Missing out on family events takes a toll

On the front lawn of the family home in west-end Toronto, 14-year-old Julia Miller and her 12-year-old brother Simon, both keen soccer players, idly kick a ball between them.

It was the sort of spontaneous scene yesterday morning that their dad, Toronto Mayor David Miller, said he has missed too often in the past six years.

An hour earlier, with their mother, Jill Arthur, the two children stood beside their dad in the mayor's second-floor office at City Hall as he announced he would not seek a third term.

The raw emotion of the moment was epitomized by a tearful Simon, his mother's arm around him, who has only known his father as a political figure. Before speaking, the mayor turned to kiss his son and daughter on the head.

Later, Mr. Miller said he asked his son why he had been crying. "My dad's been mayor my whole life," he recalls his son saying. "He didn't know me as a dad. He knows me as 'the mayor.'"

Mr. Miller was a year old when his own father died, and was raised by his widowed mother, Joan, who died eight years ago this week.

Missing out on family events has been a constant as mayor.

"This happens every summer," he said, in a reflective mood after his dramatic news. "This year it was the [39-day city]strike. We had planned months ahead to go to Quetico [provincial]Park. I love canoeing and it's an incredible time for a family to bond."

Instead, his wife took the children on the one-week trip.

Last year, it was the Sunrise propane explosion in August that forced Mr. Miller to fly back from a family holiday in British Columbia. In 2005, the "summer of the gun," he left a vacation in Maine after the shooting death of bystander Loyan Mohammed Ahmed, son of a family he knew.

"I can't complain," he said. "It's just the reality of holding an office like this that you have a responsibility and a duty to the people that has to come first."

In his political life, Mr. Miller has guarded his family's privacy. The children are never at public events, save for his political victories as mayor.

Ms. Arthur, a lawyer at the Court of Appeal of Ontario and married to Mr. Miller for 18 years, has played lead parent, not political "wife."

Asked what's next, Mr. Miller says "I am going to be the assistant coach on Julia's soccer team. Actually, I said the soccer coach but Julia said "no, dad, we've got a coach."