Minister Raymond Cho won a seat on Metro Toronto council in 1991 and, since 2018, Mr. Cho is one of just two cabinet ministers Premier Doug Ford has kept in the same post through four major cabinet shuffles.Yader Guzman/The Globe and Mail
Raymond Cho, who despite his 86 years still has mostly jet-black hair, first ran for political office in his adopted country of Canada in November of 1988 – a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Rick Astley dominated the pop charts. Justin Trudeau was 17. Mr. Cho was already middle-aged.
Flash forward to today, and the still-energetic Mr. Cho, who immigrated to Canada from South Korea in 1967 at age 30, is not just the Progressive Conservative MPP for Scarborough North, an ally of Premier Doug Ford and the province’s Minister for Seniors and Accessibility – he is the oldest cabinet minister in the province’s history.
He is also poised to set the age record for an MPP just a few months after he turns 87 in November, when he would surpass the recently deceased Liberal Monte Kwinter, who retired before the 2018 election.
And Mr. Cho says he plans to run again in 2026, when he would be 89. That is, if he gets permission from his wife and campaign manager, Soon Ok, with whom he has three grown sons.
“The more people I meet, I become more energized,” Mr. Cho tells The Globe and Mail, amid the clutter of his small constituency office in a strip mall in his riding on Toronto’s east side. “And when I see the response, I have to keep going.”
Normally far from the limelight, he has a quirky side: He says that in the past few months, he has taken up the saxophone, performing Amazing Grace at a seniors event to encourage them to try new things. During the early days of the pandemic, with seniors like him at extremely high risk from COVID-19, he sent a cardboard cutout to a press conference in his place, complete with a surgical mask. Last year, he posted a video of himself in a foam-muscled Captain America costume, wishing Ontarians an “accessible Halloween.”
Mr. Cho says he never aimed to become a politician, dreaming instead of being a war correspondent or a diplomat.
Born in coastal Incheon, west of Seoul, in 1936, he witnessed the devastation of the Korean War as a teenager in the 1950s. The occupying North Korean army forced him to dig trenches for food, and he remembers tanks rolling by his house and B-29 bombers flying overhead as U.S.-led UN forces at the Battle of Incheon beat back the Communists but left his town in “ashes.”
His father left when Raymond was young, and his single mother raised eight children, of which he was the sixth.
In South Korea, he got an English degree in university and worked at the American embassy. Once in Canada, he worked as a dishwasher, asbestos miner, hospital janitor and bait-worm harvester. To learn more about North American culture, he said, he picked up the New Testament.
By reading it, he says he “met Jesus Christ,” becoming Christian in a moment that he says changed his life and his values. He went to university and worked as social worker for the Catholic Children’s Aid Society and then local Toronto school boards, as well as earning a doctorate in counselling psychology at the University of Toronto.
After becoming a leader in Toronto’s Korean community by the mid-1980s for his role campaigning against Japan’s policy of fingerprinting Japan-born Koreans, he says Korean-Canadians in his local New Democratic Party riding association begged him to run for a federal seat in largely Liberal Scarborough in 1988. He lost.
In 1991, he won a seat on Metro Toronto council, the umbrella regional government for the now-amalgamated city, while drifting away from the NDP. He would be re-elected locally seven more times. As chairman of the Toronto Zoo board, he was credited with helping to secure the blockbuster visit of two giant pandas from China.
But he kept his eye on even bigger prizes. He failed to win a federal seat in what was then Scarborough-Rouge River in 2004, running as an “independent liberal.” In 2014, he ran provincially, and unsuccessfully, now under the PC banner. In 2016, with the riding vacant after its Liberal MPP resigned, new PC leader Patrick Brown persuaded Mr. Cho to run there again.
Minister Raymond Cho takes part in a game of ping pong at the Chinese Cultural Centre Of Greater Toronto in Scarborough on July 12.Yader Guzman/The Globe and Mail
Mr. Cho would subsequently win the seat. But he had actually been trying to persuade Mr. Ford, by then an ex-councillor widely speculated to have both mayoral and provincial ambitions, to run in Scarborough himself. The two, Mr. Cho said, had become good friends. (This despite Mr. Cho’s inclusion on an enemies list laid out by Mr. Ford’s late brother Rob in a video made during his calamitous 2010-2014 term as Toronto mayor.)
The now-Premier said he preferred to run in his Etobicoke home base and signed on to help steer Mr. Cho’s campaign. Mr. Cho acknowledged that the move ruffled feathers with Mr. Brown and his supporters, who saw Mr. Ford and his populist appeal as a threat.
Mr. Cho would end up as one of just two MPPs to later endorse Mr. Ford’s bid for leader after the downfall of Mr. Brown, who is now the mayor of Brampton, Ont. And since the government’s first election in 2018, Mr. Cho is one of just two cabinet ministers that the Premier has kept in the same post though four major cabinet shuffles.
The day after the 2018 election win that put Mr. Ford in the Premier’s chair, Mr. Cho was visiting churches in his riding to thank them for their support, and his speech started to slur. He had a stroke that left him in intensive care for five days. Mr. Ford was by his side within hours.
Mr. Cho called his recovery a miracle but says he still suffers from hearing loss and has trouble with his balance.
On a recent whistle-stop tour of his Scarborough riding, he takes a reporter to see community groups he said he has helped get government grants over the years, wearing running shoes with his suit. At the imposing Chinese Cultural Centre of Greater Toronto, he is treated like a visiting celebrity, rushing to take off his jacket and play table tennis with smiling Chinese-Canadian seniors.
“People really love me,” Mr. Cho says. “I appreciate that. But it’s a two-way thing, right? Because I love them, they love me.”
Not everybody loves Raymond. Advocates for the disabled, who were pleased to see a minister dedicated to the accessibility portfolio when Mr. Ford appointed Mr. Cho in 2018, say Ontario has made little-to-no progress on disability issues. A recent expert review of Ontario’s work toward its long-established 2025 accessibility deadline deemed its efforts an “unequivocal failure.”
Mr. Cho acknowledges there is a long way to go but insists progress is being made. “The thing is, I experience it myself,” he said, noting his hearing loss and unsteady gait after his stroke. “That’s why I take my job more seriously. And I take my job as a mission.”