It was Feb. 4, 2008, the day the chassis suddenly cracked on a subway car in the fourth-busiest station – Kennedy – in the Toronto Transit Commission's system.
The result was chaos. The train was derailed, track bent, switches destroyed, and for hours the commute for tens of thousands of passengers was disrupted. And Adam Giambrone, now the cad of city politics, emerged as the golden boy of TTC management.
The 30-year-old commission chair immediately accompanied general manager Gary Webster to inspect the damage. He educated himself on what had gone wrong, what the impact on the system was and what precautions were being taken against future failures. He impressed TTC officials with his calm, knowledgeable voice to the media, confidently assuring the public there was no risk to their safety.
The Kennedy chassis-crack became a benchmark in Mr. Giambrone's relationship with the engineers, planners, administrators, drivers and ticket collectors who operate North America's third-busiest urban transit authority.
Transportation experts say that over the four years he's been the TTC's political chief – a difficult, struggling time for the commission – he's successfully thrust transit onto the public's agenda, mastered the Mother Hubbard's cupboard finances, pushed services into the city's under-populated corners, championed new technology and maintained morale among the impoverished utility's 12,000 employees.
Yet with the self-inflicted wound of his sexual behaviour, he's succeeded in blunting his own future. Last month, after publicly confessing his infidelity to his live-in girlfriend, he nixed his bid for mayor, leaving himself and Toronto's transit system vulnerable to political and business-community attacks.
Two significant candidates for mayor, George Smitherman and Rocco Rossi, want him out of the job. The Toronto Board of Trade this week called for an audit of the TTC's finances. Political strategists in the city's eight-month-long election campaign claim that discontent with the TTC is at the top of voters' minds.
All of which raises the question of whether young Mr. Giambrone – he turns 33 on Monday – will be able to continue being commission chairman, despite Mayor David Miller's imprimatur and an apparent consensus among transportation scholars that both he and the TTC are doing a good job.
He lied about a liaison with a woman who vengefully unmasked him to a newspaper. He revealed himself a lothario with several others, all seemingly unknown at the time to his live-in partner, whom he described to a lover as a mere political prop. He's now declared, “This searing experience has taught me, permanently I hope, that a public career of integrity cannot survive deceit in your private life.”
Except will the people likely to have a hand in his fate let one behaviour be disentangled from another? Especially when Adam Giambrone's public career is threatened by something more than a private smirch: As David Miller fades into the sunset, the more politically isolated his protégé is likely to be.
He landed the commissioner's job four years ago by impressing the mayor with his youthful energy, hard work, and smarts.
He has two obsessions: politics and archaeology. The first has been a true career – his vocation – since adolescence; the second has been described as his career before politics but more accurately should be labelled a modern-day-Renaissance-man passion. His first venture in politics was in Grade 8; he lost a school election. As a Toronto high-school student, he took part in model United Nations debates bringing together young people from across southern Ontario; he was remembered as the gangly kid who wore suits and carried a briefcase.
At McGill University, from which he graduated in 1999 with an honours bachelor's degree in anthropology, he was elected vice-president of the Arts Undergraduate Society but resigned before his term was up – partly because of troubles over an AUS-run convenience store for which he was politically accountable.
