Residents of Toronto’s Ward 15 (Don Valley West) will be heading to the polls on Nov. 4 to vote in a municipal by-election. This occasionally happens in politics, and wouldn’t raise too many eyebrows in normal circumstances.
Ah, but this by-election has been somewhat different. It’s turned into a political battleground of sorts involving a former Ontario premier, a former newspaper columnist and Toronto mayoral candidate, and a Toronto District School Board chair.
How did this happen? Let’s start at the beginning.
Jaye Robinson, a longtime Toronto city councillor, had represented Ward 15 since it was created in 2018. She unexpectedly passed away on May 16. (No cause of death was revealed, but she had previously been diagnosed with “two forms of breast cancer” in 2019, according to City News Toronto.)
Toronto City Council declared her office vacant at a June 26 meeting. A by-election to fill Robinson’s seat was announced for Nov. 4.
Sixteen candidates will be on the ballot in Ward 15. The two most high-profile names are former Toronto Sun columnist Anthony Furey, who finished fourth in the 2023 Toronto mayoral by-election, and Rachel Chernos Lin, who is currently on leave as a Ward 11 school trustee and TDSB chair. Other by-election candidates include Dhruv Jain (transit policy director for TTC chair Jamaal Myers), Evan Sambasivam (former political staffer), and Sheena Sharp (former Ontario Green Party candidate).
While anything can happen in politics, the most likely scenario seemed to be that either Furey or Chernos Lin would become Ward 15’s new city councillor. The voters would make that final determination.
That is, until Kathleen Wynne decided to get involved.
According to a Sept. 9 piece by Toronto Star reporter Ben Spurr, the former Ontario Liberal premier, who represented the Don Valley West provincial riding from 2003-2022, “confirmed she had spoken with three candidates with links to the Grits about the importance of rallying behind a single challenger.” The three candidates with Liberal ties were Chernos Lin (former Ontario Liberal party director), Jain (former executive assistant to Ontario Liberal MPP Stephanie Bowman), and Sambasivam (former federal Liberal staffer and nephew of former Ontario Liberal deputy premier Deb Matthews). The reason for this, according to Spurr, was “to block right-wing pundit Anthony Furey from winning the seat.”
Why so? Several reasons were provided, including Wynne’s belief that Furey would be the wrong type of candidate for progressives and that he’s using this by-election as a stepping stone for the 2026 mayoral election. Those soft positions belie what’s mostly behind her decision to inject herself into this election campaign.
Wynne told the Star she was concerned Furey’s “right-wing ideology would not be helpful” to Ward 15 residents. Spurr, for his part, highlighted “accusations of Islamophobia over (Furey’s) columns about the threat of what he called ‘political Islam,’ as well as criticism for his ties to anti-trans activists.”
While Wynne wasn’t directly tied to this analysis, it soon became clear she was onside. A recording played by AM640 talk radio host Greg Brady (and provided by policorner.ca) on Sept. 23 heard Wynne specifically say she believed Furey was “bigoted” and “not the kind of person who we, as progressives, would want to see elected.”
Brady would have Furey and Wynne on his show to respond. The former called this description “incendiary,” but wisely took the high road to focus on building a broad-based coalition of supporters and winning the by-election. The latter kept doubling down with her foolish, unsubstantiated claims he was somehow linked to Islamophobia. She also discussed his previous role with the think tank True North, which she described as “very anti-woke, and by that I mean anti-trans, anti-gay.”
This was said in spite of Wynne admitting to Brady in their interview, “I don’t know what his personal beliefs are.” Sure could have fooled me.
As it happens, I can be of some help here. Furey and I have known each other for years. He was a fellow Sun columnist when I wrote for the paper, and served as my editor for a spell. Furey isn’t opposed to Islam and the Muslim community. He’s concerned about what many normal-thinking people, including moderate Muslims, have been troubled with for years: the growth of radical Islam, or Islamism, in our world. Meanwhile, Furey has held libertarian or modern liberal views on social issues for as long as I’ve known him. He supports same-sex marriage and the LGBT community, and I’ve never heard him say anything bad about trans people.
Maybe Wynne should have done some research before speaking out of a particular body orifice.
Oh, and there’s another crucial part to this story that has barely been discussed. Spurr’s article revealed that Wynne’s partner, Jane Rounthwaite, is chairing the “fundraising efforts” of Chernos Lin’s campaign. Want to take a wild guess who the former premier recently endorsed in Ward 15? This important tidbit of information gives one serious pause about the legitimacy of any political jockeying supposedly going on behind the scenes.
Am I surprised that Wynne, a political mediocrity who, along with Dalton McGuinty, wrecked Ontario’s economy for 15 years, would do something like this? No. But in the midst of her fury about Furey, it does say something that she hasn’t been properly called out for it…until now.
National Post