The new path to ruling Toronto runs through influential political advocacy groups. How American-style tactics took over city politics
The campaigning started long before any official statement was made. In June of 2025, Brad Bradford, the city councillor for Beaches–East York, gathered 60 of the city’s power brokers, organizers and fundraisers for a lunch at the Fairmont Royal York. The goal: to sell the group—a mix of Liberals and Conservatives that included Postmedia founder Paul Godfrey, radio and TV host Ben Mulroney, and former Liberal senator Jerry Grafstein—on Bradford’s ability to defeat mayoral incumbent Olivia Chow in Toronto’s municipal elections the following fall. A memo prepared by Abacus Data made the rounds at the closed-door event, revealing the results of a recent 1,000-person poll. The numbers highlighted the vulnerabilities in Chow’s re-election plans: 46 per cent of respondents believed the city was headed in the wrong direction on crucial portfolios such as affordability and congestion. Fifty-three per cent of eligible voters polled said that they would prefer someone new in the mayor’s seat.
More than most, Bradford had something to prove. He was first elected to city council in 2018, where he was seen as a bright young idealist on the centre-left. He was pro–bike lanes and in favour of renaming Yonge-Dundas Square, and he argued for reducing the police budget by 10 per cent. He was a vocal advocate for many mainstream progressive causes, a millennial rising star who argued that city hall should have two-term limits to guarantee fresh blood. He became a mainstay of debates on housing and transit and a frequent face at community events. But, in 2023, his political career was dealt a major blow. After his ally John Tory resigned as mayor following an affair with a staffer, Bradford threw his hat into the mayoral race. The results were dismal. Bradford came in eighth with just 9,254 votes, leagues behind Chow (269,372) and runner-up Ana Bailão (235,175).
In the years since that trouncing, Bradford has done everything he could to make himself more competitive. The path to the mayoralty wasn’t as a watered-down Chow, which left the right flank of the electorate cold. Seeing an opening on the centre-right, he increasingly distanced himself from his left-leaning voting record—he was now against bike lanes, cutting police budgets, Sankofa Square and more. A self-appointed opposition leader in a government that has no such role, he styled himself as Chow’s top critic, earning the ire of many of his colleagues. He was nakedly ambitious, which was both an asset (who else would keep trying for the mayoralty after such a public drubbing?) and a curse (he was now advocating for positions he had previously opposed, all in the pursuit of power). By June of 2025, with those political positions twisted into a strategically advantageous shape, he looked to the next step: the backing of as many powerful political players as possible.
Municipal governments in Ontario don’t allow political parties, eschewing—on the record, at least—the alliances and deep pockets they bring with them. This is, in theory, a good thing. It allows a more direct representation of constituents, expressed through their councillor’s vote. No party line to toe, no prime minister to woo, no cabinet or caucus seat to seek. But, over the past few years, political advocacy groups have stepped into the gap. These arm’s-length organizations may not be parties in a recognized sense, but they sure look like them: they raise money, develop networks, push for specific policies and maintain momentum between elections. And they can be wildly influential. Because they’re not-for-profits, they aren’t required to widely disclose where their money comes from, where it’s going or how they are governed. The place they occupy on the political spectrum, however, is completely transparent. The left has Progress Toronto, founded in 2018. In January of 2025, A Better City Toronto, known as ABC, presented itself as a centre-right rebuttal to Progress Toronto. IntegrityTO, a fringe group that bills itself as non-partisan but sits squarely on the right, formally came together in 2025 as well.
The relationships between advocacy groups and mayoral candidates are intentionally distant even when they’re glaringly obvious. For example, Michal Hay, the founder and former executive director of Progress Toronto (a group that was essential to Chow becoming mayor), is now the co-chair of Chow’s re-election campaign. However, the elaborate gymnastics necessitated by the no-party system make it unclear to voters who, exactly, is calling the shots. Is it the candidate or the advocacy group?
