Chloe Brown welcomes workers as shareholders in the future of Toronto

“We don’t believe we’re leaders because we don’t own suits, and dresses, and the right look. But we have all the right tools in our tool box and that’s what builds cities." -- Chloe Brown

Chloe Brown’s greatest strength is also her greatest weakness – she is not tied to a political party, nor is she beholding to corporate donors.

A self-described political agnostic, Brown is competing in a field that costs the average mayoral candidate $2 million. Usually, some of that comes from donations, but larger amounts tend to come from political and corporate ties. Brown’s meagre budget, sitting at just over $20,000, comes from the very working people she will represent.

Instead of wining and dining patrons, the 33-year-old political analyst has been busy formulating her extensive, and costed, platform. She’s  ready to work with various levels of government to help Toronto regain good governance.

Brown views the people of Toronto not as constituents, but as equal shareholders in the corporation of Toronto. Those shareholders deserve the right to public ownership and a role in municipal decision-making.

Hey, that sounds a lot like Democracy!

Debates have been closed to all but the six contenders considered to be front runners. During those debates, there’s been a lot of rhetoric about the apparent increase in crime – especially, violent crime.

Brown intends to address the problem head-on, while also saving the police, by refunding health care.

She believes politicians and the public are discounting how burnt-out police officers are. They’re over burdened with the responsibility of delivering health care, social work, and a variety of tasks that have been out-sourced to them. That’s contributing to the Toronto force losing a lot of their talent.

Brown wants to see the police depoliticized in order to restore respect for the profession.

That would include politicians not being able to use the police as public security. Instead, Brown would have them return to what they do best, serving and protecting the public.

Brown also wants to see an end to police subsidizing the cuts to public services politicians have been making.

By better funding health care, people with mental health issues and those with (dis)ability issues will have access to the care they need.

That’s also how Brown sees ending the unhoused crisis.

From 1960 to 1980, federal Conservative and Liberal governments deinstitutionalized psychiatric services across the country. The psychiatric beds lost during that time were never recovered. At the same time, a generation of folk that once had support from the government were left languishing in poverty without reliable services.

“That’s the really ugly truth that people don’t want to talk about,” Brown shared with Small Change during a recent interview.

“We asked the government to get out of psychiatric health and they did – with no plan. They put them into community care and we do not have the education as a population to understand what psychiatric health care looks like because we don’t talk about it,” the policy analyst added.

Torontonians often see few options other than to call police during mental health and addiction crises – neither of which are crimes. Involving professionals trained in investigative and tactical operations rather than health care, can only lead to bad outcomes.

Putting officers into the role of psychiatrist is really setting them up to be psychologically abused and to fail at their job. That’s an important consideration to factor in when research shows that 1 in 3 Canadians will experience mental illness at some time in their lives.

Instead, Brown says we need to re-fund health care workers to teach us what it means to be better care takers of the people in our circles who will experience mental health issues.

Brown maintains, “Funding health care, education, and community services will save the police from the death spiral that they’re on.”

She went on to say, “We fully need police. But we don’t need them in the capacity that they’re being delivered to us.”

On the issue of food insecurity and rising food prices – another cause of anxiety, mental stress, and petty crime -- Brown sees city property playing a major role.

Urban farms along side vertical gardens inside apartment buildings and food banks growing food all year long will help improve food security and end food apartheids.

“This is where I have to get upset with Ana Bailao because her whole plan is to preserve food banks. No! We should be trying our best to eliminate every food program that exists in the city,” stated Brown.

While urban farms may require re-zoning of lands, Brown sees the advantage because if people can eat then they can be effective at work or school.

Brown also astutely points out the existence of botanical sexism within the urban forest department. Historically, cities planted male trees in order to avoid having to deal with the fruit that female trees bare. That would mean paying staff to harvest the food or, heaven forbid, leaving the fruit for gleaners to gather and eat for free.

“It’s that sort of sociopathic ideology that exists in consumerism and it’s killing us,” observed Brown.

“We continually vote for people who show up at charity drives, for food bank or shelter photo ops,” she added.

It’s important to remember that John Tory was on the board of Metro corporation during the bread price-fixing scandal. While not running for office, John Bayliss, Executive Vice President for Walmart Canada, serves as chair of Food Banks Canada Board of Directors.

Brown envisions opening food banks as public grocery stores with urban farms on the surrounding land. That way these facilities work for the people rather than for corporations lacking the incentive to end the business of hunger.

She sees a generational rift in this election with young people feeling let down by their boomer parents. Out-sized student debt compounded by insane house prices; skyrocketing rents without caps; precarious part-time employment without benefits; and a future punctuated with the privatization of health care during increasingly frequent pandemics and a looming climate crisis make it easy to understand that resentment.

Youth and young adults are in this situation as the direct result of the greed of a privileged few. Intent on over-consuming, baby boomer chief executive officers (CEOs) made money in often questionable ways through the sales of addictive pharmaceuticals and ecologically hazardous genetically modified products, destructive extractive mining, fossil fuel extraction, and by monopolizing markets through vertical and horizontal integration.

That financial greed has even seeped into institutions of higher learning where the pay and packages that presidents of colleges and universities receive is the real driver of student debt – not deeply under-paid, sessional professors.

The excess money of the wealthy was often invested in hedge funds that made more money off the backs of renovicted elders and working families, as well as the destruction of the environment and climate. And, yeh, those investors were able to minimize capital gains taxes in order to maximize personal profit.

“I’m not a political person. I’m for workers. Those are the people who need support right now. I just want people to take pride in the fact that they’ve survived,” says Brown.

“A lot of us are here as the result of a struggle that people willingly participated in because they saw our value before we were born. That is the root of a lot of our immigration stories,” she added.

For Brown, Canada is not filled with immigrants and refugees, rather survivors. People who had no other choice but to leave their homelands and make the often-dangerous trek to Toronto where they are once again fighting for the right to the land as tenants and workers living a feudalist reality.

As Brown sees it, “We don’t believe we’re leaders because we don’t own suits, and dresses, and the right look. But we have all the right tools in our tool box and that’s what builds cities and cities require a diversity of tools.”

As Brown looks to Toronto’s future, she identifies the need to redesign values because as she knows, the age of consumption is done. It’s time for people to start producing something -- a garden, novel, or community art.

She wants Torontonians to really consider the question, if money wasn’t an issue, what would you build?

Learn more about Brown’s platform here.

Election Day is Monday, June 26^th