Today in Toronto we vote to elect the new mayor of the city: it is a very important election both because Toronto is the largest and most populous city in Canada (and among the four largest in all of North America, with almost three million inhabitants ), as well as for several major problems that the local administration has faced in recent years. There are 102 candidates competing for victory, a record for the city (the previous one was 65 candidates, in 2014).
Today’s elections are early elections, the first in the history of Toronto: the outgoing mayor John Tory, in office since 2014, resigned in February, a few months before the start of his third term due to the discovery of an extramarital affair with one of his former collaborators.
Tory, a centrist politician, had also become mayor after another big scandal: in 2013 then mayor Rob Ford had admitted to using crack and was disheartened by the city council (in 2014 he had tried to run again but had to interrupting the electoral campaign due to cancer, which caused his death two years later).
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Tory’s sudden resignation has therefore prompted many people to try to take advantage of the political vacuum left by the former mayor, by attempting a candidacy. In some cases these are risky and mainly provocative proposals: there has been much talk, for example, of that of climate activist Toby Heaps, who said he presented himself to represent his dog, Mollybut there’s also a popular comedian, barely 18-year-olds, and several bizarre characters.
The reason why there are so many candidates is because running for mayor of Toronto is very simple: any city resident aged 18 or over can apply, you don’t need to be affiliated with any political party, and unlike many other large cities that require you to collect thousands of signatures you only need 25. You just need to pay a fee of 200 euros, for which, however, a refund can then be requested.
The candidates who really have a serious chance of winning are a handful: the one that all major polls show in front is Olivia Chow, candidate of the New Democratic Party, center-left. Chow is 66 years old, was born in Hong Kong and has a long political history in the party (she was also the wife of the former national leader, Jack Layton, who died in 2011). She was already a candidate in the 2014 city election, resulting in the third most voted candidate.
Then there is Ana Bailao, who is centrist and has been Tory’s deputy mayor for the last five years, and who has received support from Tory and Canada’s most popular newspaper, the Toronto Star. And there’s city councilman Josh Matlow, a progressive leaner, and former police chief Mark Saunders, a conservative.
Whoever wins the elections will have to face a very complicated economic situation with a budget hole of about one million Canadian dollars, which was mainly affected by the expenses incurred by the city administration during the pandemic years. Then there is the housing crisis, which in recent years has become increasingly serious in the city: the homes accessible to the less well-off sections of the population are constantly decreasing and the people who are forced to live on the street are on the rise. It is estimated that there are 85 thousand families in the city who are still on the list waiting to be able to access social housing.
All the candidates have in fact proposed measures to increase the construction of new homes accessible to the poorest and policies to discourage evictions of those who have problems paying the rent. Chow, for example, has proposed an ambitious plan to build 25,000 rental homes over the next eight years at subsidized prices, in addition to the city purchasing homes currently for sale to be managed by non-profit organizations.