Latest news with #TorontoMayor
CTV News
14-07-2025
- Politics
- CTV News
Olivia Chow would easily win re-election unless John Tory enters race, new poll suggests
Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow speaks during a panel at the Federation of Canadian Municipalities conference in Ottawa on Friday, May 30, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld Olivia Chow would comfortably secure a second term as Toronto's mayor if an election were held today but she could face a significant challenge from John Tory if he enters the race, a new poll conducted by Liaison Strategies for the Toronto Star has found. Liaison Strategies surveyed 1,000 Torontonians on their voting intentions, with the next municipal election still nearly 16 months away in October, 2026. It found that in the event that an election were held today, Chow would have the support of 41 per cent of all voters and 49 per cent of decided voters. That would give her a sizeable double-digit lead over her next closest competitor. However, in the event that John Tory were to enter the race, Chow's support would drop to 34 per cent among all voters and 39 per cent among decided voters. In that scenario, Tory would be her clear challenger with the support of 31 per cent of all voters and 35 per cent of decided voters. 'If John Tory doesn't run we see that one out of five people who say they would vote for him say that they would (instead) vote for Olivia Chow, so there is a lot of overlap between the two of them, even though you may not think that would be the case' David Valentin of Liaison Strategies told CP24 Breakfast on Monday morning. The release of the Liaison Strategies survey comes after Chow marked the second anniversary of her win in a mayoral byelection that followed Tory's sudden resignation. So far few people have stepped forward to indicate an intention to run in the next municipal election, so Liaison Strategies opted to ask Torontonians about the candidacy of several rumoured and former mayoral candidates. In a race without Tory, Chow's next closest competitor would be Coun. Brad Bradford (16 per cent of all voters, 19 per cent of decided voters) and former deputy mayor Ana Bailao (11 per cent of all voters and 13 per cent of decided voters), both of whom ran in the mayoral byelection. Former mayoral candidate Anthony Furey was in fourth with the support of 10 per cent of all voters and 12 per cent of decided voters while former Liberal MP Marco Mendicino was a distant fifth with the support of three per cent of all voters and four per cent of decided voters. About 16 per cent of respondents said that they were still undecided on who they would vote for. If Tory were to run, Liaison Strategies found that it would essentially become a two-horse race with no other candidate garnering the support of more than seven per cent of decided voters. In that scenario, 12 per cent of voters identified themselves as undecided. 'There are people who want him (Tory) to come back. Ultimately you are talking about someone who has very high name recognition in a level of politics where name recognition is everything,' Valentin said. The Toronto Star reported in June that multiple sources close to Tory believed that he was considering a run for mayor. However, Tory told NewsTalk 1010 days later that he had no immediate plans to run. 'I don't have any plans to run for mayor right now,' Tory said at the time. 'The election is 16 months away. I've got a lot to think about, but I'm just going on with my life, trying to help the city the ways that I did before I was mayor and the way I have done after.' The Liaison Strategies survey found that a slight majority of Torontonians (51 per cent) approve of the job Chow is doing as mayor. That approval rating, however, is the lowest that Chow has recorded since entering office and marks a drop from December when 60 per cent of Torontonians approved of the job she was doing, according to Liaison Strategies. Asked about the numbers during a media availability on Monday to launch a pilot project to provide air conditioning units to seniors, Chow declined to comment. 'There is so much work that needs to be done in so many areas and I am not at all thinking about elections, re-elections, I am trying to find more money to buy more of these air condition units,' she said. The survey was conducted from July 2-6 using interactive voice response technology and is considered accurate to withing 3.09 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