While Bradford has denied any formal ties to ABC Toronto, he has publicly supported the group more than once. He attended its inaugural event in early 2025, where he was the only active politician on a panel of centre-right figures. Addressing the crowd, he was unequivocal about the key role ABC could play as an anti-progressive counterbalance to the left-leaning city council. The day after the launch, he posted pictures of the evening on his social media and doubled down. “For the last couple of years, the NDP administration at city hall has been led by ideology and special interests,” Bradford wrote. “ABC Toronto is a common-sense coalition that represents the rest of us.”
At the time of writing, in early September, ABC had not yet explicitly endorsed a candidate, but it is set on unseating Chow. In March, the group launched a major ad campaign aimed at skewering Chow’s record on taxes, public safety and transit, which ran on TV, radio, and digital and social media platforms. The slogan for the three 30-second spots: “Under Chow, the city isn’t going anywhere.” Ejecting the left from city hall will require ABC to eventually rally behind a single candidate and use its growing power to get them elected. And the obvious choice is Bradford. Among his colleagues at city hall, his are-they-or-aren’t-they relationship with ABC is a hot topic. The speculation can be boiled down to a simple statement that’s been made on the floor of city hall, says Gord Perks, the outgoing councillor for Parkdale–High Park: “Brad thinks he’s using ABC, but actually ABC is using him.”
Until May 1—when the election campaign officially begins—all is fair. After that date, any individual, group, corporation or union that wants to pay for messaging directly supporting a candidate or ballot measure during a municipal election needs to register with the city as a third-party advertiser. It’s a move that introduces a range of restrictions: third-party advertisers are, for example, strictly prohibited from colluding with any candidate during the advertising period (which runs through election day, in October). And during that time, third-party advertisers can spend no more than $25,000 supporting or opposing a specific candidate.
Political advocacy groups kick things off well before that May deadline, anxious to launch slings and arrows across paid and unpaid platforms before the free-for-all ends. Early in the year, when speculation about a possible John Tory return to city hall was running rampant, Progress Toronto put out digital campaigns reminding voters of Tory’s 2023 resignation scandal and municipal record. When the former mayor announced in March that he wouldn’t be seeking re-election, he pointed a thinly veiled finger at Progress Toronto’s tactics as a contributing factor. “I feel I cannot put my family and the people I care about through the inevitable attacks on me and my personal life that we started to see before I even announced my intentions,” he said. Others were less subtle. When Tory appeared on the radio show Toronto Today, host Greg Brady named Progress Toronto as culprit number one. Tory insisting that the group’s actions weren’t the only reason for his decision did nothing to slow the rumour mill.
With Tory out of the race, Progress Toronto switched its focus to Bradford. In April, it ran a series of sponsored ads on Facebook and Instagram attacking his most glaring weakness: his mutability. “Brad will say anything. You can’t trust him to deliver on what Torontonians need,” one ad trumpeted. “Where does Brad stand? He doesn’t want you to find out,” blared another. When the unregulated pre-election advertising period ended, at midnight on April 30, the group focused on the office of the integrity commissioner. On May 1, Progress Toronto filed a complaint over what it called a “cash-for-access” event in Concord: a live podcast interview with Bradford, hosted by a local developer, for which tickets cost between $250 and $3,000. (Bradford and the developer deny that the event raised funds for the Bradford campaign.) In July, Progress Toronto filed another complaint, this one about Bradford voting to lower development charges without divulging his wife’s role at a major real estate developer.
When John Tory announced he wouldn’t be seeking re-election, he pointed a thinly veiled finger at Progress Toronto
These kinds of tactics are part of what Progress Toronto is all about. Broadly put, the group gets Torontonians engaged in local politics and runs public campaigns to hold municipal leaders accountable. Saman Tabasinejad, the group’s current executive director, is confident in how leadership and their 2,000 volunteers accomplish those goals. “We are explicitly political,” she says. “We support candidates who are aligned with what we think is best: a progressive agenda involving investment in services, expanding services and making things more public. We’re against things like contracting out. We have clear values.”
