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The day after TTC collectors were warned to expect surprise visits from city councillors, Karen Stintz is in a throng of rush-hour commuters streaming through the Yonge and Bloor turnstiles.

If the collector spotted the newly appointed TTC chair in the dense crowd, he gives no hint of it.

"You know what?" Ms. Stintz confides as she plucks her Metropass from her leopard-print handbag. "No one recognizes me. It's kinda nice."

That anonymity won't last much longer.

Ms. Stintz (Ward 16, Eglinton-Lawrence) is one of Rob Ford's highest-profile cabinet ministers, charged with overseeing a 12,000-employee agency that carries almost 500 million riders a year. Within a few weeks, she will also become the de facto face of the mayor's controversial gambit to kill David Miller's Transit City strategy, in favour of a multibillion-dollar subway line extension on Sheppard Avenue.

She's something of an anomaly in the tightly knit Ford camp, though – she's a right-leaning councillor representing moderate mid-towners, and she chose not to endorse Mr. Ford during his campaign.

After the election, though, "it was quickly obvious that her enthusiasm and professionalism was in keeping with the mayor's commitments to improving customer service," said Adrienne Batra, the mayor's spokesperson.

Yet Mr. Ford almost certainly chose Ms. Stintz because he needed an able, high-profile woman on his front bench. Among the women on council, she was the most ideologically in line: She and the mayor share similar views on key issues such as reducing the size of council and the "war on the car" – recently she launched a push for tougher penalties against cyclists caught riding on sidewalks. And she was actively lobbying for the chair's job.

Personable in private but often prickly in public, the 40-year-old mother of two didn't take a natural path to city hall. She entered politics on a whim and garnered quick success, earning a spot on city council in 2003.

Since then, Ms. Stintz has had her share of rocky moments. She attracted some ridicule in 2009 when reports revealed that she had expensed $4,500 to the city for voice-coaching lessons. She was seen to have mayoral ambitions as Mr. Miller's tenure waned, but those plans fell apart during John Tory's extended indecision about running.

Despite her formal standing in council, Ms. Stintz has found herself in a tricky spot.

She backs the mayor's subway vision and dismisses the Transit City plan as nothing more than "an input" to the province's plan for a transit network across Greater Toronto. Yet she also strongly supports the $4.6-billion Eglinton Crosstown LRT line. A portion will operate in a tunnel under her ward, but much of the route will run on dedicated rights-of-way through Scarborough – just the sort of configuration Mr. Ford has vowed to eliminate.

Ms. Stintz, who tends to avoid the gravy train rhetoric, admits she's received thousands of e-mails from Transit City supporters, urging her to stay the course set by Mr. Miller. "She's the chair," shrugs Franz Hartmann, a city hall veteran who currently runs the Toronto Environmental Alliance. "She is going to wear whatever comes out of this. I don't envy her job."

Now she's been left with the task of squaring the circle. "Eglinton is a very important line for the city," she stresses, sipping green tea at a Starbucks downtown. "I've been hearing that feedback. It would be a shame if Eglinton wasn't built again."

Metrolinx is expected to release its response to Mr. Ford some time in February. It seems clear that there's not enough funding to build both.

In any case, her fingerprints won't be on the final deal. The mayor's office has left her out of the high-stakes negotiations with Metrolinx and the province over Mr. Ford's subway plan. Ms. Stintz gamely insists the talks "are taking place at the right level" and denies that she's trapped between the competing political agendas of the mayor and Premier Dalton McGuinty.

Her focus, instead, is limited to operational issues – delivering the TTC's $8-million budget cut, defending the unpopular proposed bus-service reductions and cleaning up the subway stations. Ms. Stintz's main goal is to modernize the fare system – but those talks, too, are being handled by the mayor's office, not her.

It's difficult to imagine that kind of deference from the two ego-driven men who preceded her. Retired council veteran Howard Moscoe micromanaged the TTC during his long stint as chair, often to the consternation of council and TTC staff. His successor, Adam Giambrone, also brought a strong, activist agenda to the job and promoted his plan for a new TTC fare system.

In fact, some observers wonder how much influence Ms. Stintz actually wields with the Fordites. "It will be interesting to see if she comes into her own, or if she's the instrument by which the Ford administration carries out its [transit] policy," said Ryerson University political scientist Myer Siemiatycki.

