“High Park,” Nash, 60, says without hesitation when asked where she goes to find rejuvenation.
Her slow, deliberate way of speaking picks up pace as she talks about how much she loves the zoo, running in the park, how her children, now three grown men, played sports on its grassy lawns, how the trees surrounding Grenadier Pond change with the seasons, the deer, foxes and coyotes she has spotted there.
“To me, High Park is a magical place,” she says.
She is deeply concerned some of that magic will disappear, as the year-round, free-admission zoo is threatened with closing due to municipal budget cuts.
“The mean-spiritedness of eliminating one of the pleasures we have in this city,” Nash says when she talks about the possibility of saying goodbye forever to the wallabies, peacocks and other animals in the paddocks. “We need our bread, but we also need our roses.”
Peggy is always there.
The statement echoes like a refrain through every conversation about the role the New Democratic leadership candidate plays in the Parkdale—High Park riding she represented from 2006 to 2008 and reclaimed in the federal election last year.
“Every event you go to, she is there. She’s smiling, she’s shaking hands, she’s answering questions,” says Toronto Councillor Sarah Doucette (Ward 13), who is leading the effort to save the High Park zoo. “Even when she lost the election . . . she was still there. She was still out in the community. She was still coming to the garage sales, the craft shows, the church services, the festivals. She was still there, but she lives there.”
This reality becomes apparent when Nash stops mid-sentence and looks up with a start and a smile.
“Oh, God, there’s my old next-door neighbour,” she says as she cranes her neck for a better view of the cash register at Coffee and All That Jazz, a café in Roncesvalles Village just a short walk away from the home she shares with her partner, Carl Kaufman. “Do you mind if I just quickly run and just say a quick hi to him?”
Nash was born and raised in Toronto.
Early childhood was in the area of Dufferin St. and Rogers Rd., where memories, albeit still vivid, are the stuff of little girls: a backyard swing set, the smell of good food wafting from the kitchen of the Basso family next door, riding in the first car of the subway with her grandfather to St. Lawrence Market or the flagship Eaton’s department store on Saturday mornings.
Then came the move out to suburban Rexdale in northern Etobicoke, where Nash recalls a strong sense of community, playing with other kids on the banks of the Humber River and watching her father help the neighbours put up fences for all the homes.
“We were a pretty close-knit little street,” she says.
A grassroots Quebec New Democrat who is planning to vote for another candidate recently described Nash, a former NDP president, in casual conversation as a rassembleuse, the feminine form of a word that Jack Layton used to describe himself, meaning someone who is a unifying force, someone who rallies people together.
That could be why she is often categorized as a potential compromise candidate, someone appealing to those who are looking for some happy medium between the high-profile but abrasive Thomas Mulcair and Brian Topp, who like Nash is a favourite of the party establishment but does not have a seat.
The campaign managers for Topp and Nash recently said there would be no open alliance between the two candidates to stop front-runner Mulcair.
Nash always felt connected to the city.
She loved going downtown to visit the museums and felt excited by the immigration she believed was changing her hometown in a positive way, but sometime after graduating from the University of Toronto with an honours degree in French language and literature in 1973, she felt restless and wanted to see the world.
Taking leaves of absence from her job as a passenger agent for Air Canada at Pearson International Airport, Nash travelled to Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela. She is fluent in Spanish.
It made her thankful that she lived in a peaceful and politically stable country, but also somewhat wistful that Canadians were not more politically aware and engaged, something she still wishes were the case today.
“We all know, vigilance is key,” she says of the importance of political awareness even when a country is not experiencing the kind of crises she witnessed during her travels. “Every generation has to fight for things all over again.”
She explains that she is talking about the rights of women being threatened by the Conservative government doing things like refusing to include funding for abortion in the G8 initiative on maternal child health, but also about growing economic inequality through job losses and attacking collective agreements.
“There has been pressure building for several years, but it’s increasingly gaining velocity. It’s accelerating and I think we should all be concerned about it,” says Nash.
Nash fought hard for those rights as an organizer with the Canadian Airlines Employees Association and then as a senior negotiator for the Canadian Auto Workers union.
She was the first woman union negotiator to lead talks with the automotive industry in 2005. Another woman, Stacey Allerton Firth, vice-president for human resources at Ford, was in charge of the other side. They avoided a strike.