When Progress Toronto arrived on the scene, its impact was almost immediate. Progressives believed that there should be a counterweight to certain behaviour in local politics, says lawyer Donald Eady, a Progress Toronto board member. “It was formed in reaction to what a lot of progressive people perceived to be backroom conversations and money, particularly from developers, being funnelled to candidates.” Progress Toronto gets its funding from two main sources: 70 per cent from small individual donations and 30 per cent from event sponsors. Six months before first running for mayor, Chow donated $200 to Progress Toronto; other high-profile donors include Margaret Atwood, who gave $125 to the group in 2022.
A few months after Hay launched Progress Toronto, the group started running social media campaigns, backing “progressive champions” who agreed with its platform and denouncing hand-selected “villains.” The blunt approach leveraged the power of spectacle. That year, three of the eight school trustees Progress Toronto supported were elected. The number of wins would likely have been higher had Premier Doug Ford not suddenly cut city council seats from 47 to 25 in the name of saving taxpayers $25 million and speeding up local decision-making.
In 2022, more experienced and better equipped, Progress Toronto ushered five progressive new councillors—including Ausma Malik, Alejandra Bravo and Chris Moise—and six trustees into office. No win, however, was bigger than Chow’s election the following year, the group’s crowning achievement. After Tory’s sudden departure from city hall, Progress Toronto kicked into overdrive, canvassing thousands of voters across the city, sending questionnaires to candidates, analyzing their campaigns and digging into their track records on major issues.
It all led to Chow. “Olivia is the strongest progressive in the race, and we have an opportunity to end years of conservative rule in Toronto,” the group announced in May of 2023. Next came a supercharged version of the grassroots organizing it had been doing for five years: training volunteers, canvassing voters and raising money, all of which contributed to Chow’s win that June—ending nearly 13 years of conservative leadership at city hall. While Chow never officially credited the group for her success, she did the next closest thing: she hired Hay to serve as her new chief of staff.
Since its founding, Progress Toronto has claimed victory on behalf of candidates up and down the ballot. The group also pushed out former newspaper columnist Anthony Furey, who ran in the Don Valley West by-election in 2024. Progress Toronto enlisted roughly 100 volunteers to deliver 22,000 flyers saying that Furey had a history of pushing harmful myths on Covid-19, Islam, gender and other hot-button issues. Furey’s team said afterward that Progress Toronto was a driving force behind the loss.
There is an undeniable similarity between Brad Bradford and ABC Toronto on a policy level
Bradford knew well that there were advantages to being on Progress Toronto’s—and the left’s—good side. After completing a master’s degree in urban planning at the University of Waterloo, where he wrote his thesis on the development of community-based energy solutions, he moved to Boston to work at a non-profit in the renewable energy sector. In 2015, he headed to Toronto to handle stakeholder engagement and special projects in the city planning department under then–chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat. It didn’t take long for him to consider running for office. He went for coffee with his friend Amanda Galbraith, then communications director to John Tory. Galbraith did her best to dissuade him. “I told him, ‘Why would you do that?’” she says. “‘That sounds like a terrible job. You’ve seen what it’s like in here!’” Beaches–East York was a tough constituency, with engaged, exacting voters and a well-liked leftist councillor, Matthew Kellway. But Bradford wasn’t deterred. “He had ambitions,” Galbraith says.
For a time, one of those ambitions was a relationship with Progress Toronto. According to Saman Tabasinejad, Bradford filled out the group’s candidate survey in 2018, formally asking for its support. He didn’t get it. When I asked Bradford about Tabasinejad’s claim, he told me that he doesn’t recall directly asking for the endorsement but that he has always been willing to work across the political spectrum with a range of groups.
To hear his team tell it, Bradford is the same as he always was. “People forget that, in his first election to council, he defeated a former NDP member of Parliament,” says Craig Ruttan, Bradford’s chief of staff and deputy campaign manager in 2023. “He’s never been a capital-P, Progress Toronto type of councillor.” Tabasinejad isn’t so sure. “I understand the strategic game of politics, but if you’re constantly going where the wind blows, it seems you’re more interested in power than in change,” she says. “Until a couple of years ago, I didn’t know where Brad landed. Now he’s a conservative. That’s just who he is until the next time.”
