Remember Rob Ford? Back in 2010, long before his older brother Doug took the premiership of Ontario, Rob surprised the city by winning the mayoral election with 47 per cent of the vote, easily beating former Liberal MPP George Smitherman who got 36 per cent.
Ford connected with car commuters, nearly sweeping the suburban vote. He was able to position himself as a common sense response to David Miller, the left-leaning former mayor.
Well, it seems there’s a decent chance history will (sort of) repeat itself this October when Torontonians head to the ballot boxes.
No one would say Brad Bradford has the folksy charm of Rob Ford, who served one term and then passed away in 2016. But Bradford’s message is tailored to a similar constituency, and it seems to be working.
It’s true that Bradford now criticizes policies he previously supported. He voted to expand the network of bike lanes and now criticizes popular routes like on Adelaide. He voted to rename Dundas Square as Sankofa Square, but now he opposes it. And he voted in 2020 to cut the police budget by 10 per cent but now he’s proposing adding 1,000 new officers as part of his tough-on-crime posturing, even as most crime rates go down.
While these flip-flops make it easy to tar him as a hypocrite (if he doesn’t just admit he changed his mind), many voters care less about this than they do about how he’s speaking to their issues and grievances today.
While Mayor Olivia Chow is currently the favourite to win this race, with a stable 50 per cent support among decided voters, support for Bradford has consistently risen. A poll at the end of June put him at 40 per cent among decided voters.
Just after this article was published in print and before it went up online, former Conservative MP and cabinet minister Chris Alexander joined the 30-odd person race for mayor. He apparently has the backing of former mayor John Tory’s crew. We’ll have to see whether Alexander supplants Bradford on the right of the race, or if his reputation as the guy behind the notorious “barbaric cultural practices” snitch line will keep him on the margins.
Chow alienating some of her base
The Grind was the only mass-distributed paper in the city to endorse Chow in the 2023 by-election. The Star went with Ana Bailão, and the Sun went with former police chief Mark Saunders.
But soon after the election, troubling signs emerged, indicating that a real progressive agenda might not be coming.
A few weeks after Chow took office, the city continued to evict people living in shelter hotels without providing them with stable housing alternatives.
In 2024, the city forcibly evicted the Allan Gardens encampment. While 98 people reportedly got housing, another 433 people were pushed into the city’s inadequate, already-full shelter system. In 2025, the city also evicted the homeless encampment at Dufferin Grove Park.
Despite encampment evictions being a notable election issue in 2022’s mayoral race, they have become normalized under Mayor Chow.
In October 2023, after the surprise Hamas attacks on Israel, and while Israel was dropping massive bombs on densely-populated areas in Gaza, Chow posted on X about a pro-Palestine rally on Oct. 9, saying: “The rally to support Hamas at Nathan Phillips Square today is unsanctioned, without a permit and I unequivocally denounce it.” In that post, which is still up, she spoke supportively of the police investigating the protest for incidents of hate.
Anyone with knowledge of the law knows that a permit isn’t needed to hold a protest in public space. The mayor had the opportunity to provide context on the decades-long occupation of Palestine and to show compassion not just to Israelis but also to Palestinians being bombed in their homes. Instead, she chose to paint the pro-Palestine movement as unlawful and potentially hateful. (Chow had actually posted a tweet offering sympathy to Palestinians at the time but quickly deleted it.)
Since then, Chow has been one of the most hostile mayors in Canada to the Palestinian cause and its supporters.
In February 2024, she denounced a protest against the bombing of Rafah in Gaza. The protest, which moved through Toronto’s downtown core for hours, sparked controversy after it briefly stopped outside the Mount Sinai Hospital.
In late 2025, Chow said on the radio that the police have been “doing a good job” with their Project Resolute, which has involved mass surveillance, beating of protesters, no-knock raids on peoples’ homes for suspected vandalism and the laying of hundreds of criminal charges, nearly all of which have been dropped or have led to discharges. At one point, Chow even went on a talk radio show and asked why the police can’t “arrest more and charge more.”
While many voters don’t see Palestine as a core issue, the many Torontonians who do are among the most politically active and might otherwise support Chow’s re-election efforts. The vibrant riding associations for Palestine won’t support Bradford (whose rhetoric is noticeably more anti-Palestinian than Chow’s), but will they show up for Chow?
The mayor, to her credit, did try to limit the police’s budget increase in her first year in office. However, because she didn’t have a majority of support on council, and because the defund movement was weak, she lost that battle in 2024. Since then, Chow has gone along with the cops’ requests, and the police budget has ballooned from $1.17 billion in 2023 to $1.43 billion in 2026.
Can Chow point to enough accomplishments?
For people who remember the end of the John Tory years, you may recall how he allowed standard wait times of 10 minutes between subways during off-peak hours. Chow stopped that backsliding and improved TTC service, in part by increasing property taxes, though commutes are still too often a headache.
But the portfolio that Chow will likely stake her reputation on is housing. The fruits of some projects she prioritized early on, like 2023’s affordable housing plan to approve and build more rent-controlled units, won’t really be visible for years (and the city has far less power on this than the province), so won’t factor much into this election.
In recent months, possibly motivated by the straightforward boldness of New York’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and Toronto’s growing tenant movement, the Chow administration has finally made more immediate, high-profile moves.
For example, the city has started doing overdue repairs to the building at 500 Dawes Rd. and will send the bill to the landlord. “We have to send a message to these slumlords that we will not tolerate their behaviour. We have to act now,” Chow said in March.
The city, spurred on by Councillor Josh Matlow, has also fast-tracked the maximum indoor heat bylaw, which would force landlords to ensure that units do not get too hot during the summer months, though that won’t happen until at least next summer.
A lot can happen between now and the October election. We’ll have to see how that drama unfolds, without letting it distract us from the core issues.
