Bob is back: A familiar name with a 'depth of life experience'

With less than two weeks until election day, CBC Ottawa is profiling several of the candidates vying to be the city's next mayor. Today: former Ottawa mayor and Ontario cabinet minister Bob Chiarelli.

For an octogenarian, Bob Chiarelli causes a fair bit of trouble.

Or at least for some people.

When the longtime local politician mused about running for mayor last year, he toured the local talk-show circuit pushing for an inquiry into the troubles with our LRT.

And then, a bombshell. Chiarelli released a personal email from his former aide and city super-consultant Brian Guest, admonishing Chiarelli for "going along with this crap" of calling for an inquiry.

"You know who you are screwing with this support for the judicial inquiry right?" Guest wrote. "Someone who has always been your loyal friend and servant."

Chiarelli sat on the email for more than a week before deciding to go public with it. By doing so, he sacrificed personal relationships, but ultimately felt the public ought to know.

And that email turned out to be a key trigger for the provincial government calling a public inquiry into the Confederation Line.

A few years after he was voted out of what many thought was his last public office, it seemed Bob was back.

Helped shape Ottawa 

Of all the hopefuls running for mayor, Chiarelli has arguably the deepest roots in Ottawa politics — and the longest personal history in the city.

At 81, having served 28 years in office, he hasn't just experienced his hometown's growth as a citizen, he's personally led dramatic changes, from managing amalgamation to launching Ottawa's O-Train system.

But his formative exposure to government's effects on everyday lives came much earlier, when he was growing up in Little Italy.

His large family lived in the apartment above his father's butcher shop, with a dairy at the back, on the corner of Rochester and Pamilla streets.

When his father and older brother made a batch of commercial ice cream, they'd leave a layer on the bottom and summon neighbourhood kids for a free cone — their first soft-serve, Chiarelli jokes.

Decades before any officials thought of it, the community's hockey fanatics would clear a rink on Dows Lake so they could skate — at least when they weren't using the arena at nearby Commissioner's Park or the Booth Street Stadium.

Then, in the late 1950s, the federal government booted them out to bulldoze the area for "urban renewal." 

Suddenly, Chiarelli's family, his uncle's family — and the other Italian, francophone, Jewish and Polish families he knew — were forced to find somewhere else to live and work.

"That was very difficult," he recalls. "They had to go to other communities, and they left their homeland, so to speak, where they lived and where their neighbours were."

A federal office building now occupies the corner where his first home once stood. "For that, we were expropriated."

Good family genes

Chiarelli knows what some are saying — he's too old to be running for mayor.

He shrugs it off. He says he's energized by campaigning, even if a bad left hip has him limping some days. 

And he doesn't seem to be entirely joking when he argues he's fit for the job because of his excellent genes and lists off the longevity of parents, aunts, uncles, and siblings, who all lived to their late 90s.

Hard work was certainly in his blood. His father arrived in Montreal from southern Italy in the winter of 1924, and was working shovelling snow the next day.

Soon he was pulling double shifts at a gold mine in Timmins, where he worked underground for five years before he brought over his wife, two children — one of whom he hadn't yet met — and his parents to live with him in Ottawa. 

One of Chiarelli's earliest memories, from when he was only four or five years old, is of his father's customers coming into the butcher shop to pay $15 or $20 grocery bills — credit his father had extended to his customers when they couldn't afford food during the Depression years.

"He carried that debt for a significant number of people through all those years," Chiarelli said. "So in terms of empathy, that's what I learned at home. We have to help people."

Lifelong interest in politics

Chiarelli says he can hardly remember a time he wasn't interested in politics, from engaging in philosophical discussions in class at St. Patrick's College High School, to having his father volunteer him to drive older Liberal electors to the polls.

His love of politics almost outmatches his devotion to sports. Chiarelli played them all and was fiercely competitive. He went to Clarkson University, in Potsdam, N.Y., on a hockey scholarship. 

Amazingly, so did three of his older brothers, who all took engineering. But the stubborn youngest of eight insisted on business, mainly because the program allowed for more electives, giving Chiarelli the chance to study what really interested him — history and politics. 

A few years later, he returned to Ottawa with not just a degree, but a young wife named Susan. Resisting family pressure to take an MBA, Chiarelli instead went to law school at the University of Ottawa. For the first class, he arrived with a box of cigars, to celebrate the birth of his son Chris that very day. 

After law school, Chiarelli started his own practice with a classmate. "My family went crazy, they wanted me to join a big firm," he recalls.

He and Susan had two more children, Lynn and Donna, but the marriage didn't last. 

Chiarelli continued to be involved in Liberal politics and campaigns, and met Carol on an organizing committee.

The two soon formed a big blended family of Chiarelli's three children, and Carol's two daughters — Andrea and Michelle — from a previous marriage. They had a daughter together named Katie. After Chiarelli was elected MPP for Ottawa West-Nepean in 1987, he traveled back and forth from Queen's Park.

