‘Difficult decision’ made, Stintz moves on
Karen Stintz smiles genuinely as she opens the door to her city hall office on Aug. 27.
It’s been a week since she left the mayoral race, after struggling to get above 4 percent support, but the 11-year Ward 16 councillor looks relaxed and happy, even joking about the length of the final council meeting, in progress that day.
You could say she seems relieved.
But aside from leaving the mayor’s race, Stintz is also leaving politics, saying she never had any intention of running for council again. It was mayoralty or bust, said Stintz, who also resigned her position as head of the TTC to make her run.
“It was always my intention to stay on the ballot until the very end, but I just wasn’t getting sufficient support to continue,” she said in an exclusive interview with the Town Crier.
“So that was a difficult decision to acknowledge, that the effort I had put into the mayor’s race over the last year … did not yield the results I had hoped.”
Stintz had declared in October she would be vying for the mayor’s seat, but ran into difficulty gaining traction, even being overshadowed by current frontrunner John Tory filing his papers to run for mayor the same day she did.
Having her staff issue daily campaign releases — either announcing initiatives or responding to other candidates’ platforms — didn’t seem to help. But Stintz says she doesn’t think the fault lies with her campaign.
“I don’t necessarily think it was that things went wrong,” she said. “I think it was just other dynamics in the race.
“The fact that name recognition means so much in municipal politics, and with three big names (Tory, incumbent Rob Ford and Olivia Chow) it was hard to get my message out.”
While those names continued to dominate as the solid top three in an Aug. 6 Forum Research poll, Stintz said she had to make “the difficult decision” to bow out while she still could, without putting her campaign in debt.
For now, she’s looking at closing out her last few months as councillor, and declined to go into detail on what her next steps might be, despite media reports she’d like to be the next commissioner of the Canadian Football League.
“There are a couple things I’d like to do and a couple things I’d like to explore, but I haven’t made any decisions yet,” she said firmly. “There are so many things going on in this city that I still see opportunities to contribute to city-build-ing outside of politics.”
Stintz did, however, give away one important phase of her next steps.
“I’ve made a decision on where I’m going to take my kids for a week’s holiday,” she said, laughing. “That, right now, is the end of my decision making.”
Stintz is leaving the wreckage of Transit City behind. I’d rather see her go than Ford. Ford did not know better. Stintz should have known better.