Candidates spar over economic issues
Plenty of blame to go around for Toronto’s problems, as all six are current or recent city leaders
Toronto mayoral candidates squared off Thursday in their fourth debate in two days. Following a triple-header on Wednesday, the event at the Isabel Bader Theatre was co-hosted by the Toronto Region Board of Trade and TVO, and centred on issues affecting the city’s economic competitiveness. Ana Bailão, Mark Saunders, Josh Matlow, Olivia Chow, Brad Bradford and Mitzie Hunter did their best to get their messages across in a mostly respectful exchange moderated by TVO’s Steve Paikin.
Love me tender
Asked how to fill the gaping $1.5 billion hole in the city’s operating budget, Bradford, the current councillor for Beaches—East York, pitched his plan to open up tendering for municipal construction projects to contractors who use nonunionized workers, or workers not covered by a city agreement with major trade unions. Bradford says scrapping current tendering rules would save $200 million annually, although that figure hasn’t been verified by city staff analysis.
Other candidates took turns bashing the proposal. Matlow, the councillor for Toronto—St. Paul’s, said it amounted to “throwing workers under the bus,” while Bailão said the tendering standards help ensure safer workplaces.She also pointed out that Bradford previously supported the tendering regime he now opposes. “You voted for it. You voted for it,” she said.
The blame game
All six mayoral hopefuls agreed that the city is facing major challenges in the form of a lack of affordable housing and concerns over public safety. But with all six being either sitting councillors, or recently holding leadership roles in Toronto, could feasibly bear some responsibility for those problems.
Saunders, who was police chief between 2015 and 2020, said Bailão had no reason to be proud of her work leading the housing file while she was councillor for Davenport during Mayor John Tory’s administration, given Toronto’s lack of progress on the issue. She rejected that charge, asserting that she got Toronto “back into the housing business” after years of government neglecting the issue.
Bradford, Bailão, and Hunter, who until this month was Liberal MPP for Scarborough-Guildwood, all pointed out rates of some categories of major crime increased when Saunders was in charge of the police force. Bradford called him a “failed” chief, noting that 86 per cent of officers polled by the police union in 2018 said they had no confidence in his leadership.
Bike lane battles
Chow and Saunders sparred over bike lanes, with the former NDP MP and city councillor alleging there’s a contradiction in the former police chief focusing his campaign on public safety, while opposing bike lane expansion.
“What about cyclist safety? We know death happens when you don’t have good infrastructure,” Chow said.
Saunders said he wasn’t against all bike lanes, but claimed that when done wrong cycling infrastructure hurts businesses.
Bailão said Toronto needs a network of bike lanes, but they’re not appropriate everywhere, recalling when there was a push to put bike lanes on Dufferin Street, but building them would have interfered with a busy bus route. “We had to say no,” she said.
Stag and Doe do-over
Matlow has attemped to paint Saunders, who ran unsuccessfully for the Ontario PCs in last year’s election, as Premier Doug Ford’s chosen candidate. In this week’s debates Matlow has taken pointed shots at the ex-top cop, joking about him attending the infamous Stag and Doe party for the premier’s daughter.
But when Paikin asked Saunders whether had attended the event, the former chief said he hadn’t, and Matlow repeatedly making the false accusation “shows you the quality of person you have here running for mayor.”
Matlow offered a tongue-in-cheek apology, saying he was sorry, as it was actually the premier’s daughter’s wedding “with the developers that benefit from the Greenbelt” that Saunders attended.
Saunders’ campaign says he didn’t go to the wedding either.
Fix the Six nixed?
Hunter garnered attention at earlier debates for frequently inserting the slogan “Fix the Six” into her responses. But the former MPP eschewed that catchphrase on Thursday, the same day she released a substantive, budgeted platform that she hopes will bolster her claim to being the candidate with the most serious plan. The platform includes a proposal for a “progressive” property tax structure allowing households earning less than $80,000 a year to pay less, and half of seniors to pay none at all.