“we start to believe that we just can’t expect more of our government.”
I had the pleasure of talking with Karen Stintz, a woman who has learned that politics has a way of making fools of even the most confident predictions. In 2003, when she considered running for Toronto City Council, her husband offered what sounded like sensible advice: “You should run now because you’re not going to win.” She was young, newly married, and had no children yet. A campaign would be good experience. Instead, she defeated an incumbent who had held the seat for 30 years. More than two decades later, she entered a federal election expecting to win and lost by just 888 votes. The first surprise launched her political career. The second forced her to reconsider what public service could look like without elected office.
For Stintz, the answer keeps returning to Toronto. Born and raised in the city, the daughter of a Canadian mother and an American father from Baltimore, she remembers a childhood defined by good public schools, safe streets, and strong neighborhoods. She assumed she would finish her education, find work, buy a house, raise a family, and build her life in the same city. And she did. “When you’re a child growing up, you don’t really appreciate all the benefits that community creates for you,” she reflects. “You just get to benefit from them.” What makes her current work interesting is that she has become increasingly concerned that future generations will no longer be able to take those same opportunities for granted.
Her route into politics was hardly inevitable. She originally wanted to be a journalist and earned a master’s degree in journalism from Boston University, only to conclude shortly before graduation that she probably wasn’t suited to the profession. She eventually found another way to investigate institutions and question their decisions, although elected office would require more than observing from the sidelines.
During her 11 years on Toronto City Council, from 2003 to 2014, Stintz became one of the city’s prominent voices on public transit, eventually chairing the Toronto Transit Commission. One defining confrontation came when she challenged Mayor Rob Ford over the city’s transit plans. What began as a policy disagreement became a political showdown. Stintz assembled enough support among her council colleagues to advance a light-rail plan the mayor opposed. The Eglinton Crosstown line ultimately opened in 2026, years after the original council battle. She can now ride a piece of infrastructure she helped advance.
What stays with her is the permanence of the achievement rather than the political credit. “I had a small role to play in having that really important transit line get built,” she says. It is an understated assessment of a consequential fight, and it reveals something about how her understanding of leadership has changed. Stintz is unusually candid about her mistakes. “Oh my god, I make so many mistakes,” she admits, explaining that her goal is simply to avoid repeating them too quickly. Her years in politics, followed by nearly a decade leading a nonprofit organization that helped children with disabilities participate in sports and fitness, taught her that authority and leadership are different things. “True power is not something you ever wield,” she says. It comes from building trust and convincing people to move in a common direction.
Her ambitions did not disappear when she left City Hall. After an unsuccessful campaign for mayor in 2014, Stintz spent years working outside elected politics before returning as the Conservative candidate for Eglinton-Lawrence in Canada’s 2025 federal election. She believed she could contribute to addressing the country’s problems, and she gave up a job she loved to pursue the opportunity. Losing to Liberal candidate Vince Gasparro by 888 votes was personally difficult. “It took me a while to recover from that,” she acknowledges. The defeat was followed by a difficult period of professional uncertainty and a search for another meaningful way to contribute.
That opportunity arrived through an unexpected invitation to write a book about her hometown. The result, Beyond Good Enough: Toronto and the Crisis of Urban Complacency, published in 2026, is both an examination of municipal decision-making and a challenge to the city that shaped her. Stintz argues that Toronto has gradually normalized problems its residents once would have considered unacceptable, from unaffordable housing and deteriorating public spaces to questions of public safety, education, and government accountability. Her assessments and proposed remedies will invite disagreement, particularly on contentious questions involving homelessness, public order, and the responsibilities of government. But the argument at the heart of her book reaches beyond individual policies. She worries that citizens have become resigned to institutional underperformance. “We start to believe that we just can’t expect more of our government,” she says.
Yet Stintz’s portrait of Toronto is hardly one of unrelieved decline. Some of her most revealing memories concern the ordinary experiences that make a city worth caring about. She recalls attending a Blue Jays game with her father at Toronto’s old baseball stadium, eating popcorn and drinking soda while he tried to explain the rules. When an umpire missed an obvious swing and confusion erupted, even her father was at a loss. “I can’t explain this!” he told her. Decades later, the memory still illustrates what she values about sports: their ability to create shared experiences that become part of a family’s history.
