Can Olivia Chow Fix Toronto?

After nearly four decades in politics and two runs for mayor, the 66-year-old is now leading a city in dire need of help. Her approach? A stubborn yet earnest optimism and a zeal for working with Torontonians

- Stacy Lee Kong

IT'S EARLY JULY, and Olivia Chow, the City of Toronto's boundary-breaking mayor-elect, is sitting across from me in a nondescript boardroom at City Hall. She's in one of her trademark brightly hued blazers (this one is yellow), a travel mug of black coffee close at hand. The 66-year-old will officially be sworn in the following week, so we're meeting in an ad hoc suite of offices on the fifth floor, a temporary space where her team is planning her transition to mayor.

It's a busy time, and not just because Chow is starting a massive new job. She has a real mess to clean up in Toronto. The city faces a budget shortfall of $395 million, housing is increasingly unaffordable, public transit is unreliable and public safety remains a major concern. In electing Chow, Torontonians have signalled a desire for change after the last two conservative (and scandal-plagued) mayors, Rob Ford and John Tory. Her first order of business: to prove she's up to the task-especially after losing to Tory the last time she ran for mayor back in 2014. But this, I quickly learn, is exactly the kind of challenge Chow relishes.

I ask Chow why she decided to enter politics in the first place. After one of her hallmark winding answers, which starts with her plans to become an artist (she earned a diploma from what was then the Ontario College of Art and upgraded it to an honours degree in fine arts at the University of Guelph after an older cousin bribed her with a used red Fiat) and touches on her early career (her sculptures were too big to take on public transit, which is why she needed the car), Chow lands on her entry point into the political sphere: learning about the so-called "boat people" who were seeking asylum in Canada from Southeast Asia. It was 1979, and Chow was horrified to hear about people, especially women, who were trying to flee Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.