The Toronto Star has become Olivia Chow's official press agent

 Desperate to put a tool of the special interests they love back in the mayor's office, The Toronto Star has taken on the de facto role of Olivia Chow's official press agent.

Chow will certainly need all the help she can get. She's a poor public speaker and an intellectual lightweight who has spent most of her adult life as a legislator, yet has no significant legislative accomplishment to speak of. The newly retired MP's campaign strategy seems to be based on the belief that the popularity of her late husband, on whose coattails her entire political career rested, will be enough to win the city-wide election.

So fearing what for them would be the doomsday scenario of a reelection of incumbent mayor Rob Ford, The Star is running interference for Chow's campaign from the get-go.

Bob Hepburn, a senior editor at The Star, is immediately trying to squash one of the most damaging facts about Chow. As a Public School Trustee, she and her husband Jack Layton, then a City Councillor, reportedly owned a house at the time and between them had a combined income of $120,000, yet were living in an $900/month public co-op that was subsidized by taxpayers at the rate of $300 a month.

Hepburn, contradicting his own newspaper's contemporaneous reports, is now claiming Chow and Layton never received such a subsidy and that Layton offered to up the rent to cover the taxpayer-subsidized portion. The first part is patently false, as is confirmed in the official record of the Ontario Legislature. The latter only partially true. Layton offered to increase his rent to cover the subsidy only after the story broke and his and Chow's exploiting the system became public knowledge. But they had at that point been living for years in a subsidized co-op.

Olivia Chow has been repeating, over and over and over, that she doesn't think Rob Ford is a good role model for kids. Ford's personal life is certainly not one that parents would want their children to emulate. But at least Ford has been conducting his role as a public servant with an eye to taking his duties to the taxpayer with the utmost seriousness. Chow's performance as a public servant is hardly more credible than Rob Ford's personal life. So for the sake of Toronto's taxpayers, since Chow leads such an immaculate private life but a poor public one, it would be best for all of us that she remain a private citizen for the rest of it.

h/t Alex P.