It’s time for a mea culpa column.
Because I’ve been covering politics in Ontario for four decades, I’m as susceptible as anyone to leaning on the past and thinking it’s likely to indicate the future.
So when, in 2023, Olivia Chow announced she was running for mayor — as she’d done unsuccessfully in 2014 — I did wonder what could be so different almost a decade later such that she’d get a different result.
Some of the things that bedevilled Chow’s campaign last time were, to my eyes, still problems this time. She was still an uninspiring speaker.
There was no issue that Chow campaigned on in 2014 that particularly captivated the electorate, and she didn’t seem to be saying anything unique this time around either.
Most of us thought she led the 2023 race from beginning to end essentially for two reasons:
- She had the best name recognition by far of any of the candidates by virtue of her having been in and around politics for more than 30 years.
- Unlike all the other major candidates in the race, she had an ideological lane all to herself. If you wanted the most NDP-backed candidate, Chow was your only choice. Meanwhile, all the other candidates cannibalized one another’s support because they had to share their ideological lanes.
So, while 63 per cent of Torontonians who voted wanted someone other than Chow as mayor, she claimed the prize by being first past the post.
However, there were other things happening in this race that I, and many other observers, missed. We underestimated a bunch of things.
First and foremost: the organizing power of the New Democratic Party in one-off byelections is certainly well known, and, it turns out, it was invested in Chow’s campaign. We might have missed that because Chow never referred to herself as “the NDP candidate,” and her signs weren’t orange. Heck, I don’t think I even saw her wear any orange clothing. For New Democrats, she was clearly one of their own. But it was also an important sign to voters that wouldn’t normally vote NDP that it was okay to mark an X beside Chow’s name.
Second, the anecdotes that she regularly dropped while campaigning probably turned out to be more effective than many of us thought they would be. Some of us who’ve covered too many campaigns hear these stories all the time and can get cynical about them. At a certain point, they start sounding hokey and even insincere because politicians use people’s stories as props all the time.
But a story told to me by a former Toronto city councillor smartened me up. He encountered a group of older Chinese Canadian women during the campaign and asked them whom they were supporting. They all said Chow. When he asked why, the reply was, “She’s one of us.”
And Chow gave people the chance to vote for the Megacity’s first female mayor. It all adds up.
Third, because of its (usually) more limited resources compared to the Conservatives and Liberals, the NDP tends to do well in byelections as opposed to provincewide or national campaigns. It can focus its resources on a single target. That proved to be even more relevant in this campaign. All prospective candidates assumed the next mayoral election would be in 2026. Because of John Tory’s unexpected departure, that timetable was dramatically advanced. None of the other candidates was ready to go on day one with an existing, experienced organization.
But Chow was. Toronto’s NDP machine was immediately good to go and, unlike the others, could channel all its resources into one candidate.
“The reality is that Olivia has been building the party across Toronto for decades, benefitting from and helping us build connections into the city’s many diverse communities,” says a senior Ontario NDP adviser. “Party activists and strategists are learning and adapting community-organizing techniques and scoring wins. And they don’t go to sleep between election cycles. [They’re] looking for opportunities at all levels.”
This source suggested that Chow won every advance poll because her voters had been identified and encouraged to cast their ballots early; three of every 10 votes counted for Chow on election night were marked in advance polls.
While everyone expected Chow to do well in the old city, she surprised a lot of us with her strength in the inner suburbs. She won almost all the wards in Scarborough, and the one she lost was just by a whisker. Despite Premier Doug Ford’s endorsement of former police chief Mark Saunders, Chow stayed competitive in the north end of Etobicoke (the heart of “Ford Nation”), losing to Ana Bailão by only 4.4 per cent. The margins were even tighter in North York.
Now that Chow is about to be sworn in as Toronto’s 66th mayor, the questions continue. Was her victory a one-off under highly unusual circumstances, or could this be a sign of increasing NDP appeal on a provincewide scale? After all, the New Democrats have now formed the official Opposition at Queen’s Park in two consecutive elections — an unprecedented achievement for the party. It has a new (and experienced) leader in Marit Stiles, who has such a unified hold on her party that no one else challenged her for leader.
We may get our first hint at an answer to these questions in two and a half weeks, during the provincial byelection in Scarborough–Guildwood. The riding has only ever been Liberal in its 16 years of existence. But the Tories think they’ve got a star candidate in current city councillor Gary Crawford.
The NDP notched only 17 per cent of the vote in the riding in the 2022 provincial election but has scored as high as 28 per cent on two other occasions. If the NDP wants us to think that Chow’s victory is a sign of burgeoning strength, it behooves them to show us on July 27 in Scarborough.
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