Adam Vaughan, the CityTV reporter turned city council candidate, is something of a civics nerd. He is highly passionate about something most people find impenetrable: the inner­most workings of city hall. He has a reputation for being earnest and long-winded. He talked my ear off for two hours one July afternoon, his train of thought becoming more opaque by the minute (“Council needs to find ways to enrich the democratic process”), and never once cracked a smile. The nerd rap bugs him, but he makes no apologies. “People ask me if I’m always this serious,” he tells me, “but what can I say? I have beliefs about politics.” Belief, it seems, trumps humour.

Earnestness is better suited to politics than journalism, but Vaughan is not your typical rookie candidate. After years of covering political issues for CBC and Citytv, he arrived at a crossroads. “There are two phases to these kinds of decisions,” he says. “First you make it, then you go looking to see if anyone can talk you out of it. I first decided to run last summer, at a cottage in Temagami. I woke up one morning, watched the mist clear off the lake, and felt I had to do it.” Vaughan’s candidacy is spurred by his concern that the city core is beset by poorly planned condominium construction, is in desperate need of new park space, and is quickly becoming both ugly and unaffordable. All the result of poor choices, he says, made through a municipal planning process that needs an overhaul. “The only way to fix it is through city council. Otherwise I wouldn’t have put the microphone down.” There was no talking him out of it.

His candidacy has been a thorn in the side of both Mayor David Miller and the local NDP machine. In their eyes, Trinity-Spadina is reserved for Olivia Chow’s former assistant, Helen Kennedy. Last winter, federal NDP leader Jack Layton offered him the party’s support and his personal endorsement—provided Vaughan ran in East York against nine-year incumbent Case Ootes. If he refused, Vaughan claims, Layton said the NDP would “bury” him. (Layton doesn’t recall using the word “bury.”)

Lose with me as your enemy, or lose with me as your friend. It was an offer he had to refuse. “I have never ascribed to party politics,” he says. And he was set on running in Trinity-Spadina, where he was raised, and which includes the Annex and Seaton Village neighbourhoods that his father, Colin, represented as a city councillor from 1972 to 1976. Colin was one of the leaders in the Spadina Expressway fight, which happened around the time Adam was 10. He remembers watching his dad being interviewed on camera—“I thought it was the coolest thing in the world”—and decided he wanted to be a journalist. “Then, when I was 15, my dad became a journalist at Citytv, which precipitated an identity crisis for me. ‘Now what do I do?’ ”