LILLEY: Toronto doubles down on decline with another Chow mandate

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Since Toronto’s amalgamation as the megacity in 1997, no mayor seeking re-election has lost and, on Monday, Olivia Chow continued that trend by winning a second term. Chow’s victory was impressive. She won the most votes of anyone ever to run for mayor, more than 530,000, but it wasn’t an easy victory.

Despite winning the most votes ever, Chow won re-election with the smallest percentage of the vote of any re-elected mayor at just 54%.

When Mel Lastman won re-election in 2000, 483,277 ballots were cast for him and he took 80% of the vote. When David Miller was re-elected in 2006, he won 57% of the vote with 332,969 votes in his column, and when John Tory won his second term, it was 479,659 ballots and 63% of the vote.

The reason Chow took such a small percentage of the vote while also getting the most votes of any mayoral candidate is that a massive number of people showed up to vote against her and for Brad Bradford.

Bradford’s tally of more than 400,000 votes puts him behind only Chow, Lastman and Tory for the highest vote totals by mayoral candidates in Toronto history. None of that will comfort him or his supporters the day after the election. They still lost, but it is an accomplishment.

It also speaks to the strong desire for change in this city and should serve as a caution to Chow.

A warning bell for Chow

More people voted for Bradford in his losing campaign than voted for Rob Ford in 2010 or John Tory in either 2014 or 2022. Bradford’s vote tally is higher than the 269,372 votes that made Chow mayor in 2023, and it’s more than David Miller received in either of his election victories.

There are clearly people frustrated that basic city services — the pipes, police and pavement — aren’t being handled properly. There are people concerned about spending going up by 19% since Chow took office, more than double the rate of inflation, while services have deteriorated rather than improved.

That Chow was re-elected with such high numbers shows there are a large number of people willing to accept a city in decline.

The city is dirtier, messier and more chaotic than it used to be. Traffic congestion has gotten worse, and taking transit ceases to be an option when the subway stops on a regular basis, buses are too frequently late, and streetcars can’t move, but the guy in the middle of the car can smoke crack during your commute.

In the middle of her victory speech, Chow promised more of what Toronto has consistently failed to deliver: housing.

“We will build thousands more homes that people can afford and protect the tenants and get tough with bad landlords,” Chow said.

The city’s biggest slumlord

Toronto Community Housing Corporation, owned by the city, is the type of landlord Chow vows to attack, but she won’t take on TCHC because they are public slumlords rather than private ones.

“More than half of TCHC developments were in ‘poor’ or ‘critical’ condition in 2024,” the city’s auditor found earlier this year.

That same audit found that 40% of the state-of-good-repair issues identified in 2019 had not even begun repairs by 2024. The Toronto Community Housing Corporation is the biggest slumlord in Canada, and Chow wants to expand this model.

Crime is up, not down. Toronto Police Service data proves that, even if most of the media couldn’t be bothered to fact-check her on it. Taxes have been hiked 20% since Chow took over as mayor, even as she took in billions of dollars from the federal and provincial governments and saw two major highways uploaded to the province.

Remarkably, looking at all of this, voters in Toronto said, “Yes please, I’d like some more.”

Voters choose more of the same

They opted for more antisemitism running through our streets. They opted for millions more to be spent handing out City of Toronto-branded crack and meth pipes. They opted for a transit system that doesn’t deliver and doesn’t leave many people feeling safe. They opted for putting the renaming of city infrastructure ahead of making sure that infrastructure works.

Most of all, they opted to continue allowing this once-great city to head further down the wrong path, following the ill-advised progressive road of Portland or San Francisco.

Eventually, voters might wake up, as they finally did in San Francisco. Sadly, Monday wasn’t that day, and so we have four more years of a mayor who isn’t fit for the job, and a socialist council more inclined to follow her worst instincts than rein them in.

Monday’s result means four more years of watching Toronto follow the progressive playbook of Portland and San Francisco. Voters had the chance to wake up. Instead, they hit the snooze button.

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