Will Mitzie Hunter’s grand Scarborough subway plans help put her mayoral bid on the right track?

Go back to the early 1990s, when a young Mitzie Hunter — who was born in Jamaica, and then lived in Pickering, and had been living with her parents near Kennedy and Ellesmere in Scarborough since about the time she’d started attending Winston Churchill Collegiate Institute — was graduating. She planned to become the first member of her family to go on to university. It was something her parents always expected for her. “That’s why we moved here, so you can do whatever you want in life,” she says of their attitude.

“My choices were York, or U of T Scarborough,” Hunter says. Which given her circumstances — as someone who’d be continuing to live at home, and who could not drive — was no choice at all. “My mom said, ‘How are you going to get to York? It’s two hours each way.’ She said, ‘U of T (Scarborough campus) is one bus right up the road.’ That’s how my choice was formed.” And it’s where her future was formed, too.

It worked out for her — now, at age 51, she has an MBA, has been an entrepreneur, non-profit and government agency executive, a provincial cabinet minister and, until this month, was the deputy leader of the Ontario Liberal party. But after all the roads that opened up for her once she got to university, the constriction of choices she faced in getting there — in literally travelling to the classroom — sticks with her all these years later.

Hunter tells me this recently over a portobello burger at an upscale pub downtown, by way of explaining how she views the need to unite this big, sprawling, often bitterly divided city, the reason she says she is running for mayor. “The investments that we need to make in the city need to be connected with those choices for young people, wherever they are in the city,” she says. “If they feel disconnected, or if we’re not taking care of the root issues, we’re not going to go very far.”

If you were looking for an explanation for her long-standing (and controversial) positioning of herself as a “subway champion” for Scarborough, there’s your origin story. And if you were at all confused by her recent embrace not only of Doug Ford’s planned-but-not-yet-budgeted Sheppard subway extension east to Scarborough Town Centre, but also of a western extension of that line to Downsview, look no further. From Downsview, a rider could connect to the northbound Line 1 going to York.

“It is going to change the opportunities. And it’s going to unify our city. And our city is going to feel more connected,” she says.

She’s talking a lot about home in Scarborough with me — she now lives in the Guildwood neighbourhood she has represented provincially — but she thinks of running for mayor as coming full circle, back home to municipal issues where she says things began for her. Early on, running her own company, she worked on projects like the Olympic bid under Mel Lastman, and bringing tech connections to what was then an abandoned warehouse district in Liberty Village.

She went on to executive positions at Toronto Community Housing Corporation and Goodwill, and to be CEO of the civil-sector booster group CivicAction (where former mayor John Tory was chair). And then, of course, she was Minister of Education, and many thought a potential leader of the Liberal party. But she says the city is where her heart is. “It’s so natural for me because it’s where I spent so much of my time thinking about how to make it better. I want to be part of that solution. I want to bring a different way of thinking about our city and preparing for the future.”

What no candidate had time to prepare for was the campaign itself. No one expected the job to be available this year.

When Tory resigned in a hurry in February and a bunch of names started being circulated as potential candidates, the usual backroom rainmakers and kingmakers quickly sorted themselves into various camps. Ana Bailão drew much of Tory’s old team — and many prominent Liberal councillors and city labour unions endorsed her early. Some famous conservatives lined up behind Brad Bradford, many key Doug Ford organizers joined Mark Saunders. A long list of leftish community activists backed Josh Matlow, and the NDP city organizers drafted Olivia Chow.

In all that, and despite her resume and recent high profile in the provincial Liberal party, Hunter wound up looking, at least from the outside, not to be benefitting as much from a frontrunner-style organizational machine.

She shrugs. “I’m sure when the commitments were made, I wasn’t in the race at all,” Hunter says of the council endorsements. “But I’m in now, and I’m ticking up, and I’ve got that momentum, and I’m excited about that.”

It may be just a tick, but recent polls are moving in the right direction for her. The first month or so, Hunter consistently placed sixth among the six highest-profile candidates, with average support in the Star’s poll tracker of about five per cent in early May. But within the past two weeks, some polls have showed her inching up, with a rolling average that put her ahead of Bradford and Bailão as of May 15.

Is there a chance she could catch on? It’s hard to tell. She seemed a little unexpectedly stilted — reading from scripts rather than speaking off the cuff — in a recent debate and a podium campaign announcement I attended. It’s a contrast to how she spoke to me over lunch, sharing stories and observations and laughing — a side of her she’d be wise, I think, to let voters see more. (She seems to already know that: “People need to know me as Mitzie, as me, the person that I am,” she said.)

She’s positioning herself on the progressive end of the political spectrum, where the competition is already fierce between Chow and Matlow.

But she’s trying, holding media availabilities and pushing policy positions out almost every day. When I went out to see her earlier this month, she stood on a midtown sidewalk unveiling a plan for housing that included an ambitious new city-run housing agency to build and manage affordable rentals and home-ownership units. That announcement came with an almost excruciatingly detailed booklet breaking down the number and type of units planned and the projected price points and financing structures of each.

Hunter says that housing policy is the centrepiece of her campaign. She talks about a woman she met recently at an event. “She broke down in tears. She said, ‘My family and I, we can’t afford to stay here, and we love this city. But we don’t see a way to raise our family here,’” Hunter says.

As constricted as Hunter herself felt back when she faced a choice that was no choice of where to go to university, today she sees people feeling they have no choice that involves staying in Toronto at all. A division in Toronto that leaves people feeling outside, or forced out altogether. That’s the challenge she thinks she is the one to help solve. “It’s so everybody in this city sees themselves as part of this city,” she says.

Edward Keenan is a Toronto-based city columnist for the Star. Reach him via email: ekeenan@thestar.ca