Yahoo
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem – this shameless, crack-smoking politician's life makes for car-crash TV
Canadians make bad decisions too. For proof, see this schadenfreude-fuelled documentary about Rob Ford, the bellicose former conservative mayor of Toronto. Ford's rolling scandals in office include public drunkenness, smoking crack with gun-runners, and lying about everything. Talking heads in the documentary, sensitively titled Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem (Netflix, from Tuesday 17 June), remember him as 'an everyman … without a shred of credibility … who turned city hall into a circus'. That seems unfair. Circuses aren't that bad, and I refuse to believe every man smokes crack cocaine. Most documentaries wring every ounce of lurid detail from their subjects. This guy has more chaos than fits inside 49 minutes. We do get thrillingly grainy footage of him twirling his crack pipe, slurring first-degree murder threats with Mortal Kombat-levels of specificity, and making bizarre rants in Jamaican patois, against what or whom I'm not sure. First-hand sources are film-maker's gold, and Ford is happy enough to spend his lowest points around people who video everything. These people never have good phones though, do they? There isn't space to do more than mention Ford's extensive legal and domestic troubles, nor critique his executive choices, which included voting against grant money for HIV programmes, removing bike lanes and declaring transit workers an emergency service so they couldn't strike. In one council meeting, Ford reportedly stated: 'Those oriental people work like dogs.' He later apologised for the remark, which he had intended as a compliment. Shamelessness and emotional dysregulation are fantastic traits for reality TV; at some point they became necessary for public office too. Trainwreck feels like a rear-view mirror on that turning point. Ford swings between joking around, puce-faced outrage and meek apology. He resembles a baby, which makes strange sense. If it's unfair to attack appearance, let's just say he was a voluptuous blond, and voters in the western world have a type. It is impossible to imagine a woman or an ethnic minority candidate getting away with one of the bad decisions Ford compulsively makes. Those folks can't even wear tan. The story – and our glee in watching it – is complicated by the fact that Ford is a casualty of addiction issues. The question of who, how and when we forgive is a live one. Does it make a difference if the wrongdoer demands we move on, as Ford does? His popularity remained high. He would have been re-elected but in 2014, was diagnosed with an aggressive abdominal tumour and died in 2016. That same year Trump was elected president. There's a sick familiarity to the way controversies bounce off the Canadian mayor. The way he demonises the media as liars when he knows another scandal is about to break. The way he is able to position himself as a victim, and voters eat it up. There is an attempt at balance. 'I'm proud to show this side of the story, and … why I stood by him through thick and thin,' says his former head of security. The Rob-Ford-was-a-good-man argument here hinges upon a story we're told about a time the mayor was buying himself a Subway sandwich. Upon learning there was another order waiting but no driver, Ford delivered the stranger's sub himself. Doesn't make him Nelson Mandela, does it? By his own reckoning he made $35 plus three bucks as tip. Why does he have that much time in the day? Trainwreck shows Ford going door to door, asking people if their fridge freezers are working correctly, and taking a water-jet to graffiti. That's not governing; that's being a handyman. We all need to be more serious about public office. While politics will always be about public perception, it shouldn't be reduced to entertainment, and ideally should be distinguishable from true crime. Otherwise the only winner is social media clips and documentaries. No point pretending it isn't watchable, though. I was gripped by this grainy footage, of a mayor fighting the public, or ploughing into an elderly female councillor, while barrelling across the chamber floor in a state of agitation. He might have been on his way to the Speaker's podium, to rip off his shirt and yell: 'Are you not entertained?' I was. I'm not proud of it.
