Is it too early to start polling for an election that won’t occur for another 468 days? No? Good, because we’re doing this — or rather, Liaison Strategies is, asking Toronto voters who they’re leaning towards voting for in the next mayoral election on October 26, 2026. The early results are encouraging for incumbent mayor Olivia Chow, who leads all plausible rivals by huge margins, with the exception of her immediate predecessor, John Tory, who is only four points behind Chow. If Tory chooses not to run (he is publicly undecided), the primary beneficiary is Beaches-East York councillor Brad Bradford, who ran against Chow in the 2023 race to replace Tory only to get squeezed out by other conservative candidates. Still, absent another Tory run, Chow would lead the pack by double-digit margins if the election were held today.
The election will not be held today. So, there’s no reason to think that the eventual vote totals will closely resemble those in the Liaison poll. Nevertheless, we can already see the ways in which the pressures of the next election are shaping decisions that city council is making today, most acutely around issues of housing and shelters.
A bit of context: back in 2019 (when Tory was mayor), Toronto’s city council voted to substantially expand the permissions to build homeless shelters across the city. The details are tricky, but suffice it to say that the city had previously imposed a number of finnicky conditions through its own zoning rules on the shelters it intended to build or operate; after the 2019 vote, municipal shelters became a permitted use across much more of the city.
The effect of this change was perhaps obvious to planning dorks like this writer (ahem) but came as a surprise to many residents. Because the city’s public consultation process is triggered when any project needs a zoning change, allowing municipal shelters broadly under the city’s zoning meant that, in many cases, shelters could be built without public consultation, or with only minimal consultation.
For those of us who write incessantly (perhaps even monotonously) about the housing crisis smothering the city, province, and country, this is an entirely welcome change: the city is able to get more badly-needed shelters built more quickly without holding every project hostage to the public show-trial element of the planning process. It turns out, however, that homeless shelters are not universally welcome in every part of the city. That much, we didn’t need opinion polling about.
Fast-forward a few years, and communities across the city are in a near-revolt about the spread of shelters into their neighbourhoods, and the most recent council meeting saw the city backtrack substantially on its shelter goals. While there are undeniably cases of this sentiment in the urban core, this motion was backed primarily by suburban councillors, demanding that city staff hold public consultations on any new shelters (even if they’re allowed under zoning rules) and further letting councillors dictate the form of public consultation — for example, in-person meetings versus online.
The subtext is pretty clear: antagonistic councillors are going to force in-person consultations precisely because those are the ones where the most vocal opponents are likeliest to show up. One of the biggest changes in the city’s consultation since COVID-19 was allowing people to make submissions via Zoom or similar apps, and it brought an entirely different slice of the public into conversations that had been dominated by comfortably-housed retirees with more time on their hands.
(Even when housing advocates show up for in-person meetings, it’s become increasingly common for councillors, including some nominal progressives, to dismiss them as interlopers getting in the way of the “authentic” residents — who are, of course, all opposed, as God intended.)
These same councillors will use these meetings as procedural evidence to demonstrate that the shelter shouldn’t go forward.
Many housing observers barely noticed this change because they were too busy being angry about the disappointing vote on sixplexes, which happened at the same meeting, and which we covered previously. But the two items have a lot in common: the opposition has been driven primarily by suburban councillors opposed to physical change in their neighbourhoods, housing crisis be damned. And the “compromise” arrived at by council under Olivia Chow has largely been to surrender to suburban demands.
Toronto’s a single city when the suburbs “deserve” subways, but the suburbs are precious, delicate villages when a city of three million needs places for people to live.
What does this have to do with the next election? Just this: housing is already shaping up to be a lightning-rod issue for the coming mayoral race, and whoever is running against Chow will be running to her political right. Toronto’s political geography is pretty predictable, and a right-leaning challenger to Chow will need to run up the score in the suburbs while she wins huge margins downtown. One of the ways for a conservative challenger to run up that score will almost certainly be to promise some kind of “pause”, “reset”, or “reconsideration” on the city’s housing goals in the suburbs. Whatever euphemism they choose, it will mean backtracking on fourplexes, shelters, and probably rooming houses as well across the vast majority of the city.
This marks a change in Toronto’s politics from the last decade or so. One area of genuine progress under Tory was his willingness to slowly, incrementally pry open the city’s neighbourhoods and back like-minded allies on council, such as Bradford or Ana Bailão. Progress on the housing file that started on the right and centre of the city’s politics is now being pushed forward by the left. Who knows: Tory, Bradford, or Bailão could all try and sell the gospel of housing to the city’s exclusionary suburbs. But they’ll be swimming against the political current in the places they most need to win big.
This isn’t written in stone, of course. Nothing is any more certain than those Liaison polling numbers. But some things are more probable than others. And for housing advocates in this city the choice in 2026 is probably going to be Chow and some real housing progress along with some legitimate disappointments — or a more right-leaning mayor whose path to power involves reversing the baby steps Toronto has taken in the last few years.
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