Along-held and cherished belief in Toronto politics is that city governance should be administrative, not political: fix the potholes, keep the water clean, balance the budget. “Partisan influences are, it is true, never wholly absent,” wrote political economist Samuel Morley Wickett of Ontario’s municipal politics in 1907. “In a few places they are decidedly active, though this is fortunately the exception.” The exceptions then, as they are today, were flagrant. For 100 years, between the 1850s and the 1950s, almost every Toronto mayor was a member of the Orange Order, a conservative Protestant organization founded in Ireland in 1795 that dominated local politics.
Under the Ontario Municipal Elections Act, candidates for city hall must run as independents—no financial backing from provincial or federal parties, no party affiliations on the ballot. Organized to independently raise money and influence voters, the city’s political advocacy groups share DNA with American super political action committees, or super PACs. Those first formed in the US in 2010, after two key legal rulings determined that the government couldn’t limit corporate and union spending on political campaigns. (Previously, corporations and unions weren’t allowed to donate, and individuals couldn’t give more than $2,500.) While the rules around donations and spending are different in Toronto, the sway these groups seek to have over voters is the same.
Chow’s win made it clear how powerful Progress Toronto had become and how effective its methods were. The right, which was licking its wounds and complaining that it had suffered from a lack of organization, decided to do something about it. ABC Toronto—whose acronym is widely rumoured to also stand for “Anybody But Chow”—was founded by business lawyer Jeffrey Kroeker, a long-time conservative fundraiser and the CFO of former police chief Mark Saunders’s 2023 mayoral campaign. According to Kroeker, Bradford and Saunders are the ones who pushed him to start a group to neutralize the left’s new dominance in Toronto politics. Bradford claims to have no memory of encouraging him to spearhead an alternative, which is perhaps an indication of how self-evident the diagnosis was. “He’s giving me too much credit,” Bradford said when I brought it up. “It’s no secret that we have correctly diagnosed the problem: there was a third party operating during elections, and even more critically in the period in between elections,” he said, referencing Progress Toronto. “It had been advocating for policy positions, building lists, training volunteers and collecting data.”
It’s a familiar Bradford refrain. In November of 2024, he told the Toronto Star that Progress Toronto had long been acting like a political party on the municipal level. He also said that, while he wasn’t directly involved in setting up a right-leaning alternative, he was having conversations about the need for one. A week later, he took a photo with ABC Toronto’s soon-to-be executive director, Ariella Kimmel, at one of Taylor Swift’s Rogers Centre shows. Kimmel, whose CV includes stints with Stephen Harper’s government, Alberta’s United Conservative Party and the Ontario PCs, then posted the pic to her Instagram account. Bradford says the connection to ABC is more tenuous than it appears. For example, he told me that he last saw Kelly Aizicowitz, the current executive director of ABC Toronto and a former adviser for the Dalton McGuinty Liberals, months ago, at a barbecue hosted by her chabad.
However intertwined Bradford and the group may be socially, there is an undeniable similarity on a policy level. Community safety and public order have been a key part of ABC Toronto’s platform since the beginning. At a town hall during his first campaign for city council eight years ago, Bradford advocated for a “balanced approach” to crime in the city that would address poverty, youth unemployment and mental illness. After police murdered George Floyd in 2020, sparking widespread protests and debates about racism and police brutality across North America, Bradford was one of eight councillors to vote in favour of reducing the police budget by 10 per cent. His recent shift toward lobbying for exponentially more police patrols, stricter bail reform, mandatory addiction treatment in severe cases and other “tough on crime” positions happened in increments. Reducing crime was an integral part of his re-election campaign, but it wasn’t until he ran for mayor following Tory’s resignation that the rhetoric about things like transit safety, encampment clearings and crime ramped up.
At his kickoff rally in Etobicoke this past July, Bradford asked the roughly 150 attendees to raise their hands if they or anyone they knew had had their car or home broken into. Almost everyone in the sweltering community centre raised their hand. “Your home is supposed to be your castle, your safe space,” he went on. “But it doesn’t feel that way anymore.” In his campaign uniform—black suit, white shirt and black tie—Bradford appeared stern, serious. With his shaved head and athletic build, he looked like someone you might turn to if you needed protection—more like a candidate’s security detail than an actual candidate.
