The Canadian city of Toronto, with a population of three million people, goes to the polls this Monday and can elect a Portuguese woman as mayor after the former mayor, John Tory, resigned after a sex scandal with a 31-year-old woman for the covid-19 pandemic.
Now, the successor may be Ana Bailão, born in Vila Franca de Xira, who moved to Canada at the age of 15 and is no stranger to administrative positions: she has already been deputy mayor and councilor for the Housing portfolio.
Speaking to TSFThe candidate who appears in second place in the polls behind Olivia Chow, for whom she has been closing the gap, anticipates a “very close” election, in which even Molly, a bitch who stars in a kind of candidacy “on the sidelines” . with owner Toby Heaps, she is in the running with 102 applicants.
“It was the owner of the dog who registered, obviously the City Council and the regulations do not authorize a dog to run for mayor, but the one who registered said that he was registering in the name of a dog,” explains Ana Bailão, who argues that episodes like this “shouldn’t happen, because democracy and the electoral process are very serious things,” especially in what is the fourth largest city in North America and the largest in Canada.
“It is a city with an operational income of 16 thousand million dollars, therefore it is something that I am afraid to take very seriously”, something that she herself guarantor to do, supported by her experience of “12 years as a verador and vice president”.
With the campaign coming to an end, Ana Bailão has “hundreds of volunteers going door to door”, especially since in Canada, as she explains, even in the mayoral elections there are “a lot of people and a lot of direct contact with the voters”.
“Very welcome” who says she feels in the city “where more than 50% of the population was not born in Canada and which receives people from more than 150 countries”, the Portuguese also proposes to achieve something unprecedented.
“We have never had a mayor who did not speak English. We have many communities, but the mayors we have had have all been more Anglo-Saxon than other communities, ”he explains, and that is something that would change. with your choice.
With experience in the area of Housing, Ana Bailão is concerned about a city that “is becoming extremely expensive to live in” and where a T2 can cost three thousand Canadian dollars (2076 euros) per month.
“The city is growing a lot and we are not producing the number of homes to accommodate this growth,” which has caused a lack of solutions and rising prices.
To solve the problem, Ana Bailão defends increasing the housing supply, building “quickly”, but also using “municipal land and incentives to lower the prices of these houses”. Prices “for both home ownership and rentals have risen sharply and it is becoming an extremely expensive city to live in, which has a huge impact on the quality of life and economic future” of Toronto.
Thus, contributing to solving the problem is not only one of the candidate’s “great priorities”, but also “one of the great reasons to run for the House again”, this time as president.
If he wins, the first step will not be to take special measures or make announcements: the priority, he guarantees, will be the family. “What I’m going to do is give my parents a big hug, because I know they’re very proud, but obviously they’re also very nervous… It’s not exactly something to expect, is it, when you immigrate to another country? country to have her daughter run for mayor”.
Whatever the outcome, they are promised “a very big hug.”
Source: TSF
