The Star on Giambrone
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Riding high on the TTC
TARA WALTON / TORONTO STAR
New TTC chairman and Ward 18 Councillor Adam
Overachiever Adam Giambrone, 29, a good choice to take transit to the next level, writes Francine Kopun
January 06, 2007
Francine Kopun
Feature Writer
The first bus TTC chair Adam Giambrone remembers taking was the Wellesley 94, to a reading clinic at Clinton public school at Clinton and Harbord, near the west-end neighbourhood where he grew up and still lives.
As an infant, he suffered from fluid buildup in both ears. It impaired his hearing, speech, and eventually his ability to read. He remembers visiting Sick Kids for speech therapy and having to wear surgically implanted tubes in his ears to drain the fluid.
He's cheerful about it. He can tell you that having fluid in your ears is like being underwater – you can hear sounds, but they are muffled – even though he cannot recall the exact sensation.
It left him with two things: A slight difficulty pronouncing glottal stops in Arabic and in rolling out a proper French "r," and the early lesson that he had to work hard to get things done.
Good thing, that lesson. At 29, Giambrone is the youngest-ever chair of the Toronto Transit Commission, which has a $1 billion operating budget and over 12,000 employees. He is the youngest councillor at city hall.
He's an archaeologist who travels often to North Africa to study ancient cities in places like Tunisia and writes articles for scholarly journals, with titles like: "Roman Kilns and Rural Settlement: Interim Report of the 1999 Season of the Leptiminus Archaeological Project."
He's worked in Sudan, Yemen, Libya, Tunisia. He's travelled in more than 40 countries. He speaks French and Arabic and English. He is strikingly tall, and handsome in a lanky, boyish kind of way. He is confident and well-spoken. The only clue that this requires any effort at all lies in his fingernails, which are bitten to the quick.
He is, in short, shockingly accomplished, perfectly suited to politics and probably anything else he turns his mind to. But chairing the TTC may be Giambrone's toughest gig yet, as events this week seemed to prove.
Hopes were that this charismatic whiz kid would be the one to finally solve every single problem in the vast, and in many places creaky, network of subways and buses and streetcars that moves more than 1 million people around the city daily.
So when Giambrone responded to GO train delays on Tuesday and Wednesday by saying that Toronto comes first, that the suburbs must look after themselves, well, you could hear the sigh of "same-old" as far away as Pickering.
Giambrone makes no apologies for his position.
"The TTC has a history of expanding into previously unserved areas," he says. "In the 1950s, the city took on what is now the City of Toronto, Metro Toronto. But that was a time of massively expanding budgets. There was money for the TTC. There's no evidence that that kind of money is available today."
Case closed. While the TTC is happy to work with the regions at improving transportation between the city and the burbs, it quite simply doesn't have the cash to take over the project.
"No one, not the federal, provincial or regional municipalities have shown any indication that they're willing to put up that kind of serious money," says Giambrone.
Instead, priorities include restoring the surface network from the cuts of the 1990s, establishing more frequent service and cleaner stations. Giambrone wants to get building some of the new rights-of-way for light rapid transit routes on Kingston Rd., the portlands and Harbourfront West.
The TTC has been under-funded for the last decade, says Giambrone.
He estimates the system needs another $300-$400 million annually to catch up, to build new subway lines, LRT routes, and add buses and streetcars as ridership grows.
He feels it's a realistic goal. If anyone can find the money, Giambrone is apparently the man to do it.
"When he was the NDP federal youth wing treasurer, he was known for shaking money out of anyone, everyone we could possibly think of in terms of donating to our youth wing," says Louise James, a civil litigation lawyer who has known Giambrone about 13 years.
"He was elected the federal party president for that reason at such a young age (he was 24). I've seen him get money out of sources that have been intractable in the past, so I'm quite confident he can make a breakthrough."
In fact, Giambrone's focus and drive were obvious as early as Grade 4, says Eugene Couto, 30, a systems administrator who knew him then.
"When he had something in his mind that he wanted to do he figured out a way of doing it. It was really impressive," says Couto. He remembers that his friend, a science fanatic, managed to convince his elementary school teachers to let him set up a science-discovery area on the 4th floor of Dewson Street Junior Public School, complete with fish tanks and snapping turtles. "He found ways to do pretty much anything."
He's accomplished all this by following his muse. As a child he loved dinosaurs, which led to studies of Ancient Egypt, which led him to volunteer and then teach at the ROM, which led to archaeology. As a child of NDP supporters, he grew up to join the party's youth wing, then became national president. He ran for city council at 22 and lost. He got in the next time around, at age 26.
"I have ideas, things I think need to be done and changed," he said, explaining his desire for public office. He believes that can be done more quickly and effectively at the municipal level than any other.
He is in many ways a quintessential child of the city. He was born at Women's College Hospital. He grew up at Dufferin and Bloor, playing sports with neighbourhood kids in the grassy area between apartment buildings near the house where he grew up.
Sometimes they played hockey, sometimes baseball, even cricket. Matches were often interrupted when players left to attend mosque.
He is the child of immigrants. His parents moved to Canada from New York state – his father was escaping the Vietnam draft. They married in Toronto in 1976. His mother is a market researcher, his dad a graphic designer and artist. Both are of Italian heritage.
The whole family used public transit. Scooting around town by bus and subway with his friends, Giambrone's appreciation of public transit – he has never owned a car – became an interest, and now a full-time job.
His office overlooking the skating rink at Nathan Phillips Square contains many things you'd expect: A blown-up quote from The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs, on a shelf alongside copies of Old Toronto Houses; The TTC Story; Toronto Street Names and Robert's Rules of Order.
Then there are the odd notes: The book on Sudan, another on Hiroshima, and The Muslim Handbook. The screensaver on his MacBook is the Nile at Khartoum at sunset. The iPod shuffle recharging on the side holds music by Usher and R. Kelly and Meatloaf, French pop artist Garou and the first album Giambrone ever bought, by the Fine Young Cannibals.
He is a student of the metric system, who cannot tell you what his height is in feet and inches. He is 197 centimetres tall, which is just shy of 6-foot-5.
After losing his first bid to represent Dovercourt in 2000, he spent the next three years building up grassroots support. "It wasn't done in a cynical effort to get his face in the paper. It was a genuine action in the community," says his old friend Louise James. "His success is simply hard work. He never slacks off."
He can't. On his way to work on Thursday, a TTC collector, who complained about people jumping the turnstiles, stopped him. Giambrone made tentative plans to spend some time in his booth, watching what happens between 2 and 6 p.m.
His parents, who still live in the house where Giambrone grew up, are sometimes stopped in the street by people who want to talk to them about issues in the ward. His father was involved in his campaigns.
Everyone has an opinion on the TTC, even those who don't use it. Drivers complain about streetcars. Subway riders hate being squished like sardines into cars during rush hour.
Suburbanites hate the circuitous routes they must travel between suburbs. Everyone wants his or her problem fixed first.
Giambrone lives in an apartment in the neighbourhood where he grew up, between Ossington and Dufferin subway stations. He rides the rocket to work every morning. He has a partner – she works for the provincial government.
It's been said his name will become as familiar in Toronto as Jack Layton's. Maybe. For now, Giambrone is enthused about his next great adventure: improving the TTC.
"I've got 36 years to go before I can draw CP. I don't know what those 36 years will bring."