He understands being a first-generation Canadian and coming from a family that didn't have much, and had to work really hard and struggle at times.- Chiarelli's eldest daughter Lynn

Those happy, hectic times came crashing down one night in the mid-1990s.

"One day we were sitting on the couch and I put my arm around her, around her neck, and I felt something," Chiarelli remembers. "It was cancer."

Chiarelli knew he needed to be in Ottawa full time. Carol encouraged him to run for regional chair of Ottawa-Carleton. He beat out incumbent Peter Clark in 1997, but she would not live to share in his victory.

Juggling family, work

Chiarelli's oldest daughter, Lynn, says few people had any idea what was happening at home in those days, while he was running for office or running the city.

That he was Carol's primary caregiver in the palliative stages of her illness. That he was raising two girls as a single dad. That he drove one of them to swim practice at 5:30 a.m. That, as she puts it, "He was doing the cooking and laundry and trying to cope with his own loss."

Years later, while he was an MPP for the second time, Chiarelli was living with his current partner of 20 years, Randi Hansen. Chiarelli met Hansen at — where else? — a campaign, and he jokes that despite the fact she wore high heels the first time she went door-to-door canvassing, Chiarelli says she's very smart and kind. 

The two of them took in Chiarelli's elderly sister and his son Chris, who suffered from schizophrenia and would die of cancer in 2012.

"Living with my dad and our elderly aunt was an amazing gift for my brother and gave him a safe, welcoming space to live," says Lynn.

"I think a lot of people don't realize there's a lot of depth in his life experience there," she adds.

"He understands being a first-generation Canadian and coming from a family that didn't have much, and had to work really hard and struggle at times. He has insight into the real challenges people face."

O-Train legacy

Chiarelli was handily elected again in 2000 and 2003. He had his share of challenges — the 1998 ice storm, amalgamating 11 sometimes reluctant municipalities into one geographically giant city. Still, some joked he'd be mayor forever.

He led a council that introduced a controversial bilingualism policy and, in 2001, an outright ban on smoking in public places, a first for any Canadian municipality. 

Then there was the O-Train, considered a pilot project, running from Bayview to Greenboro stations, and now called the Trillium Line. 

But it was Chiarelli's plans to electrify and expand the north-south system that would be his downfall. Critics said it was too expensive — more than $800 million, a bargain compared to today's price tag — too shrouded in secrecy, and it didn't make sense when most commuters traveled east-west.

In the 2006 election, Chiarelli came a distant third, losing to businessman and political upstart Larry O'Brien.

The new council would go on to cancel the signed contract for the project, costing taxpayers more than $35 million. And light rail would not be expanded in Ottawa for another 13 years.

Energy ministry role had highs, lows

Back in 1996, Chiarelli was one of the few MPPs to support Dalton McGuinty's unlikely campaign to be Ontario Liberal leader.

It was in McGuinty's kitchen that Chiarelli was coaxed into running again in 2010. For the next eight years, he would hold a string of cabinet posts, including infrastructure, transportation, housing and energy.

"I'm proud to say that when I was minister of energy, I shut down the last coal-burning plant in Ontario, in Thunder Bay," he said.

But Chiarelli also took it on the chin as energy minister, with many residents and business owners fuming at the rising cost of electricity, not to mention a scandal over McGuinty's controversial gas plant cancellation.

When the Progressive Conservatives swept the province in 2018, for the second time in his career, Chiarelli fell to third place. 

But days later, he was helping his successor, PC MPP Jeremy Roberts, transition into the role. He even arranged for the young MPP to take over the lease to Chiarelli's downtown Toronto apartment.

Open-door policy

Those who've been in government with Chiarelli credit his sense of humour. Although more than ready to mix it up with political opponents, he's known for not holding a grudge.

When Maria McRae was first elected to city council in 2003, she says Chiarelli reached out to discuss what she wanted to accomplish in her ward and how he could help. 

"He had an open-door policy on any issue, even if it was something he didn't agree with," she said. 

A councillor could always get a meeting with him in person — and not be relegated to his chief of staff — and Chiarelli would keep you in the loop, without micromanaging you.

"It was clearly a high-pressure, serious job, but he was also very warm and had a fun side," says McRae, remembering a hockey game he arranged between Ottawa and Toronto council members.

Outgoing councillor Diane Deans has described Chiarelli as a mayor who tried to get everyone around the council table to row in the same direction.

Deans says she and Chiarelli must have argued hundreds of times at council. "But when he left, he asked me to be one of the people who spoke about him," she says. "We could disagree, but it was never personal."

For all their admiration, though, neither McRae nor Deans is endorsing Chiarelli. His best-known aide from his city hall days — Brendan McGuinty, youngest brother of the former premier — is advising a different mayoral candidate.

Which is all indicative of a campaign that seems a little thin. Chiarelli is even reusing some old signs. "We're being frugal," he insists.

But Chiarelli professes to be unconcerned. After all, of his previous 11 campaigns, he won nine. 

"Before every election, I have a conversation with myself, as I did this time," he said, "If you're not prepared to lose, don't run. And then, run like hell."