Unless we’re about to witness a world-historical polling error, Olivia Chow is going to be the next mayor of Toronto. She’ll end a 14-year run of conservative mayors, despite the fact that she’s equally likely to win something less than 40 per cent of the popular vote. I’m not being churlish here — a win is a win. There will be time enough to consider what the outcome means for the relative strength of the city’s progressive movement, but right now, I’m far more inclined to point and laugh in the direction of Queen’s Park. Premier Doug Ford is looking at a minimum of three years of an antagonistic relationship with the mayor of the province’s biggest city. The situation will have consequences for some of the government’s biggest priorities, such as housing and transit. It might have been avoided if, for example, the City of Toronto had adopted ranked ballots, something it had started working toward prior to 2020. But the Ford government peremptorily made ranked ballots illegal for any municipality anywhere in Ontario.
Whoops. Now, because some conservatives with the premier’s ear seemingly believed ranked ballots were a leftist trick to keep conservatives out of power, guess what? It’s Mayor Chow until at least 2026. And either she’ll wield the strong-mayor powers Ford originally intended for John Tory or the Tories will contrive some transparent and flimsy excuse to take those powers away. That part of the story is yet unwritten, and we aren’t done conducting the autopsy on this election campaign.
To restate the facts before us: Chow was an eminently beatable candidate. Even her supporters acknowledged at the outset that she wasn’t going to be some kind of electoral juggernaut in this campaign. As far back as March, the Toronto Star quoted a progressive organizer who said that, thanks to division among centrists and conservatives, Chow could win with the left’s traditional 35-ish per cent of the vote.
Pundit accountability, here: I thought this was a foolish plan and was quite certain that Chow was being set up for another humiliating defeat (not unlike what happened with her 2014 run) by people who didn’t have her best interests in mind. I was wrong, though not because Chow is set to exceed expectations, but because her rivals have so massively underperformed.
The most salient fact here has to be the division on the right of the political spectrum. The race started off with Councillor Brad Bradford making an explicit pitch to be Tory’s political heir: he presented himself as a voice for fiscal restraint running a law-and-order campaign. The problem for Bradford is that the city’s conservatives don’t trust him: his mom is a Liberal MP, but even worse, he’s a cyclist, and Toronto’s conservatives appear some days to see the entire observable universe from behind their car dashboards. In particular, they’ve been utterly incensed by bike lanes Tory and Bradford had a role in expanding.
Enter Mark Saunders, who was quickly supported by a number of the city’s prominent conservatives — including (not-so-subtly) the premier himself, well before he dropped any pretense of neutrality in the race. Saunders had some obvious weaknesses that conservatives were willing to ignore, like his documented history of misleading the public about what Toronto police knew about serial killer Bruce McArthur. Politics sometimes involves ghoulish compromises, but if you’re going to make them, you’d hope to at least win and not come in a distant second or third.
Finally, we’ve got Anthony Furey, the Postmedia columnist and further-right firebrand in this election. Furey won’t be mayor, but when all the ballots are counted, he’ll likely have secured at least half as many votes as Saunders — and possibly a larger fraction still (and likely more than Bradford, who has been all but abandoned by both the right and the centre). For a candidate with little institutional support and a message that boils down to “you want a conservative? I’ll show you a conservative,” it’s actually a pretty shocking rebuke to conservative leaders in this town, not least Ford and Tory.
It’s not exactly a shock that a non-trivial part of the conservative movement deeply resents the idea of being told to get in line. Having made anti-elitism into a cornerstone of their politics, right-leaning voters, it turns out, are as likely to turn that rhetoric against conservatives themselves. Someone who really ought to have understood how powerful the impulse can be is none other than Ford, who started his leadership bid for the PC party in 2018 by telling supporters, “Make no mistake about it: the elites of this party — the ones who have shut out the grassroots — do not want me in this race.”
In 2018, Ford parlayed his anti-elitism into a successful leadership bid and ended up in the premier’s office. In 2023, the party elites are Ford himself and people who answer to him, because a two-term premier and his circle can’t be anything else. That he’s unable to influence events in Toronto’s mayoral election is going to cause his government some headaches, but it isn’t itself critical. The bigger question for Ford and the Tories is whether their own supporters’ enthusiasm is starting to flag — and, if so, what that could mean for the 2026 election. For now, though, the luckiest politician in Canada is Olivia Chow, who may be about to win office thanks in large part to her enemies cannibalizing one another.
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