Tooker Gomberg
| Tooker Gomberg | |
|---|---|
| Born |
August 12, 1955 Montreal, Quebec |
| Died | March 4, 2004 (aged 48) Halifax, Nova Scotia |
| Cause of death | Suicide |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Alma mater | Hampshire College |
| Occupation | Environmental Activist |
| Political party | New Democratic Party |
| Spouse(s) | Angela Bischoff |
Tooker Gomberg (August 12, 1955 – March 3 or March 4, 2004) was a Canadian politician and environmental activist.
A native of Montreal, Quebec and a liberal-arts graduate of Hampshire College (1980), Gomberg founded one of Canada's first curbside recycling programs in Montreal, and later moved to Edmonton, Alberta, where he created educational materials for Alberta's energy ministry and headed the EcoCity Society, an environmental agency.
In 1992, he was elected to Edmonton's city council.
He later ran for the position of Mayor, but was not elected.
In 1997, he was the New Democratic Party candidate for the Montreal riding of Outremont.
Gomberg then moved to Toronto, Ontario, where he ran for mayor in the 2000 municipal election. He received over 51,000 votes, but finished a distant second behind Mel Lastman who garnered over 80 per cent of the vote.
The campaign was nonetheless extremely influential. Gomberg had been endorsed by urban guru Jane Jacobs, a longtime and extremely influential resident of Toronto's Annex neighborhood. Some of his planks including advocacy of provincial powers for Toronto, tolls for downtown traffic, re-emerged in the successful 2003 campaign of David Miller.
In the last days of the 2000 campaign, Lastman appeared with Canadian PM Jean Chrétien to promise nearly one billion dollars in social housing funding. After winning, one of Lastman's first acts was to appoint Jane Jacobs to the City's Charter Committee which was seeking additional powers for the City (taking them from the province of Ontario). Both moves were generally attributed to the need to respond to Gomberg's insurgent campaign.
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