She finds another expression of Toronto’s character in its opera house, whose relatively modest exterior conceals exceptional acoustics. For Stintz, it captures a city that can be understated yet extraordinary when it performs well. The question is why that same standard of excellence cannot be expected more consistently elsewhere.
Now serving as Managing Director of TRACCS Transit and Rail, Stintz remains involved in questions of transportation, infrastructure, and public policy. Her book has also brought her back into conversations with residents ahead of Toronto’s October 2026 municipal election. There is an interesting tension in the role she occupies. She is both a critic of the city’s political decisions and someone who spent years helping make them. She knows what it means to win an argument, lose an election, and discover that meaningful change can take far longer than a political career.
The girl who grew up assuming Toronto would always offer a good life has become a woman asking whether the city is doing enough to preserve that promise. She has lost some of her early political certainty, but not her attachment to the place. And perhaps that is what makes her latest chapter compelling: after everything politics has given her and taken away, Karen Stintz is still trying to convince her hometown that it can do better.
Yitzi Weiner: Karen Stintz, it’s such a delight to meet you. Before we dive in deep and talk about your amazing work, I would love to learn about Karen Stintz’s personal origin story. Can you share with us the story of your childhood and how you grew up, and particularly the seeds and genesis of all the amazing leadership that has come since then?
Karen Stintz: Oh, well, thank you. Thank you for that. Yeah, I was born in Toronto. And as I mentioned, my mother’s Canadian, my father is American. He was born in Baltimore. So Baltimore has a strong place in my heart. And it was, again, a pretty uneventful childhood. I had the benefit of living in this great city called Toronto and growing up where we had strong communities and good schools and safe streets. And so when you’re a child growing up, you don’t really appreciate all the benefits that community creates for you; you just get to benefit from them. And so I did. I had a wonderful childhood. I went to good public schools. I went to university. And it never occurred to me that I would not ever — I always took for granted that I would have a job, come back to my community, build my home, my life here, buy a house, have a family in Toronto. And so I’ve been able to do that. So I guess I consider myself really lucky.
Yitzi Weiner: So you’ve accomplished so much. Could you briefly give us a summary edition of the story that brought you to where you are today?
Karen Stintz: So originally, I actually wanted to be a journalist, and I went to Boston University to study journalism, a Master of Science in Journalism. Shortly before I graduated, I realized I probably wasn’t going to be a very good journalist. And so I then continued on in my studies, and I was not ever thinking I would be an elected official, but it was in 2003 I had the opportunity to represent my community as a city councillor. And I remember talking to my husband about it. We didn’t have kids yet, and we just bought our house, and I was interested in the election because it was our community in our neighborhood. And he said, “Well, you should run now because you’re not going to win, but you’ll get a sense of what it’s like and you might build your base, and we don’t have kids, and now’s the time to do it.”
And I said, “Okay.” And I won. And I ran against an incumbent. And typically at the municipal level, incumbents have the advantage because of name recognition. But I was able to beat this incumbent who’d been in office for 30 years. And so it was quite a story about how I had done this and began my political career as a Toronto city councillor, where I served for 11 years, from 2003 to 2014.
And in that time, I was also chair of the Toronto Transit Commission, which is the fourth largest transit system in North America.
And so after that, I did run for mayor because after 11 years, I felt that I had done what I could do as a city councillor, and I was ambitious — ambitious for myself, ambitious for the city — and I felt that we weren’t achieving all that we could. I was not successful in that bid. So then I left to go into the not-for-profit sector, where I worked for an organization that was dedicated to helping kids with disabilities and their families participate in sport and fitness. And so I was there for about 10 years.
And then I got the political bug back, even though I swore that would never happen. I was again looking at where my country was going and feeling that it wasn’t going in the right direction, that we had a number of issues that needed to be addressed, and I wanted to represent Eglinton-Lawrence at the federal level and help make a contribution towards what I felt was changing the course of where we were to a better course that would lead to a better future. And I was hopeful, naively so, I suppose. Anyway, I lost that election by 888 votes, and within that opportunity, when I was looking for a new job, I was approached by a publisher and asked if I would write a book about Toronto, my hometown. And he felt that there hadn’t really been a good book in the last 30 years that described some of the pressures and challenges and opportunities that were missed in the city.
