Three years ago, as the battle lines were being drawn in the special election to replace John Tory as mayor of Toronto, some provincial Progressive Conservatives began floating the idea of Willowdale MPP Stan Cho (ahem) running to succeed him. I said on Twitter at the time that this was a dumb idea for multiple reasons: most people couldn’t pick Cho out of a lineup (notwithstanding his time served as a cabinet minister under Doug Ford) and once they learned who he was it would simply make the election a referendum about Ford and his treatment of Toronto — not a debate that conservatives in this city were guaranteed to win.
Privately, in a discussion with one of the Tories backing Cho, I added: if the conservatives in this town wanted to back a challenger to Olivia Chow, Brad Bradford was a sitting city councillor with a substantial record who was obviously eager to run against her from the right. This wasn’t campaign advice, just a simple recognition of the political facts on the ground. The response from my conservative interlocutor was barely-veiled contempt for Bradford, and prominent Toronto conservatives (including the premier of Ontario) ended up backing Mark Saunders. For their time and money, they got a bit over eight per cent of the vote.
It was, admittedly, a stronger showing than Bradford got in that race, with just over one per cent. The difference between 2023 and 2026, however, is that Bradford has clearly learned from his defeat and made a much stronger showing this time around. The same can’t be said for his conservative antagonists, including as of this morning Chris Alexander, who dropped out of the race on the day that early voting began. (Because of the late decision, Alexander’s name will remain very near the top of the ballot.)
Alexander is now just the latest of several failed attempts to offer a conservative-but-not-Bradford candidate in this election cycle: former MPPs Rod Phillips and Michael Ford, journalist and fellow 2023 candidate Anthony Furey, and Ben Mulroney have all been floated as possible mayoral contestants — and all opted not to run. We can lament the fact that Alexander’s campaign never caught on with voters if we want — I wrote sympathetically about his transit ideas last month — but the simple fact is that his campaign started relatively late and ostentatiously lacked a suitable justification for its existence (beyond the persistent facts that some political consultants saw some billable hours to extract from the country’s largest media market, and some of the city’s conservatives still couldn’t make peace with backing Bradford even if it meant defeating one of the country’s most prominent New Democrats and changing policy in the country’s largest city).
The explanation for this curious fact about the 2026 mayoral election is that Toronto politics is basically grudges and beefs all the way down: as Richard Warnica reported in the Toronto Star this week, apparently even Bradford’s allies and supporters find him “weirdly intense” and others find him “almost uniquely unlikable.” Full disclosure here: Bradford is my own city councillor and I’ve had several substantial conversations with him both off- and on-the-record over the years; I think that descriptions of his personal style should probably carry less weight than his own public record, but that both are being conflated to some extent.
Bradford’s record of taking both sides of some prominent decisions at City Hall (like the renaming of Yonge-Dundas Square) depending on which way the political wind is blowing is combining, in some observers’ minds, with perceived personality tics to form the kind of package that has clearly motivated at least some well-heeled political professionals to try and find someone, anyone to run against him.
And to be clear, it’s a free country: people can run for office for any reason or no reason if they want, and their supporters can cast a ballot for any reason up to and including “I don’t like the look of that other dude.” This isn’t a column urging people to vote for or against Bradford or anyone else. What is striking about the year-long, increasingly desperate search to find a non-Bradford candidate from the political right is that it was basically never connected to the observable reality of the city’s politics: namely that Bradford had spent years consolidating support from Chow’s opponents and that by early this year the vast majority of those voters had chosen their candidate and weren’t moving, barring a political earthquake.
Bradford may still lose this election — indeed, based on the preponderance of polling evidence that’s currently the most likely outcome — but it’s not a great sign that substantial numbers of conservative political operators in this city can spend months of time and large sums of money chasing a delusion. Toronto will eventually elect a conservative mayor again someday, as it has in most elections since amalgamation, and it would be best for the city if the people who find jobs in that administration can recognize fact from fiction.