EDITOR’S NOTE
Idid not have high hopes for Olivia Chow’s Toronto mayoralty. For decades, she’s been a marginal political figure, and I had grown accustomed to seeing her campaign for office and lose. Even when she won a seat on Toronto’s city council, she often sat too far to the left to make much of a difference and, as an NDP MP, she was only ever a critic from the sidelines. I suspected she wouldn’t know what to do when she took the reins of power.
Boy, was I wrong. Since becoming mayor of Canada’s largest city in July of last year, she has had a bigger impact on Toronto in 10 months than her predecessor did in almost 10 years. Chow moved fast. She raised property taxes by 9.5 per cent. She extracted $1.2 billion from the feds to build rental housing and $162 million for refugee support. She somehow convinced her biggest political foe, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, to take financial responsibility for the costly maintenance of the city’s mega-highways.
For all of those reasons, we placed Chow at the top of our list of politicians in this special issue of Maclean’s highlighting Canada’s most powerful people. Her No. 1 ranking also reflects the role of cities in the post-pandemic era. As Chow herself regularly points out, the country’s biggest challenges are highly visible in cities. When refugees come to Canada, they fill up urban homeless shelters. When grocery costs rise, people flock to city food banks. Encampments are now a regular fixture of city parks and downtowns. Canada’s problems become problems for mayors to solve.
I’m sure that Vancouver’s mayor, Ken Sim, who also appears on Maclean’s Power
List, would agree. While he and Chow don’t have much in common ideologically, they’ve both done a lot in a short period of time. Soon after Sim was elected toward the end of 2022, he began dismantling tent encampments, earning him praise and condemnation in equal measure. Maybe this is the age of the powerful Canadian mayor.
In putting together our list, we thought hard about which categories to feature. As you’ll see, we organized the list using some straightforward topic areas such as education, politics, sports, business, tech and culture. But we also feature a bunch of categories that you might call issue-based, such as climate, AI and housing. The big players in those fields, we believe, will shape the future of the country.
Our list is not exactly scientific. It’s more of a cheat sheet on who’s who, created by a team of editors who watch the country closely, keep track of the people dominating the headlines and think deeply about what matters now. If you believe we’ve left off anyone important, please let us know.
“As mayor of Toronto, Olivia Chow has had a bigger impact on the city in 10 months than her predecessor did in almost 10 years”