Number of candidates seeking office tumbles

242 ran for council in 2018, but that has dropped to 116

Toronto is facing a political drought — a drastic shrinking of the pool of residents willing to run for a seat on city council.

On Wednesday, with two days left to register, 116 people were running for a council seat and 19 for mayor — less than half of last election’s total. Many incumbent councillors face only one or two challengers.

Possible factors include pandemic-triggered political disengagement, extra workload in supersized wards that is sending some councillors to the exit door, and a hostile political environment that includes death threats.

Detachment from elections for the government closest to residents, but which traditionally gets lower voter turnout than provincial or federal votes, is cause for grave concern, said political scientist Myer Siemiatycki.

“Maybe call it the great municipal resignation,” said the Toronto Metropolitan University professor emeritus, who predicts voter turnout in the Oct. 24 civic election will plummet below the historically low 41 per cent in 2018.

“We are intensifying the disconnect between our government institutions, politicians and people they serve,” he said, as far-right, anti-government protests are growing louder.

“If the public gives up on elections, that creates a huge vacuum that will be filled and more often than not, it’s going to be filled by something that could be dangerous.”

The 116 councillor candidates so far compares to 242 who battled for the 25 seats in the 2018 election. Under the old 44-ward system, there were 358 councillor candidates in 2014 and 279 in 2010.

Mayor John Tory had, as of Wednesday evening, 18 rivals hoping to unseat him.

The workload has become too onerous and councillors will all tell you they can’t connect with constituents like they once did (when wards were smaller)

JOHN CAMPBELL FORMER COUNCILLOR IN ETOBICOKE

That compares with 34 in the last election. John Campbell, who represented an Etobicoke ward from 2014 to 2018 when he lost to a colleague after Premier Doug Ford slashed the number of wards, didn’t give any serious thought to trying to mount a comeback.

“The workload has become too onerous and councillors will all tell you they can’t connect with constituents like they once did,” before wards almost doubled in size to about 110,000 residents each, he said.

“The job is basically no fun anymore,” Campbell said, adding his colleagues tell him that instead of personally fixing local problems, they must send staff members so they have time to read reports and attend countless meetings.

Getting elected in a huge ward is equally tough for challengers with no party system behind them, he said, calling it “a Herculean task” to knock on all the doors, assemble a team of volunteers and solicit campaign donations.

Seven councillors are not seeking re-election with several, including Joe Cressy, Mike Layton and Ana Bailão citing the toll of long work hours on home and family life as a prime reason for leaving city hall.

There is no rush of candidates to replace them. Tory, asked about the issue, told CP24 that he believes the political climate is scaring people away.

“There’s polarization, a lot of hostility … I think it’s scaring people off and you see less interest, as you see in some of these numbers,” Tory said. While winter protests that jammed Ottawa and border crossings with trucks and anti-vaccine rallies in Toronto were primarily aimed at the federal and provincial officials, city officials have also felt far-right wrath.

“I’m getting more threats than at any time in the past,” said one veteran councillor, who got in the crosshairs over a particular motion, and requested anonymity to avoid triggering a fresh wave of hate. “In the past year I’ve had 60 or 70 threats of one kind or another and about a dozen death threats, one of them serious enough that I had to refer it to police,” the councillor said.

Siemiatycki also sees an “overlay” of “pandemic political fatigue, disengagement from electoral politics, that’s playing out in the country,” including a record-low turnout in the June provincial election.

Toronto’s candidate numbers, he said, signal “this election is going to be the same-old same-old, with no reinvigoration of an agenda for local government.”

Still, there are many Torontonians eager and excited to be city council candidates, and working hard to get an entry pass to city hall.

Malik Ahmad, running against Coun. Gary Crawford and six others in Ward 20 Scarborough Southwest, said he wants to help make city hall more racially diverse and increase political responsiveness in the ward.

“When you door knock, they thank you and tell you to leave your literature and say ‘I’ll think about it,’ ” Ahmad said.

“But they’re happy somebody knocked on their door.”