“Put two women in charge and they’ll get it done,” then CAW president Buzz Hargrove once told the Star he overheard Nash saying to Allerton Firth as the chuckling pair passed him in the hallway when he was taking a break from a difficult bargaining session.
Nash became instrumental in pushing for same-sex benefits, anti-harassment and anti-racism policies and employer-funded child care during her time at the CAW and advocated for better equality for minorities and diversity within the union too.
“That by far is her legacy in the union,” CAW president Ken Lewenza, who recently rejoined the NDP to support Nash, along with his union. “She was like a pit bull on those issues.”
Nash is a founding member of Equal Voice, the non-partisan organization advocating the election of more women, but she was not sure at first whether to run for office herself when Layton encouraged her to do it, soon after he became the federal NDP leader in 2003.
“It’s a question of where can you do the most.” Nash says. The NDP had fewer seats in Parliament then than the Liberals, the Canadian Alliance and the Bloc Québécois. “I had a senior position in my union, where I felt I could make a concrete difference, so I had to ask myself: why do this and run for a fourth party?”
She says it was her frustration with the Liberals, who had come to power in 1993 promising to increase the number of child care spaces and then cut social spending to balance the federal budget, that helped her make her choice.
“I just thought: you know what? It matters who’s elected. It matters who is actually there in Parliament making decisions,” she says.
It was not to be the first time around, when Nash lost the 2004 election in Parkdale—High Park to Liberal incumbent Sam Bulte, but she got a taste for politics and never let go.
“I knew that I would run again,” says Nash. “I thoroughly enjoyed it.”
Victory came two years later and Nash set about using that beachhead to turn the riding orange at all three levels of government.
“Her reputation was golden. It helped me get elected, there’s no doubt,” says Cheri DiNovo, the United Church minister turned Ontario NDP MPP for Parkdale—High Park, who Nash had lured into politics for a 2007 byelection.
Terry Burrell, chairman of the board of directors of the Revue Film Society, recalls Nash playing an important role in the effort to save the Revue Cinema on Roncesvalles Ave. during her first stint as MP.
“She gave the issue a real profile, appearing at key events, and donated generously to the cause,” said Burrell, who has worked on her campaigns.
While Nash makes an impression one-on-one and in small groups, her charisma onstage leaves something to be desired. In the leadership debate in Halifax in January, she kept raising her voice in a crescendo, expecting an audience reaction that never came.
Beyond falling flat, Nash walked right into a rhetorical trap that rival candidate Paul Dewar set for her at another debate, two weeks later in Quebec City.
She told Dewar that health care was under provincial jurisdictionit would be up to Quebec to decide whether to impose hospital user fees. The next day she issued a statement saying she was “unequivocally opposed to user fees in health care” and that “any suggestion to the contrary is a politically motivated distraction.”
The perceived confusion over this issue and then again on corporate tax cuts allowed Dewar to paint her as a flip-flopper in the subsequent debate.
Being there was not enough for Nash to win re-election in 2008 against Gerard Kennedy, who had been the well-regarded Liberal MPP for Parkdale—High Park but ran for the Commons seat that year after having left the Ontario government to run unsuccessfully for federal leader.
DiNovo recalls sitting in the living room of Nash’s home on that election night as they both watched the poll-by-poll returns — something DiNovo avoids doing when her own name is on the ballot because it feels like “being eaten to death by guppies.”
“Most people would have felt pretty devastated by that, and she didn’t,” says DiNovo of Nash, who returned to her old job at the CAW. “Within months of the loss she was out again and back again.”
Kennedy remembers Nash still being around in the riding when he was the MP and he credits her “city councillor kind of presence” with her success against him in the next election campaign, in 2011, but noted there is a difference between being present and solving problems when it comes to politics.
David Miller, both a neighbour and a friend to Nash in addition to being the former mayor of Toronto, believes that being from the city is one of her greatest strengths. He sees it in her plan for green cities that includes federal investment in public transit and environmentally friendly infrastructure projects.
“The heart of our neighbourhood is High Park, physically and symbolically,” says Miller, who is not endorsing anyone in the leadership race. “You’ll often run into Peggy running in the park and I think that’s symbolic of her attachment to the neighbourhood: that she is there at its heart.”
Original Article
Source: Star
Author: Joanna Smith
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