Toronto’s wild mayoral by-election is over. Despite a dramatic late-innings surge by centrist candidate Ana Bailão, Olivia Chow sealed the deal last week and Toronto has its first NDP-affiliated mayor since 2010.
This will no doubt confirm to some that Toronto is a left-wing city returning to its roots after an anomalous 13-year run of populist and centrist mayors. Really, what it should tell us is that Toronto is becoming a big global metropolis that can’t be won with the old “war on cars” playbook.
If Toronto’s centre-right wants to find its way back into power, we need a vision for how a more nimble, market-oriented government can address the challenges of Toronto in 2026, not 2010. Toronto is growing fast, and the electorate is changing.
Let’s think about what this change looks like. The most obvious change is growth. Toronto added more than the population of Prince Edward Island between 2011 and 2021. And new households increasingly live in multi-family buildings, since there’s not much room for new detached houses in the city boundaries. So the city has grown and urbanized since Rob Ford came to power with his “end the war on cars” message.
Just looking at population numbers understates the change. There’s also population turnover. People are born, people die. People move out, people move in.
It’s easy to overlook how that changes the lived experience of the electorate. Someone who was born in Toronto when it was a small city might have very different expectations from someone who moved here after it was already a big city.
There are fewer and fewer people who remember Toronto as a small city. You’d have to have been born in the 1940s to have known Toronto as a city of under a million people and in the 1960s to know it as a city of under two million. Memories of living in a newly built subdivision south of the 401 are fading away. It’s a big city now. To new Torontonians, it may seem like it’s always been that way.
More people are coming from big cities around the world and expect Toronto to provide the level of services one would expect in London, New York, or Shanghai. They’re probably more interested in whether the city has adequate public transportation than how much road space is allocated to cars. Toronto is becoming a global metropolis, filled increasingly with people who expect it to act like one.
Now, you might think I’m saying that Toronto conservatives should just pack it in. Far from it.
What I’m saying is that conservatives need a new playbook. The two candidates running the Rob Ford playbook polled at around 20 percent combined. Their final combined tally was 13.6 percent. Strategic voting probably accounted for their poor showing, but it’s notable that less than a quarter of voters at any point during the campaign expressed interest in the two candidates running on “war on cars” rhetoric. Ripping up bike lanes isn’t the vote winner it once was.
Toronto’s electorate isn’t the same as it was in 2010. That doesn’t mean they can’t be persuaded by a conservative platform. Small-c conservative principles could win, if applied correctly. Those principles need to be applied to people’s real-life priorities, and those change over time. Principles don’t have to change. The fact that people are now more likely to ride bikes or live in apartment buildings doesn’t make them raging communists. Sensible market-oriented reforms aren’t just useful for people who live in detached houses.
How do we double housing starts, which every party in Ontario claims to support? How can we build public transit better and faster to make it easier for people to get to work or explore the city? How can we stabilize the city’s public finances and improve the quality of life? If only the Left provides answers—good or bad—to these questions, it’s going to get a lot harder for the city’s conservative and moderate factions to have any influence. That would be very bad for Toronto.
After coasting for several years, Toronto’s centre and centre-right need a refresh. We need a program that works for Toronto in 2026, not 2010. Toronto is well on its way to becoming a global metropolis, and residents will expect the kind of amenities they’d get in other major cities. Our task is to show people that a more nimble, market-oriented city can meet those goals.