CBC
21-06-2025
- CBC
City launches cleaning blitz to refresh Toronto's public spaces, streets and parks for the summer
Social Sharing Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow launched a new citywide initiative Saturday aimed at keeping public spaces clean, safe and well-maintained as people head outdoors to enjoy the summer weather. Under the initiative, which began Saturday, crews of 300 to 400 people will clean and refresh public spaces around the city. That work will include removing graffiti, weeds and litter from streets, sidewalks and parks, the City of Toronto said in a news release. "Too often we have garbage that might be overflowing. The streets are sometimes … not in [the] best shape and there's litter around," Chow said at an announcement Saturday. "That's why we need to create a cleaner, safer city for everyone." These cleaning blitzes will happen for several Saturdays over the next three months, the news release said. The cleaning crews will also install more than 600 new garbage and recycling bins to high-usage parks. Chow said these bins will have QR codes which people can scan to notify the city when a bin needs to be emptied. Crews will also conduct heightened enforcement and clean-up of "illegal dumping hotspots," the city's news release said. WATCH | Business owners call for end to illegal dumping at Scarborough plaza: Stop dumping trash in this Scarborough plaza, business owners say 5 months ago Duration 2:35 Business owners in a Scarborough plaza say they're frustrated with recurring piles of illegally dumped trash. CBC's Britnei Bilhete explains why cracking down on the issue is complicated. Chow said the crews will investigate who is responsible for illegal dumpings. "We will get you, so don't dump your garbage in a place where you shouldn't be," she said. They will also maintain trees, make repairs to potholes, bike lanes and bike rings, and repaint pavement markings, including crosswalks. The city said it will use data to identify neighbourhoods where cleaning blitzes are most needed. "Crews will resolve 311 service requests as well as applying an equity lens to prioritize cleaning and repairs in historically underserved, low-income and vulnerable communities where the city typically receives fewer 311 service requests," the news release said. The city said it is also hiring up to 30 students to join summer park cleaning teams and adding more custodial staff to maintain 21 outdoor pools.
Telegraph
19-06-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
The wild life of Canada's favourite crack-smoking, escort-loving mayor
It is a feature of modern life that many of the world's best-loved politicians, from Donald Trump to Boris Johnson, are colourful, charismatic and deeply flawed characters to whom normal rules of behaviour simply do not seem to apply. The worse their actions are, the more they are beloved by a public who refuse to accept that their idols are not on their side. Yet few have been as swashbucklingly, hilariously outrageous in their buccaneering showmanship as Rob Ford, the one-time mayor of Toronto. Ford came to international attention when he gave a press conference in 2013 in which he not only denied claims that he had smoked crack cocaine – something that the newspaper the Toronto Star had seen video footage of – but then proceeded to attack the media for daring to report verifiable fact as fact. Over the course of Shianne Brown's frequently jaw-dropping new Netflix documentary, Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem, Ford's brief, chaotic and flamboyant life comes into focus once again. There are clear and obvious parallels with both Johnson and Trump, although Ford's hard-living, heavy-drinking ways have little in common with the teetotal president and the largely abstemious former PM. Instead, what is so remarkable about the politician is that he had an innate gift for connecting with his public, despite his outrageous and wildly controversial personal life. The crack-smoking – which under normal circumstances would have finished his career forever – was only the most egregious of the many things that he did. But as one former colleague of his remarks, perhaps hopefully, 'in the long run, history will think of him as a man who had an illness and accomplished things that have never been accomplished before.' Ford's father, Douglas, was a successful self-made businessman and member of the Progressive Conservative party who passed on both his political views and energetic drive to succeed to his four children, especially his sons Doug and Rob. They became known as the 'Ford family enterprise' as a result. Mayor of Mayhem does not explore Ford's initial rise to prominence, which came when he was a city councillor for Ward 2 Etobicoke North in Toronto, but it is a fascinating story. In language which anticipated the rise of Trump and Elon Musk and their cost-cutting exercises, Ford declared in 2001, when the city was facing a budgetary shortfall and necessary rise in taxes, 'I have to give my head a shake because some of the rhetoric that comes out of the mouths of some of these councillors boggles my mind, I swear. ... Get