Four Ukrainians vie for city council seats in Toronto "Megacity" race (10/26/97)

Four Ukrainians vie for city council seats in Toronto "Megacity" race

by Andrij Kudla Wynnyckyj
Toronto Press Bureau

TORONTO - Last year Ontario Provincial Premier Mike Harris decided to change the political landscape of Canada's largest urban center by amalgamating six municipalities into one so-called "Megacity." After a citizen's referendum and a court challenge failed to stop him, municipal elections are being contested on November 10 for the positions of mayor and 56 city councillors.

Four candidates of Ukrainian background are running for the positions of city councillor: Alex Chumak in Ward 19 (High Park in Toronto), Gloria Luby in Ward 3 (Kingsway-Humber in Etobicoke) and Len Wasylyk in Ward 1 (Lakeview in Mississauga). Adam Slobodian was a last-minute entry into the Ward 3 race, but no information about him was available at press time.

Because of the institutional chaos sown by the Harris government's Megacity plan, technically none of the candidates are up for re-election, but in a sense Mr. Wasylyk is an office-seeker, while Mr. Chumak and Ms. Luby can be considered incumbents.

Alex Chumak

Of the three, Mr. Chumak is the best known quantity among Ukrainians, having served as a Toronto Board of Education trustee (among the elected positions Mr. Harris's amalgamation has truncated or abolished) for 20 years.

Along with former alderman William Boychuk, Mr. Chumak has been one of the longest serving representatives of the city's West End. Mr. Chumak was instrumental in having Ukrainian language instruction included in the curriculum (for credit) of Toronto's post-secondary schools and prepared a teaching unit on the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933, which has been offered since 1987.

Mr. Chumak also established a liaison committee at the Toronto Board which made recommendations on issues pertaining to Ukrainian culture and history. In March 1994 he led a delegation to Kyiv that signed an agreement with the Ukrainian Ministry of Education providing for material assistance in the form of texts and computers. He has been a regular contributor to the Our Toronto Free Press and the Bloor West Villager community newspapers on educational matters.

The former trustee is also vice-president of both the Ukrainian Canadian Congress's Ontario Provincial Council and the Toronto Branch of Ukrainian Canadian Social Services (UCSS).

Mr. Chumak is a member of Ukrainian National Association Branch 440.

Reached at his campaign office, Mr. Chumak said he decided to run because local democracy has been eroded due to the Harris government's amalgamation plan. He added that he intends to ensure that local community voices are heard by government.

Because of the federal and provincial austerity programs, Ukrainians need to realize they have to "fight to regain what they had once achieved all over again."

Mr. Chumak said that funding had to be maintained for Ukrainian immigrant services, for Ukrainian community social services, for ESL classes designed to assist immigrants in integrating with the community, and for Ukrainian language and heritage classes.

"It's often not a question of new funding but efficient spending," Mr. Chumak said. "If you calculate the hours worked by the volunteer and paid staff at the UCSS, for example, it works out to 10 cents an hour - if the government took [their operations] over, they would spend five to 10 times as much."

Mr. Chumak said government support for celebrations such as the marking of Ukrainian Independence Day (August 24) also is important, because "people take tremendous pride in their roots, and when they are able to express their pride it makes them good members of a community who feel they have a stake in making it strong."

Gloria Luby

Both within Etobicoke City Hall and in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), Ms. Luby has been a major power broker, chairing Etobicoke City Council's audit committee (since 1991), the planning and development committee (since 1994), the economic development committee (in 1990-1992), and its capital budget committee (1995-1997). In 1989 she was a founding member of the Multicultural and Race Relations Committee, on which she has served since.

Ms. Luby was Etobicoke's representative at the GTA Mayors' Meetings (in 1991-1994), served on the board of directors of the Association of Municipalities (1995-present), chaired this year's Ontario Task Force on the new Municipal Act (expected to be passed this fall).

Professionally, Ms. Luby served as president of The Planning Forum (an international association of corporate and strategic planners, in 1987-1988), was a senior consulting associate of the Coopers and Lybrand accounting firm (1991-1995), the strategic planning director for the Toronto-based Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (1981-1986), and lectures on municipal government right across Ontario for municipality officials and staff from Kenora to Ottawa.

In the world of business, she was a director of Corporate Foods Ltd. in 1989-1995.

Ms. Luby's volunteer work is no less high-powered. She was a director of the Metropolitan Toronto Library Board (1977-1978); in the late 1970s-mid 1980s she sat on the board of governors of Northwestern General and Humber Memorial hospitals (recently collapsed into a single entity, the Humber Regional Hospital, by the Harris government); she was a member of the board of directors for Arts Etobicoke for several terms in the 1980s and 1990s; and served as a director for the George Hull Center for Children and Families (1987-1992) and the Metropolitan Toronto Advisory Board of the Salvation Army (1993-1996).

Ms. Luby told The Weekly in a recent interview that her credo is "be accessible and responsive to your constituents." In terms of local democracy, she believes in forming consultative committees on issues of importance and expressed concern that amalgamation, with attendant increases in the sizes of wards, would dilute local democracy and make it prohibitively expensive to run campaigns.

Ms. Luby contends that "amalgamation had to happen eventually ... but it happened faster than many of us expected." She added that voters should "re-elect those who are a known quantity because the new city is going to be very complex, and there's little time for a learning curve."

However, she disagreed with the position recently taken by Toronto-based activist Jane Jacobs, author of "Life and Death of American Cities," whose works and causes were the subject of an international conference held in Toronto in mid-October. Ms. Jacobs contended that Toronto might be forced to secede legally from the province in order to preserve local democracy. "I didn't agree with everything she had to say," Ms. Luby averred. "The new Toronto will not suffer the same fate of New York's or L.A.'s inner cities, because this is Canada, I have faith," she said.

Ms. Luby said heritage education programs, such as those of the St. Demetrius Ukrainian school where her children are enrolled, need to be safeguarded from provincial cutbacks to education.

The veteran public servant said the UCSS had an important role to play in delivering social services to the community and should be supported by government. "I think ethnically based organizations can more easily overcome language barriers and are more sensitive to the particular concerns faced by fellow members of their group. They are also experienced in dealing with them successfully."

Len Wasylyk

Mr. Wasylyk is a former police officer and currently an Immigration Canada official with 21 years' experience. The 46-year-old Mississauguan is the treasurer of the St. Sofia Ukrainian Heritage School's advisory council (formed in 1996) and a director of a local residents' ratepayers association (since 1993).

His slogan is "Len: the $8,000 difference," signalling his willingness to give up this amount of his councillor's salary to put to use in municipal programs, an eye-catching promise in the current atmosphere of government cutbacks.

Running his campaign on a shoestring budget out of his home, Mr. Wasylyk hopes to ride into office thanks to an outsider's grass-roots approach, calling for "true representation at City Hall, not just rubberstamping." This is Mr. Wasylyk's second run at a councillor's seat.

According to a member of his campaign team, Mr. Wasylyk is concerned that the downloading of province's responsibilities in the area of social services will make it difficult for immigrants to the Greater Toronto Area from Ukraine and elsewhere to access services and integrate smoothly into the community. In a policy statement recently sent to The Weekly, Mr. Wasylyk wrote that "strong leadership is required to stand up to [Ontario Premier Mike] Harris."

Mr. Wasylyk is a member of UNA Branch 888.

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