Four days later, a shooter fired into the crowd at the Salsa on St. Clair street festival, killing two people and injuring five more. The attack prompted Bradford to hold a couple of press conferences highlighting crime. When asked what he would do to curb gun violence, he replied, “I’m not going to stand up here at a podium and gaslight the residents of the city and try to tell them that, statistically, everything’s fine.” It was a not-so-subtle dig at police chief Myron Demkiw, who had said that while statistical progress couldn’t erase the fear and trauma caused by gun violence, shootings in Toronto were down 26 per cent compared with the same period last year.
Bradford later pledged to train 1,000 new police officers over four years if he were elected mayor—a roughly 50 per cent increase on Chow’s current plan. That promise prompted a rebuke from Tory, who had otherwise remained fairly quiet on Bradford-as-candidate, on Newstalk 1010. Bradford is “prepared to say anything at a moment, if the wind is blowing that way,” Tory said. “I don’t think that really suits him that well, trying to capitalize on legitimate insecurities people feel about the past, the present and the future when it comes to even the level of criminal activity we do have in what is a very safe city, relatively speaking.”
Falling crime numbers are inconvenient for ABC’s messaging. In fact, Kroeker claims that home invasions and carjackings are actually up, even if the data says otherwise. “Some statistics are a fallacy because citizens have normalized this and stopped reporting it,” he says. “We have open drug use in subway stations and on streetcars. It’s everywhere. By-law officers are more focused on parking tickets or drinking in parks than on moving homeless encampments along.” ABC Toronto, like Bradford, has framed Toronto under Chow as a modern-day Gotham, a near-apocalyptic landscape in desperate need of a new kind of leader.
Neither ABC Toronto nor Progress Toronto have registered as a third-party advertiser in the current election, meaning they can’t spend money on advertising that explicitly paints any candidate or their record as positive or negative. Unpaid advertising, however, is fair game. Progress Toronto spent the summer mobilizing its army of volunteers in support of community initiatives, public campaigns and events: marching in Pride, canvassing the Beaches Jazz Festival, launching a “ban grocery price gouging” petition and campaign, filing complaints, gathering data to evaluate voter priorities, and preparing to go door to door. In late August, the group hit a familiar note on its social media channels for the umpteenth time: “Meet Brad. And Brad. One ran as a progressive to get elected councillor in 2018. The other is now running for mayor as a conservative to win October’s election. The thing is, it’s the same Brad. And he’s in it for himself.” Meanwhile, ABC Toronto has largely focused on policy proposals and safety campaigns aimed at city hall, demanding increased funding for the police, the removal of bike lanes along University Avenue and crackdowns on e-mobility vehicles, plus an overhaul of Toronto’s summer camp registration system.
Not registering as a third-party advertiser hamstrings the groups to a certain extent, but it also comes with one clear benefit for ABC Toronto: it is under no obligation to release its financial documents or, by extension, its backers. Until now, the group has insisted that revealing who funds it would distract from the issues facing the city. If it doesn’t register before the campaign period ends in October, it will have spent money to influence the election without revealing anything about where that money came from or where it went.
In municipal elections, which historically have low voter turnout, incumbents often have the edge: they’re proven winners, they have a team in place, everyone knows their name. But there’s also an appeal to being the challenger nipping at an incumbent’s heels. Much, if not all, of your platform can be built around assuring voters that you can fix everything your would-be predecessor is perceived to have done wrong. Chow is a well-known figure in Toronto politics, and from the outset, Bradford has been laser-focused on using that familiarity to his advantage. “This is a change election,” he said at his first rally. “I love the fact that Olivia Chow is going to spend this whole campaign defending the status quo,” he later told me.
For more than a year and a half, keeping the pressure on the mayor has been a top priority for both Bradford and ABC Toronto. Bradford has positioned himself as the anti-Chow: tough on crime, friend to the suburbs, a salt-of-the-earth guy who jokes that many in his affluent, largely socially liberal riding like to say he lives in the “500 section” of the Beaches. He empathizes with people outside the downtown core because he might as well be in their backyard; he, the sloganeering goes, would be everyone’s mayor.
