Who is Olivia Chow? Meet Toronto’s newly elected mayor | 24CA News
Olivia Chow has been elected as Toronto’s new mayor following a crowded byelection on Monday night time. But who’s Olivia Chow?
The 66-year-old was most notably a former NDP MP within the later a part of her profession and was the primary Asian-born girl to be elected a metropolis councillor for Toronto in 1991 the place she served for greater than a decade.
Chow moved to Canada from Hong Kong when she was 13 years outdated. Her household lived in an house in St. James Town.
She was launched to politics after working for NDP MP Dan Heap, whom she credit as her mentor. Chow was then elected as a faculty board trustee for the TDSB in 1985, a place she held for six years.
In addition, Chow supported an anti-homophobia curriculum within the Nineteen Eighties and helped deliver vitamin applications to Toronto colleges within the Nineteen Nineties. She had additionally fought again towards exploitative immigration consultants within the 2000s.
She joined her late husband Jack Layton on Toronto’s metropolis council in 1991. Chow and Layton have been married in 1988. Layton would later go on to be Canada’s federal NDP chief.
During her metropolis council tenure, Chow would flip her consideration to federal politics.
In 1997 and 2004, she ran as an NDP candidate for Trinity-Spadina however misplaced each occasions to Liberal incumbent Tony Ianno.
In 2006, Chow lastly gained the driving and was elected as a parliamentarian within the House of Commons as an NDP MP, becoming a member of her husband in federal politics. However, months after the 2011 federal election, Layton handed away after a battle with most cancers.
In 2014, Chow resigned her seat within the House of Commons and went again to her roots to run within the Toronto election. She ran towards John Tory and now-Premier Doug Ford however got here in third place. Tory gained that race and marked his first time period as mayor.
She tried getting her federal seat again in 2015 however misplaced to Liberal candidate Adam Vaughan and had since stayed out of politics till this 12 months, when she introduced her bid for mayor of Toronto, her second run for the highest job.
Following her 2014 loss, Chow known as on one among her mentors, Marshall Ganz, a longtime organizer with the United Farm Workers credited for serving to form Barack Obama’s discipline operations throughout his 2008 U.S. presidential run. Chow took Ganz’s political management course at Harvard University and returned with the curriculum that impressed the Institute for Change Leaders, the group she based in 2016.
For a lot of the final decade, she ran the group to coach neighborhood organizers. Supporters stated the group’s work might assist form her time period as mayor.
“When I first met Olivia Chow, I was a student at the University of Toronto, I was involved in campus activism and organizing,” Coun. Ausma Malik instructed Global News.
She stated Chow invited her and others to her dwelling and helped them to enter the worlds of politics and advocacy. When Malik ran for college board trustee and later councillor, she stated Chow’s instance as a racialized girl in authorities — and her recommendation — helped with the push.
“She is someone who knows how to get things done, to improve the lives of Torontonians,” she stated. “What we can expect from her leadership, for me based on a really strong record …, it is about someone who is going to be really clear-minded and collaborative in reaching the solutions that we need for our most urgent priorities.”
In the lead-up to the Toronto byelection vote, Chow dominated the polls for a lot of the marketing campaign. An Ipsos ballot accomplished for Global News carried out June 9-13 pegged Chow because the frontrunner with an unassailable lead.
The byelection on June 26 was triggered in February after former mayor John Tory admitted to having an “inappropriate relationship” with a former workers member and resigned.
— with recordsdata from Global News’ Isaac Callan and The Canadian Press
© 2023 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