So, I took advantage of that opportunity and I wrote a book called Beyond Good Enough: Toronto and the Crisis of Urban Complacency.
Yitzi Weiner: You probably have some amazing stories from your amazing career, and I’m sure this is difficult to single out. Can you share with our readers two stories that stand out in your mind from your career, whichever, whether nonprofit or public?
Karen Stintz: Yeah. Well, there was a moment at City Hall when we were debating transit — and City Hall is famous for debating transit and not doing anything about it. So, there was this moment in time where I had an opportunity to work with my colleagues to actually make a decision to advance the construction of a significant transit project in the city. And what made it really interesting was that the mayor did not agree with the plan that I was advocating for. In fact, he was very against it.
So what didn’t intend to be a showdown became a showdown between the mayor and me. And the mayor was the infamous Rob Ford, and I was just little Karen Stintz, and I was able to successfully convince my colleagues that the transit plan was the right one, and we were able to pass it at council, and it got built and it opened. And it was 10 years after we made the decision on council that it was opened. But when I look back — and it’s not that far from where I live, so I’ve taken it, I’m on it, I see it — it’s one of those moments where you just feel proud about being able to contribute to something that you don’t get credit for, but it doesn’t matter because it’s there. And I had a small role to play in having that really important transit line get built. And so that was one of the highlights.
And it also led to an opportunity for me to be in Undercover Boss Canada. So I got to star in an episode of Undercover Boss Canada. And so that was pretty unique and pretty remarkable to tell the story of the transit system in Toronto in a way that hadn’t been told before. So that’s great.
Yitzi Weiner: So you ran for the Conservative Party of Canada. It’s interesting because in the United States, if you’re conservative, you don’t want anything to do with mass transit or public transit — it’s more of a partisan thing. It’s interesting. Is that typical in Canada, that even conservatives want good public transit?
Karen Stintz: It is typical. Public transit isn’t really seen as a partisan issue. It’s really seen as a pragmatic approach to building strong communities. And so, for sure, there are those that say that public transit interferes with car usage, but by and large, the debates really revolve around the best way to invest public dollars as opposed to whether or not we should build transit.
Yitzi Weiner: There’s a saying that sometimes our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Do you have a story about a humorous mistake that you made when you were first starting, and a lesson you took away from it?
Karen Stintz: Oh my god, I make so many mistakes. My actual mantra is I just try not to make the same one twice in a short period of time. But I think there’s no question that on council, there were mistakes around leadership and mistakes in understanding how true leaders actually become effective. And it’s not by having power. It’s by being able to galvanize and to be able to have people get behind you because they believe in where you want to go. And I really learned the difference between leadership at council and then when I went to work in my not-for-profit space, because leading a team in the not-for-profit world is very different, as I say, than being a politician. And the way that you rally support and the way that you build trust and the way that you build high-performing teams is very unique. And I did make some mistakes not understanding that really, true power is not something you ever wield. True power is something you get because you work with people and you build a common understanding of where you want to go together.
Yitzi Weiner: What’s been the most challenging project or role you’ve taken on so far and why?
Karen Stintz: Oh boy. I would say — sorry it doesn’t quite answer your question — it was the most challenging time of my most recent career when I ran for the Conservatives a couple years ago and I lost by such a small margin. Because I didn’t expect to lose. And of course, every time you run in politics, there’s a chance you could win, a chance you could lose. But I really didn’t expect that I was going to lose. And I had given up a job that I liked, that I loved, because I believed in something bigger. And I wanted to be able, in my small way, to serve my country and to serve my community.
And then losing in such a tight race in my community was very, very difficult. And it took me a while to recover from that. And it took me a while to get another job. And it took me a while to feel that I was making a contribution again in a meaningful way. And so I am now 18 months through it and can say that it was a challenge that taught me resilience and it taught me to remember why it is that I wanted to run in the first place. And it really was to be able to serve the community. And so when I had the opportunity to write the book, it really helped me work through a lot of how to channel that loss into something productive and to tell the story about Toronto in a very hopeful way about the things that we weren’t doing well that we could be doing better, so that we could again begin to realize the city that I think we take for granted a little bit. And we live in a bit of nostalgia about what our city is instead of recognizing what it’s become and then making intentional decisions around how we want it to function.
