Progress Toronto candidate offers confusing story

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A political candidate is offering conflicting information in Parkdale-High Park.

Diana Chan McNally, who has been positioned as the heir apparent to longtime Toronto city councillor Gord Perks, has expanded and contradicted details of her personal life in interviews on the campaign trail, misrepresenting her age to one publication and altering the already painful story of her teen pregnancy.

Online news outlet The Local was caught up in the events and took the drastic step of retracting a profile of McNally on Oct. 1, then publishing a new version a day later with a lengthy editor’s note that explained how the publication confronted the candidate about her “deliberate” falsehood about her age.

But McNally’s changing narrative goes beyond that article. A source who knew McNally well during her teen years, including during her pregnancy, spoke to the Toronto Sun and questioned other statements McNally has made on the campaign trail.

The source spoke on the condition of anonymity given their personal history and the sensitive nature of some of the allegations.

McNally is no fringe candidate.

She’s been endorsed by local MPP Alexa Gilmour, former mayor David Miller, union locals for ATU and CUPE, as well as the group Progress Toronto, which is tightly affiliated with incumbent mayor Olivia Chow and touts McNally as a “progressive champion.” (The ATU declined to comment and Gilmour’s office said it can’t “engage in matters” related to Toronto’s election. Her other endorsers did not respond to questions from the Sun.)

A campaign representative said McNally would not speak to the Sun or provide any comment for this article.

‘Kicked out’ or ‘left home’?

The Sun has found apparent contradictions in McNally’s public comments on her upbringing, her family, her education, her time reportedly spent homeless on the street and even her relationship with her child.

McNally told The Local last month that she was “kicked out of her parents’ house in Rexdale” because she was pregnant at 17. She was homeless on and off “for months,” which ultimately put her on the path of housing advocacy, the article says.

Her baby was seized by Children’s Aid, McNally said, and adopted by one of her high school teachers.

McNally in June told a podcast called Antifascist Dad that her parents were unaware she was pregnant until just two weeks before she gave birth, when her school “forced” her to tell them. Meanwhile, a story published this month by the West End Phoenix simply says McNally got pregnant and “left home.”

The Sun’s source, who knew McNally during her pregnancy, questions her claims of teen homelessness. Three other people who knew McNally at that time told the Sun they couldn’t say she had been homeless.

The Sun has been unable to confirm details about McNally’s pregnancy or her child’s adoption. The Sun’s source said McNally’s account of those events is largely factual and acknowledged the experience would be “traumatic” for a teen.

McNally’s high school did not return a phone call from the Sun. The TDSB said it would not comment on personnel matters and did not have easy access to records from that long ago.

A relative of McNally’s declined to comment. Attempts to contact McNally’s teacher have been unsuccessful. The Children’s Aid Society of Toronto said in a statement that for privacy reasons, it can’t “confirm or deny whether our agency has been involved with any specific child, youth or caregiver.”

‘Deliberately provided inaccurate information’

McNally used her child as her excuse for lying about her age to The Local.

In an unusually long editor’s note, The Local said it got information “that called into question some elements of McNally’s story.” While she had twice told a reporter that she gave birth at 15 and was 41, she admitted she had in fact been 17 and was now 43.

“She said she had deliberately provided the reporter with inaccurate information in order to protect the identity of her child,” the editor’s note reads. “During our call, McNally acknowledged that correcting her age and the age she gave birth would not put her child at risk.”

At a town hall event last year, hosted by the Phoenix and the left-wing group Meidas Canada, McNally again said her parents cast her out because she was pregnant.

“I lost custody of my daughter because I was homeless, so I don’t really know where she is, but I hope she’s OK,” she said.

It’s unclear how McNally’s age might pose a danger to a child she doesn’t know. In an email, The Local executive editor Nicholas Hune-Brown told the Sun that his publication had nothing to say about McNally beyond what it had published.

However, the Sun’s source claims McNally was not cut out of her child’s life. The Sun has viewed a since-deleted social media post in which McNally congratulates her child on beginning a post-secondary education.

The difference between a girl giving birth at 15 or 17 might have been relevant to the Children’s Aid Society, however.

McNally has said she was a ward of Children’s Aid, including in a March article in the Toronto Star. In a social media post, she said she was involved with the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto “as both a minor and a parent in the early 2000s.”

However, Children’s Aid of Toronto told the Sun that while some 16- and 17-year-olds “may have been involved with the child welfare system,” Ontario’s child protection mandate only applied to children under 16 at that time. It’s unclear why McNally would’ve been an exception and entered the system when she was nearly 18.

Cousin or acquaintance?

McNally has claimed a cousin died while homeless.

McNally brought this up earlier this month while criticizing involuntary treatment for drug addiction during an interview posted to YouTube by an account called TeaghanTalk.

“From personal experience, my own cousin was somebody who had a lot of issues going on, multiple issues going on, who ended up on the street and who was seized … ultimately she died anyway on the street,” McNally said.

McNally has also posted about her homeless cousin regularly on the social media platform X. In October 2024, McNally asserted in a social media post that her cousin’s name was Ilona.

The photographs posted with that social media post by McNally appear to have originated from the Facebook account of a woman named Ilona Verseghy, which appears to have been dormant since October 2024. In one of her last public posts, Verseghy pleads for financial help.

A review of public obituaries of Verseghy’s relatives contains nothing to indicate any relationship to McNally’s family. The Sun’s source has indicated having known Verseghy as the daughter of one of McNally’s parents’ colleagues, not a relative of McNally.

Questions about education

McNally has also presented differing versions of her upbringing, which she described as “pretty charmed” as recently as 2019.

She told the Phoenix that both her parents were teachers and has boasted on social media that one of her grandparents, Norman McNally, founded Ontario’s EMS system – which the Sun’s source said is true – she described herself as “poor” to The Local. She also suggested she’s “working-class” and living “paycheque to paycheque” in the TeaghanTalk video.

City council appointed McNally – “Toronto’s most well-known defender of the unhoused,” as The Local dubbed her – to a housing rights advisory committee last April.

That move was informed by a city report that said she had master’s degrees in arts and education. According to the University of Toronto, she has a master’s in museum studies. That university had no record of McNally holding an education degree. (The city’s public appointments page, meanwhile, says her education degree is incomplete.)

‘Wily’ and ‘wilier’

McNally has bragged about misleading the Sun itself and its readers. Between laughter, she told the Antifascist Dad podcast she was “wily” enough “to talk to the conservative base” with her single Sun guest column, about homeless encampments, in September 2024.

“I was kind of like, I didn’t think they would go for it,” she said.

She told the Phoenix, however, that she’d leave some “wilier stuff” behind as a city councillor. That was in reference to her history of political protest, some of it “disruptive,” per the Phoenix.

McNally told the paper that she’s banned from Queen’s Park without an escort for yelling in the legislative chamber. (Queen’s Park said that for privacy reasons, it can’t confirm or deny any details about security restrictions that have or haven’t been applied to any individual.)

In her TeaghanTalk interview, McNally said she views the councillor job as not just the work at city hall, but also “pushing back and organizing with communities to demand what we want as part of realizing our local democracy.”

The Phoenix article mentioned Perks’ own history in disruptive protest before politics. McNally has sought to draw her own parallels with Perks, right up to his blunt retirement message in the council chambers that capitalism is “trash.”

“Capitalism is trash,” McNally agreed on social media in late July, before closing with a heart emoji: “Thank you, Gord.”

jholmes@postmedia.com