\u2019s pushing his Smart Track \u201csurface subways\u201d scheme. Yes, she threw all the familiar barbs in his direction (who hasn\u2019t?). But mainly, Stintz and Tory were fishing from the same pond \u2014 moderately right-of-centre, middle-to-upper-middle class voters who still desire fiscal prudence on council, but without a \u201cBreaking Bad\u201d cast.<\/p>\n

Stintz\u2019s exit \u2014 and the resulting support boost for Tory \u2014 also tees up the next major psycho-drama in this race: does Olivia Chow\u2019s front-runner slide accelerate or level out, and if the former, will her disenchanted backers de-camp in the direction of Tory or David Soknacki?<\/p>\n

Certainly, Chow can\u2019t have too many more weeks like the last one \u2014 first, her advisor Warren Kinsella detonating a stink bomb on the eve of a big transit announcement day, followed by an energy-free performance at the Heritage Toronto debate, during which she basically read from her briefing notes instead of addressing the audience. For reasons unclear, Chow still hasn\u2019t fired Kinsella over his \u201csegregationist\u201d tweet and subsequent non-apology apologies, while her public claims about his apparently marginal role in the campaign simply defy credulity.<\/p>\n

Yet before we leave Stintz to whatever she ends up doing next in life, it\u2019s worth taking a measure of her political record over the past 11 years. From where I sit, she\u2019s greatly influenced council\u2019s direction, in ways both positive and negative.<\/p>\n

No one should have been surprised by Stintz\u2019s aim to become mayor, and I\u2019m not just talking about her 2013 campaign to win approval for a Scarborough subway extension to replace the ailing Scarborough RT.<\/p>\n

From the very outset, her political career has been a series of poor-odds victories. With neither name recognition nor an organization, she knocked off a long-standing incumbent, Anne Johnston, to win a seat on council in 2003.<\/p>\n

In the waning days of David Miller\u2019s second term, Stintz made enough noise about transit to position herself to be elected chair of the Toronto Transit Commission under the new regime, and this despite the fact that she had long maintained a polite but discernible distance from then Ward 2 councilor Rob Ford.<\/p>\n

When she finally went public, in early 2012, with her concerns about the Fords\u2019 $2 billion boondoggle schceme to bury the Eglinton-Crosstown from end to end and cancel the other three approved LRT projects, Stintz somehow cobbled together a coalition of councillors from across the political spectrum and delivered a series of devastating council defeats to the Fords. Again, all long-shot wins.<\/p>\n

Yet not content with that string of Hail Mary passes, Stintz, with the assistance of Glenn de Baeremaeker, succeeded the following year in marshalling another council coalition to effectively reverse what she\u2019d achieved in 2012 as a means of positioning herself to run for mayor.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always been struck by the fact that Stintz, while conservative in her views, made a determined effort to inform herself about the detailed work of local government \u2014 something you can\u2019t say of many of the members of council\u2019s right wing. When she stepped into the TTC chair role in 2011, she immersed herself in a highly technical policy field dominated by engineers and conventional wisdom.<\/p>\n

Stintz, at certain moments, also revealed a good deal of personal courage. By the time she challenged the Fords\u2019 transit plans, Stintz had already put up with a lot of private bullying, high-handedness and condescension, especially at Doug\u2019s hands.<\/p>\n

When she went public, she came in for some breathtakingly harsh and sexist attacks, some of them, no doubt, engineered by the Fords. I was tracking her twitter mentions at the time, and some of the anti-Stintz tweets \u2014 and presumably plenty of the email coming in to the office \u2014 were shockingly ugly and personal. While she was also getting encouragement from progressives, it\u2019s hard to imagine how it must have felt to suddenly be on the receiving end of that kind of hatred. Scary, I suspect.<\/p>\n

During the first LRT showdown, in early 2012, Stintz advanced a potent critique of council\u2019s frustrating tendency to re-litigate major decisions: \u201cHow,\u201d she asked, \u201cdo we know when we\u2019ve made a decision?\u201d When she sought to launch her \u201cOne City\u201d vision in the summer of 2012, which included some frank policy talk about funding and a city-wide focus, Stintz seemed to be trying to rescue the transit debate from the Fords\u2019 boundless capacity for parochialism and magical thinking.<\/p>\n

So what, then, to make of her subsequent handling of the Scarborough subway file, and the fact that she ended up explicitly contradicting many of the positions she adopted when she fought to re-instate the original four big LRT projects (including the seven-stop Scarborough LRT)?<\/p>\n

It would be easy \u2014 and, I think, overly simplistic \u2014 to dismiss Stintz as merely another ambitious opportunist seeking high public office. First, accusing a politician of being ambitious is like criticizing a professional athlete for being physically fit: ambition is part of the job description. No one could endure the psychological demands of elections and public office unless they were ambitious, which is not the same thing as naked self-interest.<\/p>\n

In part, Stintz\u2019s about-face on the subway file was a response to the Fords\u2019 enormously distorting influence on local politics. (What\u2019s more, she had a cheering section, including from members of the progressive left.) The brothers spent four years filling voters\u2019 heads with all sorts of arrant nonsense about transit, and so it\u2019s hardly surprising that candidates seeking to succeed in that kind of political purple haze must figure out how to reach a profoundly confused electorate.<\/p>\n

Consequently, and unfortunately, this kind of environment discourages \u2014 or at least discounts \u2014 truth-telling while it greatly encourages pandering (e.g., see de Baeremaeker\u2019s rhetoric about how Scarborough \u201cdeserves\u201d rapid transit). And Stintz chose to pander. But so has Oliva Chow (\u201cabove ground subways<\/del> rail\u201d) and John Tory, who pretends that the Scarborough decision is a done deal, even though he knows full well that if he\u2019s elected mayor, he\u2019ll be facing a series of big money votes during the next term in order to get the project moving. (Soknacki is the only front-running candidate who calls \u2018em as he sees \u2018em. But it\u2019s clearly a risky position.)<\/p>\n

So while Stintz deserves plenty of credit for ensuring that transit has become a central focus of the 2014 election, she also deserves blame for perpetuating the confusion and delay that has marred the city\u2019s latest efforts to build new lines. She may also bear partial responsibility for handing the next council a poisoned chalice, in the form of a low-return, ill-advised subway that may cost the city far more than council bargained for in 2013, and will take years to approve, much less begin.<\/p>\n

Bottom line: I believe Stintz was serious about seeking to expand transit across Toronto, and was prepared to tell voters it won\u2019t come cheap. But she also allowed herself \u2014 no excuses \u2014 to succumb to the temptation of electoral calculus instead of building her candidacy around the most effective and fiscally responsible solution, a solution that she herself had once promoted. It\u2019s a complicated legacy.<\/p>\n

Correction: The Chow campaign talks about \u201cabove ground rail,\u201d not \u201cabove ground subways,\u201d as indicated in an earlier version of this article.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In many ways, Karen Stintz\u2019s entirely predictable departure from the mayoral race last week provides a useful dose of clarity in a still confusing contest. On a host of issues, Stintz\u2019s position was ideologically, if not programmatically, indistinguishable from John Tory\u2019s. Yes, she favoured the [insert euphemism here] relief line whereas he\u2019s pushing his SmartContinue reading “LORINC: The mixed legacy of Karen Stintz”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4051,"featured_media":49548,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLORINC: The mixed legacy of Karen Stintz - Spacing Toronto<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2014\/08\/25\/49544\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"LORINC: The mixed legacy of Karen Stintz - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In many ways, Karen Stintz\u2019s entirely predictable departure from the mayoral race last week provides a useful dose of clarity in a still confusing contest. 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