Olivia Chow takes her mayoral campaign to the Toronto Sun

The Toronto Sun, the tabloid that helped create Rob Ford’s public persona, propelling him to the mayoralty in 2010, is now very, very sorry for the mess. (Or at any rate, its editorial board is now admitting it was wrong, which amounts to the same thing.) In that context, it’s not so surprising that the paper chose to publish an op-ed by Olivia Chow, the mayoral candidate whose politics bear the least in common with the Sun’s right-wing, small-government stance.

The article itself (you can read it here) is pretty much a repeat of what Chow said yesterday during her campaign kick-off speech, but what’s interesting is the generally positive tone of the comments, many of them supportive of Chow’s declaration that she, like her opponent David Soknacki, would cancel the Scarborough subway extension in favour of replacing the Scarborough RT with light rail, as originally planned.

It’s widely assumed that supporting a subway (rather than a longer, cheaper above-ground light-rail line) for Scarborough is the key to winning votes in that part of the city, but if recent polls are anything to go by, that’s not necessarily true. Subway-boosting candidates like Ford and Karen Stintz could find themselves on the wrong side of this issue, with no room to backpedal.