By: Matt Gurney
In the end, the expected close race to be the next mayor of Toronto was not, in fact, remotely close. Olivia Chow, the left-wing incumbent, easily defeated challenger Brad Bradford. While recent polls had suggested a race that was narrowing into a toss-up, the reality was different. Chow won an outright majority of the vote and defeated Bradford by at least 130,000 votes, or roughly 13 points (there are a few polls outstanding, but not enough to change those numbers by much).
So, yeah. Not exactly a photo finish.
I’ll leave it to the polling nerds and political operatives to figure out what happened here with the false hope for Bradford. Something was clearly wonky somewhere. Explaining the outcome itself is easy enough — Toronto is a left-leaning city, Chow had incumbency, and a ground-game supported by unions, the NDP (most readers will recall that Chow is the widow of Jack Layton, the late federal NDP leader), plus Progress Toronto, a progressive political group. It was always going to be hard for Bradford, or anyone, to defeat that.
Maybe it was particularly hard for Bradford. Astute readers will notice that in my intro above, I noted — neutrally and I suspect uncontroversially — that Chow is left wing. I didn’t assign a partisan affiliation to Bradford. He certainly ran against Chow from the right. But Bradford is one of those political animals who seems to match his stated beliefs to the occasion. As near as I can tell, he ran from the right, on issues like law-and-order, public safety and fiscal restraint, because the incumbent was on the left. In an alternate universe where the incumbent was a conservative, I have a hunch that Bradford would have put on a keffiyeh, begun every stump speech with a land acknowledgement and pledged subsidized groceries.
His most sincerely held belief seems to be in his own political destiny. The rest, he’ll figure out on the fly.
If that sounds uncharitable, rest assured I’m barely exaggerating. Bradford started his political life, and just a few years ago, as a pretty bog standard Toronto downtown progressive, with maybe a bit of a tilt toward the centre ... but only just maybe. His pivot to the right required him to pledge as mayor to reverse decisions he’d supported as councillor. Only Mayor Brad Bradford can undo the damage Councillor Brad Bradford did to Toronto, I quipped earlier in the race. The rank political opportunism, combined with what we could politely call a likability issue — this Toronto Star profile of Bradford was absolutely savage, but not particularly contested — and we end up with the result we got. Say what you will about Chow’s policies, but she’s generally well liked, and for the very simple reason that she’s a pleasant person. Sometimes, in politics and in life, that matters.
It may seem odd for me to say this now, but, I’ll make a disclosure. For all that, I voted for Bradford. I did so expecting him to lose — I was surprised by the scale of his defeat, but not the defeat itself. And I did so with a pretty crippling degree of non-enthusiasm. Bradford was not my ideal candidate.
But I voted for him for the simple reason that I’ve watched something very dark settle into my hometown over the last few years, targeting this city’s Jewish community. Since the Oct. 7 attacks, Toronto’s Jews, who once dared believe themselves fully assimilated and safe to live their lives with as much or as little obvious outward faith as they chose, have been attacked, harassed, threatened and intimidated. This has gone on for years and no one in power seemed much to care. The response from officialdom was tantamount to “Thoughts and prayers and good luck!” It wasn’t until the U.S. government started paying attention, after its downtown consulate was struck by gunfire, that Toronto police seemed to remember that they are allowed to arrest people for committing crimes.
Because that’s what the Jewish community was confronted with — crimes. This isn’t about peaceful marches against Israeli military actions, which are legal and legitimate. It’s about assaults on Jewish persons, attacks and vandalism on Jewish businesses, religious sites and schools, and protests, nominally against Israeli military actions, in parts of the city that had no link to Israel whatsoever, but just happened to have many Jewish residents. It was rank intimidation, and Bradford, to his credit, was one of the few who’d say so openly.
I don’t think Chow is an antisemite. I also recognize that a lot of what went wrong in recent years is shared among other levels of government. The feds and Ontario have not draped themselves in glory. But she is the final elected authority in the city where this basic breakdown in the social contract was taking place, and I’d hoped the electorate would be alarmed by that enough to send a message.
I guess they did, come to think of it. It just wasn’t the one I hoped they’d send. I’ll take it at face value, in any case, and I suspect my Jewish friends and neighbours will, too.
It’s not that I assume that a vote for Chow is a vote against Toronto’s Jewish community. Far from it. There are also a lot of reasons one could not feel great about voting for Bradford. I know this as a guy who did not feel great about voting for Bradford. I get it.
But in the final analysis, even though Toronto is a big and complicated place, it seemed to me that there was a pretty clear and fundamental moral issue at the heart of this campaign, and Bradford, Lord help us, was the one on the right side of it.
A vote for Chow was, if nothing else, a vote that didn’t care about what Toronto’s Jewish community has suffered. In the overwhelming majority of cases, I suspect people never even thought about it at all.
I wish they had! Antisemitism is a canary in our societal coal mine. I regret to inform you all that the poor little bird has thoroughly asphyxiated. A close reading of history — even a passing glance at it, come to think of it — is pretty clear that that is not generally a sign that things are going well.
Oh well! Best of luck to Mayor Chow and all those elected or re-elected to council in our country’s largest city. You have a lot of work to do, and I wish you success. I also hope you’ll take a moment to remember those Torontonians who now live in fear in their own city because of a conflict a world away.
Bradford, thoroughly imperfect as he was, spoke for them. I hope someone else will step up.
But we’ll see.
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I quibble with describing Toronto as a “left-leaning” city. It is a proudly far left city, rivalled only by Vancouver as North America’s crucible of unrepentant far-left toxic antisemitism
This is what multiculturalism looks like: third world immigrants couldn't care less about Jews, even when they don't actively hate them. Indigenous Canadians should take a warning from that.