Making sure the centre-right has a single viable candidate to line up behind is another ABC priority. No one wants to repeat the vote-splitting of 2023. In March, Michael Ford, nephew of Doug Ford and former MPP, started hinting at a run for mayor. Within days, he was seen having coffee in the lobby of the Sheraton Centre Hotel with Bradford, who told Toronto Today that it was a conversation between “close friends who agree that Toronto needs change.” In early April, Ford released a statement saying that he wouldn’t be submitting his candidacy after all.
Then, in late July, with 13 weeks until election day, a potential threat: former Conservative MP and diplomat Chris Alexander declared. At a downtown coffee shop a few days later, Alexander insisted that he could win it all. “I’m enough of a student of general politics to know that things can change dramatically: up, down, sideways,” he told me. “We are banking on a Toronto that is volatile in the right way and eager to rally behind good ideas.” What he could not comprehend, he said, was the vitriol being lobbed his way. Alexander’s communications director, former journalist Wilf Dinnick, said the team has received aggressive, threatening calls telling Alexander not to run. “Trying to keep people out of races isn’t a democratic best practice,” Alexander said.
If Bradford sees Alexander as a legitimate threat, he is determined to play it cool. “I literally didn’t know who he was when I first heard the rumours circulating,” Bradford told the press when asked about Alexander’s run. “I had to look him up.” Others in Bradford’s orbit have been more direct. When I reached out for her thoughts, ABC’s executive director Kelly Aizicowitz called Alexander’s candidacy “a distraction from what matters: the issues facing Torontonians and replacing the status quo at city hall. The polling makes it clear that a divided vote for change benefits only one person, Olivia Chow.” It was an obvious, if unspoken, endorsement of Bradford. Posting on X, Kroeker went even further. “I can’t think of anyone more stupid, politically out of touch and moronic at this current moment in time than Chris Alexander,” he wrote. He also heavily implied that Tory had put Alexander up to playing spoiler: “I guess JT wants to cement his legacy in Toronto politics as the man who brought Toronto Olivia Chow.” Kroeker later withdrew the remarks following a critical post from Amanda Galbraith, the former Tory communications director.
If ABC Toronto thought it could keep the race centred on one non-progressive candidate, Alexander’s sudden appearance was a rude awakening—one Chow’s camp wasn’t shy about celebrating. “Of course the vote split helps us,” a member of the mayor’s staff told me gleefully. A slight shift closer to the centre could also help. On July 23, Chow announced Andrew Bevan, the Liberal campaign director who co-directed Mark Carney’s successful run for prime minister, as her campaign’s new co-chair alongside Michal Hay. Bevan says that his joining the team shouldn’t surprise anyone: “Not having parties involved lends itself to different sorts of coalitions. It’s not a straight line between Conservative, Liberal and NDP when it comes to municipal politics.” With the centre-right distracted by its two-horse race, Chow’s team was looking straight ahead to the finish line. “This is why the left has traditionally done so well in city politics in Toronto,” one former city staffer told me in August. “You’d never see that happen on the other side.”
If a Toronto election could be swayed by social media alone, Daniel Tate would be the kingmaker. The founder of IntegrityTO is basically a one-man show. Unlike Progress Toronto, which has attracted legions of volunteers, and ABC Toronto, whose main players are almost all connected to provincial and federal conservatives, IntegrityTO runs on online outrage. Tate was galvanized by the city’s decision to rename Yonge-Dundas Square in 2021. The new name, Sankofa Square—inspired by a Ghanaian saying—has nothing to do with Toronto’s history or population, he says. “I was infuriated because we had an incredible opportunity to honour legendary Torontonians—the people who built this city and changed the world for the better. They made Toronto their home, yet we overlooked them.” The renaming sent him down a rabbit hole: while campaigning online, unsuccessfully, to reverse the city’s decision, he thought about other things that needed changing. “If all this corruption, lying, historical revisionism and lack of public consultation could happen, it’s natural to think it’s endemic elsewhere in the municipal bureaucracy,” he says.