The fact that Ms. Stintz isn't in on the talks with Metrolinx and Queen's Park is a telling detail about her clout, or lack thereof, he added. "In significant conversations, she's not part of the discussion."

HER PATH TO POLITICS

The start of Ms. Stintz's political career is the stuff of minor legend at city hall. In the wake of a heated local fight about a pair of high-rise towers at Yonge and Eglinton, she responded to an ad placed in a local paper seeking someone to defeat incumbent Anne Johnston in the 2003 election.

With little political experience, Ms. Stintz beat Ms. Johnston by 2,300 votes, even as Ms. Johnston's protégé David Miller swept into office on a reform mandate. The mayor did little to conceal his resentment, effectively pushing Ms. Stintz into the opposition camp.

Early on, Scarborough councillor Michael Thompson recruited Ms. Stintz to pressure Mr. Miller to take a tougher line on guns and gangs. Mr. Thompson pressed the mayor to appoint her to a community safety panel, but he refused. "The Anne Johnston thing," he recalls, "was a barrier."

At first Ms. Stintz often came across as nervous and high-strung during council debates. But during Mr. Miller's second term, she stepped up her attacks, co-founding the "Responsible Government Group" in 2009 to put forward a more coherent critique of council's spending.

Ms. Stintz, who grew up in Willowdale, lives near Yonge and Eglinton with her husband Darryl Parisien, a software executive, and their children. Her father, an American, lives with them, too – he worked as a NASA engineer before moving to Canada to join SPAR Aerospace and the Canadarm project. She never saw a launch, "but I actually got to touch the arm when it was in Brampton," Ms. Stintz recalls.

After earning her undergraduate degree at the University of Western Ontario, she enrolled in a journalism program at Boston University. "You know what I wanted to do? I wanted to be [Globe and Mail columnist] Jeff Simpson." But she changed her mind after she took a job placement as a reporter with a community paper in Norwood, Mass. "Honestly, I'm not a very good journalist," Ms. Stintz admits with a self-deprecating laugh. "I always got the lead wrong."

Instead, Ms. Stintz got a masters degree in public administration and ended up working in Ontario's ministry of health under former premier Mike Harris.

To this day, she still sounds like a bit of a policy wonk – she supports unpopular measures such as the HST because she buys the economic arguments. "I believe that decision was the right one. In the long run, we'll be more productive."

HER ROAD AHEAD

Of all the senior cabinet positions on council, few are as demanding as the TTC job. Ms. Stintz spent the past month holed up with senior TTC staff as they teach her what's involved in running North America 's leanest transit agency.

"It is an engineering culture," she says. "It is a rigid and rules-based operation. That being said, all of my interactions have been met with openness."

And Ms. Stintz, who now sports a TTC lapel pin on her trademark blazers, is inclined to reciprocate. During a recent commission meeting, Ms. Stintz chose not to berate the senior TTC brass when they presented a budget that didn't meet the mayor's cost-reduction goals. She patiently managed the morning-long session, abstained from a key vote about the bus-service reductions, and then discreetly sought approval for a motion designed to boost the TTC's budget – hardly the sort of thing one would expect from the mayor's more rock-ribbed supporters.

This delicate balancing act has not been lost on some of her council colleagues. Indeed, some on the centre-left appear willing to give her the benefit of the doubt while prodding her to do more to defend the TTC's budget and its plans. "She has a management skill set," says Joe Mihevc (Ward 21, St. Paul's West). "I think I trust her integrity here."

Council newcomer Josh Colle, whose Ward 15 is next to hers, feels that Ms. Stintz has "an independent streak" and is encouraging her to seek out council's middle ground. But he says it's clear that she's under tremendous pressure from Mr. Ford's inner circle. "We all get more and more how this place is beginning to work… The eyes and reach of the mayor's office [are] becoming more and more pervasive."

The game to watch in coming months is whether Ms. Stintz will seek to build a bridge with middle-of-the-road councillors, or if she will content herself with delivering the mayor's waste-busting agenda. "What I've learned over the last two terms," she says, "is that you need to know what you stand for, but you need to be able to compromise."

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