Yitzi Weiner: I really hope that you stay in politics. I hope you run for president one day — president of Canada. Actually, the common understanding is that Pierre Poilievre was going to win, but because of Trump meddling, that’s why Carney won. Do you think in a similar way you could have won — maybe the Conservatives could have won, and you could have won? Do you think Trump messed you up also?
Karen Stintz: Yeah. Oh, yes. Most definitely. Most definitely. Yeah, because I’m one of those ridings that typically goes where the government of the day goes. So when the government of the day is Liberal, my riding goes Liberal. When the government of the day is Conservative, my riding would go Conservative. And so when the government went Liberal, I was still really hopeful that I would have that opportunity to represent my community, but it just wasn’t going to happen.
And Trump did. He just changed the dynamics of the election. And we were running on a platform that was talking about how we can fix Canada. And suddenly the election became about an American president, and it was really weird. And I was saying to people, “It doesn’t matter who is in the Oval Office. It doesn’t matter. We should build a strong country that can withstand any tremor that we feel from the south or any tremor that we feel from the west or the east, and there’s work that we need to do.” And it is a bit frustrating to sit now, again 18 months later, to see people think that, “Oh well, we won the battle against Trump,” when we still have issues in our country that need to be addressed, and it’s been a tremendous distraction from what we actually need to do as a country to make ourselves stronger.
Yitzi Weiner: So, let’s talk about your book. So, the book is called Beyond Good Enough: Toronto and the Crisis of Urban Complacency. The title is telling me that Toronto was good enough, that Toronto is pretty good, but there’s a crisis of complacency. So, please unpack that for us.
Karen Stintz: Yeah. It really is about where we’ve arrived at, I think, as an electorate, and it’s not unique to Toronto. It’s really telling a story about Toronto that can spread across the nation. And we start to believe that we just can’t expect more of our government. And we start to believe that we don’t have a role to play. And no government ever runs on a platform of, “We’re going to spend your money foolishly. We’re going to not deliver basic service. We’re going to not clean up snow in the winter or pick up the garbage in the summer. We’re going to let the parks run roughshod. We’re going to let people start sleeping there.” No government runs on that platform.
And yet in Toronto today, we have encampments. We have unsafe streets. We have open drug use. We have unaffordable housing. We have a school system in decline. We have a governance issue at City Hall where there’s no accountability, and on and on and on. And so when the snow doesn’t get cleared, who do you hold accountable? And when the parks don’t get maintained, you just shrug and say, “Well, you can’t beat City Hall.” And so my book was an attempt to remind ourselves that we can demand more of government and we can expect more, and we shouldn’t just accept that we’re told that there’s nothing we can do about it because it’s too expensive, because it’s too this, because it’s too that. No, it’s because we have intention that we make decisions that lead us to a place where we want to go together.
And in the book — it doesn’t come up in the book because it had to be published before the FIFA event — I hear time and time again from our mayor and our city council, “Well, if we only had more money and we only had this and we only had that.” But when FIFA was in town for that period of time, actually, our roads worked, our city was clean, transit was operational and functional, people got to where they needed to go. And I’m like, “Okay, so it’s not about money, because the money that was spent on FIFA was for the stadium and to market FIFA.” But we had intention, and we wanted the world to see Toronto in a way that would leave a good impression. And so we were intentionally cleaning up our city. We were intentionally enforcing our laws. We were intentionally making sure that people felt safe. And so if we could do that for a period of time when the football is in town, why can’t we do it for the people that live here and are invested in this community?
And so for me, it’s a bit of a policy analysis, a bit of reflection from my time at council, and a bit of understanding how these issues unfolded over the last 30 years, and some in plain sight, that we now need to understand so that we don’t continue to do them. Because we can’t continue to build housing that no one can afford. We can’t continue to have a school system that doesn’t perform for our kids. We can’t continue to have parks that are overrun by political agendas instead of places of open space where communities come together. We just can’t do that.