Through his use of social media, and Instagram in particular, Tate has done more to convince the extremely online contingent that Toronto is on a negative path than Progress Toronto or ABC Toronto combined. His group has 68,000 followers, more than double Progress Toronto’s count of 25,000 and eight times more than ABC Toronto’s 8,000. But, ultimately, it’s the number of views that counts. After eight years in action, Progress Toronto’s videos—often collages of candidates’ faces with bold text and numbers tracking their records—usually hover around 10,000 views. ABC Toronto’s content is grabbier—Aizicowitz regularly appears speaking into her phone camera to communicate a point—but its viewership of individual videos also tops out around 10,000 views. When its numbers do spike, it’s also thanks to rage bait. Recent ABC Toronto hits include a clip of a construction worker speaking about his equipment being stolen, security camera footage of an attempted break-in and a video of an encampment with the caption, “When was the last time anything in the city worked?”
IntegrityTO’s approach is an ugly turn for municipal politics, which have mostly stayed out of the gutter
IntegrityTO ’s raw and unfiltered social media presence revels in being as unpleasant as possible. One video posted immediately after Caribana showed early morning trash on King Street with the caption, “Toronto is a wasteland of garbage.” Drug use is a particular focus: Tate regularly posts shaky videos of people who appear to be taking drugs on public transit or on the street, with captions such as, “Toronto is a drug zombie wasteland… mayor likes dancing and nachos.” They often feature an overlay of Tate holding a tiny microphone, hovering in a bottom corner and commentating on what’s happening. He has collections of videos about the people at city hall he insists have wronged him, particularly councillor Chris Moise. He’s even registered to run in Toronto Centre, Moise’s ward.
It’s an ugly turn for municipal politics in Toronto, which have, for the most part, stayed out of the gutter. But is it effective? IntegrityTO’s account certainly racks up views. A video showing a masked shoplifter walking out of an LCBO with a backpack full of booze without being challenged—“Toronto is becoming a criminal’s paradise”—was watched 355,000 times. Another, of an angry passer-by pointing at someone passed out on the street and shouting, “I’m tired of this” at the camera, has nearly 500,000 views. Tate is unbothered by notions of third-party advertising or slick production values; it’s fair to say that his videos will go farther and wider organically—as long as he keeps doing what he’s doing. His nasty antics, which take aim at how Toronto is currently being run, are far more critical of Chow than of Bradford. And that’s good news for ABC Toronto.
The way these political advocacy groups operate has consequences well beyond lowering the bar on social media. They’re fulfilling some of the functions of political parties, but they’re not held to the same standards. They are not necessarily obligated to disclose who is funding them or where their money goes—despite the fact that citizens generally like to know who’s behind the messages clamouring for their votes.
The Municipal Elections Act, and the political framework of municipal politics in Toronto, was set up for a different era—a more genteel one, perhaps, but one that’s never coming back. Unless the rules change, political operatives will continue to influence our elections without us knowing who they are or what they hope to accomplish. Thankfully, the super PACs don’t always win: pro–Andrew Cuomo political action committees spent $28 million in New York last year only to watch grassroots mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani sweep the election.
But political advocacy groups have arrived, and there is little incentive to challenge their role. With the backing of these groups, a wannabe mayor’s campaign doesn’t need to end the moment the final vote is counted. The momentum can be carried into the next cycle, and the one after that, until a win is reached. Progress Toronto’s momentum is so strong now that, to slow it, one candidate would need to galvanize an uneasy coalition of centrist and conservative voters, topple Chow, and restore the right to city hall. Bradford’s success relies on holding together unnatural allies: old-money Bay Street Conservatives, suburban populists who voted for Doug Ford, and the new-right voters who tend toward a Pierre Poilievre brand of populism. If that happens, ABC Toronto will suddenly be a whole lot more than the new kid in town.
Published by Toronto Life: https://torontolife.com/deep-dives/making-a-mayor-how-american-style-advocacy-groups-took-over-city-politics/