Some councillors might think ‘a win is a win.’ But Monday’s results also signal it might be time to do things differently

After savouring victory for a few moments, the new city council will have some messy issues to tackle on its agenda.

Thestar.com
Oct. 26, 2022
Edward Keenan
OPINION

Just call her “Landslide Frannie.”

Coun. Frances Nunziata: a calcified fixture of York South--Weston and a cranky landmark of the council chamber in the speaker’s chair. The last of the preamalgamation mayors left serving in Toronto, long after Mel Lastman, Michael Prue and Doug Holyday shuffled offstage. Thirty-eight years, and counting, in municipal elected office.

Is it too late for a new nickname?

On Monday night, she won re-election over challenger Chiara Padovani by a margin of 94 votes.

Now, you may look at that number -- out of 21,167 votes cast -- and think that for a woman of such long service, in a city where defeated incumbents are rarer sights than albino squirrels, it might give pause. A signal of hunger for change in the ward that’s grown to roughly equal whatever sentiment has propelled you all this time. Humblingly close.

But to hear Landslide Frannie tell it on election night, it was instead a virtual avalanche of approval for the status quo: “It’s very clear that my constituents have spoken, and they’ve been very happy with the service and how I’ve been representing them over the years,” Nunziata told the Star on election night.

“A win is a win,” she said.

Those might turn out to be words to keep in mind as you watch Mayor John Tory and this new city council in action. Because it isn’t just Nunziata you might expect to have a think after taking a closer look at this election’s results, and it might not just be her who interprets them differently than you do.

Let’s start with the turnout, which appears to be in the neighbourhood of 29 per cent, which appears to be a record low. Tory may be entering a historic third term that will see him become Toronto’s longest-serving mayor, but an overwhelming supermajority of this city’s voters stayed home rather than be a part of that milestone.

It could be worse, I suppose: in Kitchener, a stunning 80 per cent of eligible voters failed to show up.

Speaking of Tory, among his other accomplishments, he appears to have blazed a trail in his route to the mayor’s office that other downtrodden politicians have been following in ever-greater numbers. He first won election as Toronto mayor in 2014 after serving as an unsuccessful provincial party leader. Patrick Brown followed his example to become mayor of Brampton in 2018. This year, two more former provincial leaders showed it wasn’t just an option open to Conservatives, as Andrea Horwath became mayor of Hamilton and Steven Del Duca won the job in Vaughan. The GTHA appears to be running a chain of luxury retirement facilities for failed premier wannabes.

One of the features of that particular consolation prize for those old leaders is they get to keep tangling with Doug Ford, the premier who often seems to see himself first and foremost as the Mayor of Everywhere, a perch from which he can spring legislation on mayors every now and again to make their plans redundant (look, he’s doing it again!). Perhaps Tory can offer his new counterparts some advice on coping with that.

But back to Toronto, and the lessons Tory might take from the results: despite his own healthy electoral margins, he doesn’t appear to have particularly long coattails.

Of the 11 living candidates he endorsed and campaigned for, seven won -- including Nunziata with her razor-thin victory and budget chief Gary Crawford, who drew only 35 per cent of the vote but was lucky enough to see the progressive opposition split between two candidates. Beyond those, Tory had five clearer victories and four losses, which is only slightly better odds of picking winners than flipping a coin would give you.

One of those losses might sting more than others. For the second election in a row, Tory spent a lot of energy supporting Mark Grimes in Etobicoke-Lakeshore, campaigning with him in the last weekend before the vote and running Facebook ads in support of him. Grimes had the Tory endorsement featured prominently on his lawn signs, reflecting the mayor’s popularity in the ward. Tory won 67 per cent of the vote there this year. Many people there went to the polls to re-elect Tory, but on the same ballot rejected his choice of city councillor and instead voted for Amber Morley. Thus they gave us that municipal equivalent of a unicorn sighting: a defeated incumbent.

And they contributed to an overnight quadrupling of the number of Black councillors. Before this election, Michael Thompson was the only Black member of the city government. Now, after being returned to office (under a cloud, since he stands charged with two counts of sexual assault; he plans to plead not guilty), Thompson is joined in the council Black caucus by Morley, Chris Moise of Toronto Centre and Jamaal Myers of Scarborough North. One of the defining trends of the council election was increased representation of ethnic minority groups, which included not just the new Black representatives, but also Chinese-Canadian Lily Cheng in Willowdale and Chilean-born Alejandra Bravo in Davenport, who each defeated a Tory-endorsed candidate in their wards, and by the city’s first hijab-wearing Muslim councillor in Ausma Malik in Spadina Fort York.

A quick note about Myers: his win in Scarborough Centre as someone endorsed by the leftist Progress Toronto organization carries a bit of an asterisk in that incumbent councillor Cynthia Lai, endorsed by Tory and expected to win re-election comfortably, died unexpectedly days before the election. The rules in place mean that votes for her were disqualified, and whoever won among the remaining candidates takes office. I’m sympathetic to her supporters’ claim that this is unfair, since it’s highly likely if Lai hadn’t been running, someone of similar ideological leaning might have run in her place. The Miss America-style runner-up-gets-the-gig format is an election process unbecoming of a big-city government. But those appear to be the rules. Still, even more than Nunziata, Myers has reason to consider how to interpret his own mandate.

Myers’s election means that council winds up down one more rock-solid Tory supporter, and up one more firm progressive. Looking at the entire new council and estimating the expected leaning of its members, it appears to me that Tory can still command a slight majority of council members on his unofficial right-leaning team. It’s hard to game these things out in advance -- every councillor is a free agent, in fact if not always in practice. There are wild cards in that deck, and new councillors without baggage and with fresh perspectives who could lead council’s consensus position to a new part of the political spectrum.

Perhaps, even, the mayor and councillors will look at the turnout, and at the lukewarm reception to Tory’s picks for city council, and at the vote margins and splits in some areas of the city, and conclude that while many of them have a renewed mandate, it’s a mandate that includes a lot of signals calling for a different approach. It’s possible.

But it’s also possible, and maybe more likely, that the mayor and his council majority will adopt Nunziata’s line and say, “a win is a win.”

And after they bask in that victory for a moment, they can turn to the slew of messy issues on the immediate agenda -- an epic budget hole, an affordable housing crisis, a possible recession on the horizon, the Doug Ford Factor fully operational. And then they might wonder if a win, in this situation, is more blessing or curse.