And one of the things that happened in Toronto — which I don’t see happening in other places to the degree it happens here — is the lawlessness and the anarchy that takes place in our street, where people are threatening a minority community and they seem to be able to do it with impunity. And I’ve been really vocal about that because it’s over an issue that doesn’t affect Canada, but it certainly affects a minority community who lives in our country. And the law is being broken under the name that free speech needs to be protected. And yet there is no free speech that allows people to mob rule and threaten a minority community. And when I see what’s happening in France and how mob rule has taken over, and reading articles about how it’s not a student protest — of the 35 groups that are part of this anarchy, only 15 are student-led and the rest are a combination of various international influences — it’s only one step away from what’s happening in our streets.
And we can say, “Oh, look at what’s going on over there,” but it’s right in front of us, and it’s our complacency that prevents us from seeing the threats that we have.
It is shocking and appalling, and for me personally disheartening, that we could allow a minority community to be threatened the way that they are currently being threatened.
Yitzi Weiner: So are you talking about the Jewish community?
Karen Stintz: The Jewish community. Yeah.
Yitzi Weiner: So, if you were the mayor during the encampments — I’m not sure they’re happening right now, but they were for a long time — how would you deal with them?
Karen Stintz: With the encampments, yeah, we have to start from a place where it’s not okay for people to sleep in parks. That we don’t protect anybody’s dignity by allowing people to sleep in parks. And if we can get there — and the reasons that people are in parks are very complex, because if it was an easy problem to solve, we would solve it. But as mayor, I would be very clear: parks are not a place for encampments. And we need to be very clear on that. And we need to work together with solutions.
And we’re not there yet because our current mayor won’t even say that encampments shouldn’t be permitted in parks. And it’s gone even to the courts. And the courts have ruled that there is a Charter-protected right to be homeless, which is bananas, because when you think about how invisible you become when you don’t have a home, it is shocking that anybody would advocate for that. Because when you don’t have a home, you can’t get a bank account, you can’t file taxes, you can’t get benefits — there’s so many things that you don’t have access to when you don’t have a home or even an address. And so why we would advocate for people to continue to be invisible is beyond me.
Yitzi Weiner: I’m very grateful for your advocacy for the Jewish community; it really means a lot.
Karen Stintz: Yeah, it’s just such a strong community and really one that is not being protected and not being appreciated for the contributions that they make. And in Toronto, the Jewish community has built our hospitals and our art centers and our universities, and they’ve contributed to thought leadership and to the development of so many things. And to abandon this community is really — I don’t even have the words.
Yitzi Weiner: Can you share your favorite story that you share in the book?
Karen Stintz: Oh, one of my favorite stories. I have a couple. One is about my dad, when my dad took me to my first baseball game. And it was at a time when our baseball stadium was built — we have a tremendous baseball stadium now. We hadn’t always had one. So, it was one of the older stadiums that was cold and uncomfortable and the seats were terrible. And he was trying to explain baseball to me, and the Blue Jays were playing — and I can’t remember who they were playing, but it was before they had all the replays. And I remember him trying to explain the game to me, and the pitcher lobbed this ball high into the air and the catcher caught it, and the batter swung at the ball, and the umpire was so mesmerized by the ball, he was looking at the ball and he missed the fact that the batter actually swung and of course missed. And so he called it a ball, but it was a strike, and it was pandemonium. I remember it was just — and I’m like, “Dad, what’s happening?” And he’s like, “I can’t explain this!”
But it was one of those moments. I remember it stuck out because I was there with my dad and he bought me a soda and I had popcorn, and it was just one of those moments in my childhood where it just was such an amazing experience that I was there with my dad. And so I tell that story about why sports is important, because it has the ability to bring community together. You get kids playing, and you have great moments when you’re little and your dad takes you to the game.
And the other story that I love to tell is about the opera house in Toronto. And just really quickly, opera houses really are cultural centers and they’re built to tell the story of that region or that city. And it’s about opulence and grandeur and showcasing everything that area has to offer, like the Sydney Opera House and New York and London. And so opera houses are unique in that way, in that they tell much more than just the story of the opera. But in Toronto, you’d be hard-pressed to find our opera house because it looks like the buildings that surround it. So, it’s tucked in, and it’s tucked in by design because the architect of our opera house felt that if you’re going to add something new into the built environment, it needs to fit in, and it shouldn’t be this testament to placemaking. It actually should really be about form and function and fitting in. But what’s really amazing about our opera house is the acoustics are incredible, and it performs much better than many opera houses that were built centuries ago, for all kinds of reasons. Performers love to come and sing at our opera house. And so I think about that in the context of what Toronto is. It’s a little bit understated. It’s not really grand. It’s not showy, but when it’s performing, it performs really well.
