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Toronto mayor-elect Olivia Chow gives her victory speech on stage at her camp’s election night headquarters in Toronto on Monday.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
A wind of change is blowing in Canadian politics.
In British Columbia, the mayor of Vancouver and then the premier of the province were toppled in spectacular fashion, the first beaten by a Green Party upstart, the second by the leader of a party, the Conservatives, that had been in complete disarray. In Quebec, the separatist Parti Québécois returned to power after a dozen years in the wilderness, reducing the ruling Coalition Avenir Québec to precisely zero seats in the National Assembly.
Olivia Chow managed to buck the trend on Monday evening, beating back a serious challenge from an energetic city councillor, Brad Bradford, and winning a second term as mayor of Toronto. It was quite an achievement for the former city councillor and NDP MP, who turns 70 next year. She arrived in Canada from Hong Kong with her parents at the age of 13, moving into a sprawling public housing complex. She won election to the school board at just 28, beginning a political career that has spanned four decades.
Olivia Chow re-elected mayor of Toronto, staving off challenger Brad Bradford
That career seemed to be over in 2015, after she lost a bid for mayor, then a by-election that would have given her back a seat in the House of Commons. But when former mayor John Tory resigned amid a personal scandal in 2023, Ms. Chow took another stab and won the mayor’s chair in a special by-election. If all goes well, she will hold it until 2030.
In this moment of triumph, she is bound to see a vindication of the record she has established at city hall and the program she had laid out for the future. She is entitled to that view.
Unlike most government leaders, mayors are elected directly. With parties prohibited at the city level, voters mark their ballots for the candidate alone. Armed with that legitimacy – along with the “strong mayor” powers the provincial government has granted to cities – Ms. Chow has a solid mandate and considerable power.
In her first term, she managed to create a school snack program, open all libraries seven days a week and strike a cost-sharing deal with Premier Doug Ford worth billions of dollars to the city. In this term, she plans to fight for tenants’ rights, create more affordable rental housing, keep transit fares frozen and invest in youth programs.
But it would be a mistake to interpret Monday’s vote as a rubber stamp for the status quo. Mr. Bradford gave Ms. Chow a real run for her money. He told voters that Toronto was crying out for change, and that message clearly struck a chord, bringing him close to even with a well-known sitting mayor in late-campaign opinion polls.
Voters will not be content with a steady-as-she-goes approach to governing Canada’s leading metropolis. Traffic congestion is a genuine problem, frustrating to locals and mind-boggling for visitors. It costs Torontonians countless hours of wasted time and the city many billions of dollars in lost productivity.
Though Toronto is safe by North American standards, with crime rates down in several categories, the plague of mental illness, drug addiction and homelessness that afflicts so many cities is painfully visible. Ms. Chow managed to get most of the tent encampments out of municipal parks, but city dwellers continue to witness scenes of disorder and despair on sidewalks and in transit stations.
The general state of Toronto’s parks, roads and many of its transit stations is not what it should be. Ms. Chow has put lots of resources into making sure Toronto’s most disadvantaged residents get the help they deserve, but little into making sure that the city’s economic engine keeps humming.
Rather than coast on her victory, Ms. Chow would be well advised to reach out to Toronto’s business community about how to feed the goose that lays the golden eggs, and focus more on issues of simple urban maintenance such as cleanliness and conduct in public spaces.
Toronto is a thriving city, more stuck than broken, as Mr. Bradford put it. Most of its problems, like high housing costs and crowded roads, are problems of success. But looking around at other cities of its size, it is hard to avoid the feeling that it is falling behind. Its transit network is nowhere near as good as you would find in many major European or East Asian cities. Its cultural assets are below par.
While she is hard working, decent and sincere, Ms. Chow sometimes seems to lack the ambition that the leader of a dynamic city like Toronto needs.
The wind of change is blowing in Toronto, too. Ms. Chow would be unwise to ignore it.