Basing choices on facts and figures
As an urban planner, Bradford wants city council that is not guided by ‘political calculations’
This is the first in a series of profiles of the four new councillors at Toronto city hall.
Here is something you probably didn’t know about Brad Bradford: He nailed the double axel in figure skating.
As a child growing up in Hamilton, he trained in both singles and pairs skating, competing nationally in pairs.
He was at the rink before school, after school and on weekends, says his mother, Valerie Bradford, an economic development officer for the City of Kitchener.
“What I thought was great about figure skating is that it teaches you to get up when you fall down, to think on your feet, and to practise, practise, practise,” she said, recalling her son’s years in training.
“It really does teach you tenacity and hard work for sure.”
That tenacity paid off for Bradford in the municipal election on Oct. 22, when he won Ward 19 (Beaches—East York) by a slim margin, after knocking on 50,000 doors with his team over the course of the campaign.
He launched his campaign in June, from his dining room table, in the small detached home he shares south of Danforth with his wife who, like him, is an urban planner and competitive cyclist. She works in the private sector.
Until deciding to run for office, Brad- ford worked for mayoral candidate Jennifer Keesmaat, when she was Toronto’s chief planner.
He was one of three Toronto city planners who ran in the election.
“When you see local government up close, I think sometimes some of us feel that there’s a better way to do it,” Bradford said days after the election, as he prepared to leave on a delayed honeymoon — a cycling trip in Spain.
Here is another thing you probably didn’t know about Bradford: As a child, he slept four to five hours a night. Now, he says, he sleeps six.
So while he was working as an urban planner, he was also an active member of the Danforth East Community Association, and the founder of Toronto
Hustle, a professional cycling team that also does outreach to get more people cycling and advocates for safer streets. He is one of CivicAction’s 25 DiverseCity Fellows this year, who are chosen from the ranks of promising community leaders.
“I think he has a really important set of values that he makes decisions with and seems to guide him and I think that that’s an often understated importance of leadership today, and he intrinsically has that and I think that’s very powerful,” CivicAction chief executive Sevaun Palvetzian said.
Bradford, who holds master of arts in planning from the University of Waterloo, said he became interested in civic engagement because his mom was interested in civic engagement, and because he saw how hard she worked, squeezing an education in between a fulltime job and raising three kids.
“With a single mother, I saw the importance of strong community organizations, I saw the importance of neighbourhoods coming together to help out,” Bradford said.
He began playing rugby in high school and continued in university, where it came to replace skating. After four knee surgeries related to rugby, he took up cycling just as passionately has he had pursued his other sports.
The cycling team he founded, Toronto Hustle, is different in that it doesn’t just include cyclists of the same age with a single common goal. Bradford reached out to include racers of different ages and ambitions, says Michael Longfield, a member of the board of directors of the Ontario Cycling Association, of which Toronto Hustle is an affiliated team.
“Holding both those things together in one team is not common in racing in Ontario and I think it’s what’s good about Toronto Hustle. The fact that he was able to find a bridge to make those riders work together I think is unique,” Longfield said.
Gay Stephenson, co-chair of the Danforth East Community Association (DECA), has worked with Bradford in the organization for about two years.
“I think that he is honest and dedicated and hard-working. I think he’s really smart,” she said. “I think he’s good at bringing people together and that he’s really community focused.”
Bradford said he decided to run after months of complaining to others about how hard it was to effect change at city hall.
“I think that we could be making more decisions based on facts rather than political calculations,” Bradford said. He won an endorsement from Mayor John Tory when he was running neck-and-neck in the ward with former NDP MP Matthew Kellway, which Bradford admits did give his campaign “a lot of juice.” But he waves off the idea that it was because Tory expected his support in return on issues including the Scarborough subway and the Gardiner Expressway.
“It’s not about specific issues, it’s about having a 25-member council that can work together, discuss the issues, and focus on how we can work together as a council to move everything forward. I think that is what the mayor is interested in and frankly, that is what I am interested in, too,” said Bradford.
“When I talked to residents this summer, by and large, the sentiment was, ‘We’re tired of the partisan politics, we’re tired of the different camps. We’re tired of this special-interest and the sort of politics-as-a-career approach at city hall.’
“What they want is people who can represent the community, think about the city of Toronto and make a commitment to actually getting things done. That was my call to action.”