Yitzi Weiner: That’s really an amazing analogy. I often interview actors, and outside of Hollywood, Toronto is probably the strongest acting capital in the world — maybe even more than London. And I don’t think people realize it. It’s understated, but it’s really the world powerhouse of entertainment and arts and culture. So what would you do to encourage that if you were mayor? What would you do to encourage Toronto’s being the cultural capital of this part of the world?
Karen Stintz: Well, yeah, I think it’s really showcasing that opportunity. Because I did a bit of a book tour, and it’s amazing how many people don’t know about our opera house. It’s amazing how many people don’t know about the immense and varied and unique and distinct and brilliant cultural scene that we have. And so it is a testament to what we can do when we’re intentional, and to understand how that developed and how that can develop in other spaces too, where we are, I think, underperforming in some of our business and our economics and in some of our spaces.
And so I wanted to include that section on arts and culture because it is a thriving area of our city, and to understand what made that possible: how do we bring those lessons over to other areas? And it’s about leadership. All of the amazing cultural spaces that have been built have been built because of leadership by an individual or a group of people.
Yitzi Weiner: This is our signature question. Karen, you’ve been blessed with a lot of success and you must have learned a lot from your experiences. Looking back all the way to the beginning when you first started, can you share five things that you’ve learned over the years that someone starting out today, whether in politics or nonprofit, can really benefit from?
Karen Stintz: Five things.
- Well, one is for sure resilience, because setbacks are just things you need to overcome; they don’t define you. So, resilience.
- Courage, because sometimes the things that are the hardest to do are the things you need to do the most.
- I would say forgiveness for others and yourself, because that’s important.
- Definitely humor; you need to have a sense of humor.
- And I’m going to use the word love: love the opportunity, love your community, love your family — particularly your family, because they are your foundation — and your friends, and all the opportunities that come your way.
- And remember that it’s a gift to be able to make a contribution and to have the strong foundation to be able to give.
Yitzi Weiner: Can you share some of the self-care routines that you do to help your body, mind, and heart to thrive?
Karen Stintz: Yeah, I do like to exercise and I do various things. I like to cycle. I like to play tennis. I like to ski. And I like to ski with my son, so that’s kind of our thing; we go skiing together. And with my daughter, well, she likes to shop, which I like to do less. But I’ve just started painting. I just started oil painting, so I get a lot of joy around that. And my dog — to be able to go out and walk with my dog and have that calmness in the morning is really something that I treasure.
Yitzi Weiner: This is our final aspirational question. Karen Stintz, because of your amazing work and the platform that you built, you’re honestly a person of enormous influence. If you could spread an idea or inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? Because you never know what your idea can inspire.
Karen Stintz: Right. Oh, one idea. Oh jeez, that’s tough. One idea of: show up for the people that matter in your life, and they’ll take you places that you never thought you would ever go.
And show up for the things that bring you joy. And also show up for the things that make you — I don’t want to use the word angry because I don’t like that word, I don’t like that emotion — but when you see an injustice, show up for righting that cause.
Yitzi Weiner: So beautiful. How can the readers purchase your book? How can they continue to follow your work?
Karen Stintz: Oh, Amazon. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Yitzi Weiner: Well, Karen, it’s been an honor to meet you. I’m confident that we’re going to continue to see your star rise.
Karen Stintz: It’s been an honor to be on your show here. And I hope if you come up this way and you visit Eglinton-Lawrence, you please let me know so that I can take you around town.
Yitzi Weiner: Oh, I would really love that. Thank you so much, Karen.
Karen Stintz: Okay,
Yitzi Weiner: Great. Have a wonderful day.
Karen Stintz: You too.
Karen Stintz: Toronto’s Future Demands More Than ‘Good Enough was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.