the government out of our backyards. It's ridiculous. Government red tape here. Bureaucratic here. It's nonsense having all this government.' He led by example, refusing to claim expenses and saying that 'all this office budget stuff is self-promotion to benefit yourself. Why should the taxpayers have to pay for it? It boggles my mind.' Ford also had a knack for the quotable insult or jest. He argued against installing suicide prevention barriers on the Prince Edward Viaduct, claiming that the money should instead be spent on prosecuting paedophiles 'who are the main cause of people jumping off bridges.' He referred to political opponents as 'scammers' and 'goons', and when accused of racism, blithely denied it, saying 'I'm a conservative and the majority of people are left-wing and cannot stand my politics.' Ford made many enemies in his early political career, but he, a self-described 'public servant', also was seen as energetic and accessible by voters. Prone to exaggeration – the documentary observes that even from his early campaign appearances, he would claim that a crowd of 2,000 voters was in fact 5,000 – and also to self-mythologising, he had a knack of communicating with the public that resonated with people tired of the same old politicians. As one acquaintance put it: 'Rob Ford gives out his business card out to virtually everyone he meets and says 'if you have any problems, call me'.' This cut through usual expectations of public service, often to unexpected effect. At Ford's funeral, his brother Doug recounted the anecdote of how Ford, picking up a takeaway sandwich, was surprised to learn that there was no delivery driver available to fulfil an order. Ford volunteered to take the sandwich himself, on the grounds that it might endear him to a potential voter. 'They gave me $35 for a $32 order, so I got a $3 tip!' he later recounted. Ford, a large, imposing figure who bore a resemblance to the late actor John Candy, decided to run for mayor in the 2010 election amidst public dissatisfaction with his left-wing predecessor David Miller, who had served two terms in office but had lost his standing amidst a lengthy strike by garbage workers in the summer of 2019. Ford's platform was unashamedly populist, with such slogans as 'Stop the Gravy Train' and 'Respect for taxpayers'. His opponents attempted to draw attention to previous misdemeanours of his, including an arrest for driving under the influence of alcohol in Miami in 1999, but Ford shrugged them off. His popularity only grew with voters, who saw him as an accessible everyman figure, and he was elected mayor with 47 per cent of the vote. As his special assistant Tom Beyer puts it in Mayor of Mayhem: 'We were outsiders and now we were insiders.' The first indications that it would be an eventful mayoralty came on St Patrick's Day in 2012, a little over a year since he was elected. Ford held a 'wild party' in which he was said to be under the influence of both alcohol and drugs, and when the Toronto Star reported that the mayor was a heavy drinker, angrily denounced the story as 'lies, after lies, and lies'. He was said to have hired a blonde sex worker named Alana for this party and to have drunk and taken copious quantities of drugs with her, before announcing that he intended to '[go] out then [get] laid.' The newspaper now redoubled its attempts to find some dirt in Ford's eventful private life, and was rewarded with its vigilance by being informed, in May 2013, that a video existed of the mayor smoking crack cocaine. They were offered its sale for $100k, but as the Toronto Star had a policy of not paying for stories, was unable to back up a hugely significant scoop. It looked as if it could not be printed, until the gossip website Gawker, which got hold of the same information, published their own story first, to be picked up on by the grateful Toronto Star. Even as one of Ford's aides acknowledged 'that's a problem', the mayor simply described the story as more falsehoods, and suggested that the video had been doctored. This may have been a blatant untruth, but it was said with enough conviction to persuade half the citizens of Toronto that the newspaper was biased against Ford and casting around for evidence to discredit him. The mayor blithely admitted things that would have led to any other politician being disgraced – in August 2013, when asked about cannabis use, he announced that 'I won't deny that, I smoked a lot of it' – but he seemed in denial about the damning video. When his chief of staff Mark Towhey suggested, given the inevitability of its becoming public, that Ford should seize the initiative and enter rehab, the mayor simply fired him. And so, when Toronto police chief Bill Blair announced on October 31 that he had seen the video, which had been captured after a gun smuggling raid, Ford refused to admit its existence. In an instantly notorious press conference, he came out fighting: 'I have no reason to resign, I'm going to go back and return my phone calls, gonna be out doing what the people elected me to do and that's save taxpayers money and run a great government.' He then addressed rumours that he had behaved