Politics, says Cheri DiNovo, is “like pushing a male elephant uphill”—which may be why the Parkdale–High Park MPP describes herself as a reluctant politician. The media tend to use phrases like “charisma to burn” and words like “spark plug” when they’re not savouring the details of her far-from-private history of transformation from street kid to drug dealer to Mercedes-driving CEO to United Church minister. A crazy résumé for the woman who is now the NDP Housing Critic? Maybe, though crazy ideas have been working out rather well for her.

Electorally, she was a winner right out of the gate. In 2006, she succumbed to an invitation to run for the NDP in a by-election in Parkdale–High Park. She wasn’t expected to win (it was a Liberal stronghold), but she did. She won again by a comfortable margin in last year’s general election, despite Liberal candidate Sylvia Watson’s attempts to highlight her drug history and twist her sympathies for the world’s underdogs into endorsements of everyone from pedophiles to Karla Homolka (for the record, she’s not sympathetic to Homolka, just critical of publishers who splash her face on the front page to sell newspapers). Attacks have never made DiNovo back off, and they didn’t stifle her commitment to social justice—she may be just a backbencher in the relatively feeble third party, but her name is all over issues like freedom for Tibet and regulating payday loan sharks. This March, her private member’s bill to raise the minimum wage from $8 to $10 an hour won so much public and media support that the government, in its most recent budget, proposed raising it to $10.25, though not till 2010. Cheri kicked back with her $11 by 2011 campaign, knowing first hand what it’s like to be poor and homeless.

She dropped out of Grade 10 in the early ’60s, fleeing a troubled working-class family in the Annex to “tune in, turn on, drop out” and live on the streets (famously trying to make ends meet by smuggling LSD into the country in hollowed- out Bibles). She was passionately involved in the anti–Vietnam War movement, early environmental issues, feminism and the nascent struggle for gay rights (“it seemed a logical extension of feminism to me,” she says, “since straight men treated gays the way they treated women”). Friendship and counselling from a United Church minister at the Fred Victor Mission, where she often went for food, helped draw her back to school in the early ’70s. She would eventually study philosophy and psychology at York University and ultimately become the founder and CEO of the Abbott Group, a personnel agency that focused on women and made half a million dollars in its first year.

She had married by then (artist and draft resister Don Zielinski), had two children (Francesca and Damien), had a fine house in the suburbs with a pool in the backyard, and wasn’t really happy. “I woke up one day,” she says, “and realized my mood depended on my billings. That was no way to live.” Zielinski’s death in a motor­cycle accident in 1992 clinched the need for a life change. They’d been together 17 years. She calls it a spiritual awakening.

She was ordained in 1996 and two years later was appointed minister at Emmanuel–Howard Park United Church on Roncesvalles Avenue. She’s decidedly earnest, but not without the saving grace of humour: “I love kitsch,” she tells me, “and I have all the Jesus fridge magnets”; she refers to her Mistress (not Master) of Divinity degree and argues that Canada’s social democrats should dress better than they do—“After all, we’re meant to create and enjoy beauty.”

DiNovo says she has no political ambitions (though in some circles, her name figures on any list of possible replacements for Howard Hampton, the NDP’s current leader). You might say she has street ambitions, growing from the conviction that the NDP needs to appeal to street-level voters who are disillusioned with the political system itself. She may be 57 years old, but her politics seem to grow from listening to her inner child—that 15-year-old street kid hoping for a decent chance to turn her life around.