Brad Bradford, the current city councillor for Beaches-East York, was among the first people in line last Friday to register his campaign for the mayor of Toronto. He’ll be challenging current mayor Olivia Chow, we assume, though as of this writing Chow hasn’t yet registered her own campaign nor explicitly said that she will, in fact, run again in October.
That ambiguity isn’t stopping anyone from starting the political slugfest nice and early. Progress Toronto, a left-of-centre political group formed to help “elect progressive champions for Toronto” in municipal elections has filed a complaint to the city’s integrity commissioner, alleging that Bradford held a “cash-for-access” event in Concord earlier this year. Bradford dismissed the allegation as a “smear” in comments to the Toronto Star, and said it’s no different than elected officials taking speaking gigs anywhere else.
Bradford is not without allies, however: A Better City Toronto (ABC Toronto, get it?) is a similar, albeit younger, group that has been laying the groundwork for a challenge to Chow for more than a year now.
The history of these groups tells you something about what’s going on here: Progress Toronto was founded in 2018 after the city’s left had lost two deeply consequential elections in 2010 and 2014 (Rob Ford and John Tory, respectively). Progress Toronto’s efforts in 2018 saw only marginal successes; Doug Ford’s late-in-the-day decision to cut Toronto City Council in half evaporated competitive races for a number of competitive young progressive challengers, as incumbents scrambled for seats before the music stopped. In 2022 progressives had more luck, and in 2023 Progress Toronto helped put Chow in the mayor’s office — and the group’s one-time executive director, Michal Hay, became Chow’s chief of staff.
ABC Toronto’s founding in 2024, similarly, came after Chow’s win: the city’s conservative and blue-Liberal political operators were suddenly on the outside of power for the first time in 14 years. This isn’t a coincidence. The political coalition that holds the mayor’s office already has enormous ability to dictate the agenda on any given day; it’s the people toiling in opposition who need to get organized to make themselves heard.
October’s election is shaping up to be the first real contest of two duelling groups like Progress Toronto and ABC Toronto. It’s already common shorthand for these groups to be called political parties in all but name: they recruit and train volunteers and identify preferred candidates as well as common policy priorities. While they’re technically “third party advertisers” under the law, by the law of ducks these groups have a lot of the same features as political parties. (If it quacks like a duck, etc.)
What they don’t do, what they can’t do under Ontario law, is coordinate fundraising and campaign expenditures among different candidates. The province’s Municipal Election Act states that campaign donations can only be made directly to candidates (not a third party) and provincial and federal political parties (as well as their riding associations) are explicitly forbidden from making donations to either candidates or third-party advertisers. This one legal trick — just one small section in a much larger law regulating municipal elections — is the entire load-bearing beam holding up the nominally non-partisan state of Ontario’s municipal elections.
This law is out of date, at least in our biggest cities. We have two political parties in Toronto, the two leading candidates for mayor will have their respective backing, and they’re all but certain to line up a slate of candidates in various ward elections, too. Some people are undoubtedly already bemoaning this. It’s incredibly common to think that political parties are the problem with democracy when they are, in fact, a solution to many problems in representative democracy, and Ontario’s big cities show us why.
In the absence of clear partisan identification people don’t assess municipal candidates based on a rigorous evaluation of their policy preferences and candidate histories; they overwhelmingly vote based on name recognition and niche local grievances, the former of which gives incumbents a nearly-insurmountable advantage. A Toronto councillor is one of the safest jobs in Canadian politics, with deaths in office being more common than outright election defeats (this is literally true, at least in recent history!). And this is in one of the best-covered municipal elections in the country. People find political parties distasteful, but the alternative isn’t some Platonic republic of ideas. It’s a lifetime job guarantee for people who in some cases last faced serious competition more than a decade ago.
2026 is likely to provide a pretty vivid example of this in action. One of the criticisms of Bradford (from both his left and right) has been his willingness to abandon positions he’d previously held only a few years ago. In a provincial or federal race this kind of political switcheroo would likely necessitate a floor-crossing in Parliament, a big showy event that’s both public and easily legible to voters, as recent federal events have shown. In contrast, Bradford’s opponents will have to spend a substantial amount of time and energy making this criticism stick, because civic politics is designed to be more opaque.
The problems with the absence of political parties don’t end on election day, since the results are a system where it’s functionally impossible for voters to get what they vote for. A mayoral candidate might run on a city-wide platform but the moment they’re sworn in they’ll run face-first into the buzzsaw of a council that a) has its own ideas and b) doesn’t need the mayor’s permission. This has regularly made my job as a political journalist more fun and interesting than it otherwise would have been, but entertaining political journalists is not, in fact, the primary consideration in how we structure institutions. Toronto’s council structure makes a city of 3 million people harder to govern and, more importantly, harder for voters to fix.
Making municipal elections de jure partisan instead of merely de facto could only possibly sound radical in Toronto, a city that often tries its best to be as reactionary and conservative as possible. We are not just an outlier among other global big cities (London, Berlin, New York, Paris, Rome — all governed by partisan councils!) even Toronto’s comparable cities in Canada have established political parties in Vancouver and Montreal.
And even if none of that were true, the simple fact remains that we are in a basic way lying to ourselves about this election, and very likely future elections. We have organized groups doing partisan politics behind the fig leaf of third-party advertising. Ontario should amend the Municipal Elections Act to legalize and regulate municipal political parties, at the very least for the biggest cities. This is a Toronto story for now, but the thing about ideas is that when they work, they spread — and by the next election we could have a lot more pseudo-parties around Ontario.