inappropriately towards a young female staffer, Olivia Gondek, who had resigned the previous year. He claimed that '[The newspaper] says that I wanted to 'eat her p----'. I've never said that in my life to her. I would never do that. I'm happily married. I've got more than enough to eat at home.' Matters fell apart swiftly. Five days later, Ford was compelled to admit that 'Yes, I have smoked crack cocaine but ... am I an addict? No. Have I tried it? Um, probably in one of my drunken stupors, probably approximately about a year ago.' Eventually, the penitent mayor announced 'I will be forever sorry', but a series of embarrassing videos were leaked of Ford claiming he was a 'sick motherf-----' and miming bizarre fight moves. In another, the mayor was filmed shouting 'I need f---ing' ten minutes to make sure he's dead!' When asked in an interview 'have you purchased illegal drugs in the last two years', Ford was compelled to say 'Yes, I have.' By the time a video appeared of him speaking in Jamaican patois, it was all one long-suffering aide could do to say 'it all blurs.' The Toronto mayor was now an international joke, lambasted on chat shows all over America. Jay Leno, observing the latest absurd development, quipped: 'There's not a lot to do in Toronto.' When Ford entered the council chamber, amidst public demonstrations demanding that he resign as mayor, his fellow politicians yelled 'shame' at him, leading Ford to retort that they were 'scumbags' before charging and inadvertently knocking one woman over with his significant bulk. Unabashed, he then announced' 'This reminds me of when Saddam attacked Kuwait…you guys have just attacked Kuwait.' Despite everything, Ford was not only able to remain as mayor, but he announced his intention of standing for re-election ('Why retreat when you can keep pushing ahead?'). Even as yet another video surfaced of him smoking crack, he tried to get his life into some sort of order, albeit on his own, inimitable terms. He entered rehab, lost weight, was seen in the company of Hulk Hogan (who he beat in an arm wrestling contest) and Mike Tyson and once again set about seducing the citizens of Toronto as only he could. Had he not been diagnosed with a rare cancer, pleomorphic liposarcoma, he may even have won re-election. In the event, his brother Doug stood in his stead and came a close runner-up to the eventual winner, John Tory. Ford instead fought and won his city council seat once more, indicating his extraordinary public popularity, and held it until his death on 22 March 2016. He was only 46. In one of the last scenes in Mayor of Mayhem, a bald, pensive-looking Ford is interviewed while going through chemotherapy. 'I'm doing the best I can in the situation,' he says softly. He believed that he would beat his illness, as he had beaten everything else that had come at him in his brief and eventful life. He was wrong. Doug Ford, now Premier of Ontario, has already denounced Mayor of Mayhem and its makers: 'It's just disgusting. Leave the guy alone. Let him rest in peace. Let his family rest in peace. They're just disgusting people. It just absolutely infuriates me, to be honest with you. [If] they want the truth, talk to the real people who absolutely loved him.' Certainly, it offers an unvarnished and at times highly unflattering picture of his younger brother as a Falstaffian, self-centred ruffian whose lack of impulse control meant that what might have been a legendary political career ended up falling apart, mired in scandal and sleaze. But what scandal, and what sleaze! If Rob Ford is to be remembered for anything, more than a decade after his death, it is in taking political wrongdoing to new depths, and making himself immortal in the process. There will never be another politician like him. We hope.
Yahoo
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Doug Ford blasts Netflix doc on late brother Rob Ford: 'Let him rest in peace'
TORONTO — Ontario Premier Doug Ford says a new Netflix documentary about his late brother Rob Ford is "disgusting." The doc titled 'Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem" chronicles Rob Ford's rise to power as Toronto mayor in 2010 and his chaotic time in office. Speaking at a news conference in Toronto, Doug Ford said he wasn't going to watch the film, and he doesn't see eye-to-eye with the creators. Ford said he spoke to one person who saw the doc and that it "absolutely infuriates" him. The film's director Shianne Brown told The Canadian Press last week that she had asked Doug Ford to participate in the film but he 'kindly declined.' It includes archival footage and interviews with journalists and insiders from Rob Ford's circle to trace the populist wave that swept him into office in 2010 and his struggles with addiction while in the spotlight. "It's just disgusting. Leave the guy alone, let him rest in peace. Let his family rest in peace," Doug Ford said Tuesday when asked about the documentary, which debuted that day. Rob Ford died of cancer in 2016 at age 46. He served as mayor until 2014. This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 17, 2025. Alex Nino Gheciu, The Canadian Press
