Summer 2023 newsletter
Hope
My city, Toronto, has a new mayor – an older woman, an immigrant whose mother worked as a maid, and someone who knows a thing or two about the value of persistence.
Olivia Chow is 66, immigrated to Canada from Hong Kong as a teenager, and despite being a recognisable figure with a long career in municipal and federal politics, has also had her share of very public failure. The last time she ran for the top job in Toronto, she finished a distant third. But she didn’t give up, and now she will lead the fourth largest city in North America.
Hope was a central theme of her campaign, and clearly it resonated at the polls. No surprise there. Toronto is facing a briar patch of problems - a chronic lack of affordable housing, nightmarish traffic, the insidious impacts of climate change and a billion-dollar budget deficit, to name just a few. Many of these issues require multi-government, multi-state cooperation and Olivia will have to carefully navigate policies and a few prickly personalities along the way.
But even as I write this, I’m reminded who she is – a woman - and I fear some criticism of her leadership will be based solely on that fact. I hope it won’t happen but there are signs gender equality gains are evaporating (or never existed in the first place). About two weeks before Olivia was elected, an alarming global study was released, showing 90% of people are biased against women. That’s the same entrenched level of bias an earlier version of the study found. Read: there has been no human rights progress (women’s rights = human rights), and we may even be going backwards. This bias leads to barriers for women in politics and in leadership roles. Certainly – the bias is clear in places like Afghanistan, but gender equality gains are being eroded in the developed world as well – from the US, to the election of an avowed ‘anti-feminist’ president in South Korea. And lest we think we are immune in Canada, there are many instances of bias against women here too: from the abrupt ouster of CTV News anchor Lisa LaFlamme to a male passenger objecting to a female pilot on his WestJet flight.
I don’t want to overstate the significance of the outcome of the Toronto mayoral race. I’m not saying Olivia Chow, because she is a woman, is a standard-bearer. She’s a politician, one who has made mistakes in the past and one who will certainly make more in the future. I’m just saying it’s nice to see a 66-year-old woman who has persisted in overcoming barriers and bias, succeed in her quest to win a political leadership role.
I hope Olivia Chow does well.