Lost in the aftermath of Olivia Chow’s shock-and-awe victory last week — in which she beat Brad Bradford by almost 130,000 votes and prevailed in almost every part of the city — is a sense of what the 400,000 Torontonians who voted against her were saying.
It is, of course, a mug’s game to try to prise out meaning from so many ballots, but I’d like to offer a theory: in this election, the actual ballot question had to do with safety, and its presence or absence in the city’s far-flung neighbourhoods, in its public spaces, and on the TTC.
Yes, many topics get canvassed in a long race, from the mundane — an administrative overhaul of the water system! — to the intentionally salient. Because the policy planks of Chow’s platform were designed to generate as little controversy as possible (school lunches, the TTC fare cap, etc.), Bradford filled the vacuum for months with his fear-mongering and his pledge to hire a thousand new cops.
Was there a lower moment in this campaign than the photo of him on the cover of the Toronto Sun, wielding the baseball bat he claims to keep in his house for self-defence? I don’t think so.
Setting aside the atmospherics, we did have a big city-wide debate that boiled down to vibes-versus-crime stats, and one might come to the glass-half-full conclusion that the stats side won, perhaps even decisively. If Bradford’s safety agenda was the ballot question, one way of reading the result is that a lot of people said, ‘Nope, not buying it. I don’t feel unsafe.’
Still, thousands of people filled in the oval for Bradford, and a good number of them, one can surmise, took to heart his critique of our public spaces — too many homeless people on the streets, too much open drug use — and his prescription for addressing the same. Some may have been expressing their preference from a place of personal experience while others no longer feel at ease in the city, for whatever reason.
Some pre-election polling picked all this up. A Mainstream Research poll made public in early October found that 70% of respondents were extremely or very worried about crime, and more than half believed that safety should be a high priority issue in the election. (Chow’s campaign officials didn’t respond to my requests for what they’d learned from their own polling about the safety file.)
I’d parse Bradford’s safety platform as follows. Some of it was targeted at people who are troubled by the sight of addicts collapsed on the streetcar or in spaces like Yonge-Dundas Square.
Some was coded, a bat signal to those Jewish voters who have felt anxiety or experienced harassment since October 7, and became the focus of Bradford’s early fundraising efforts.
Finally, his platform resonated in affluent neighbourhoods whose residents have experienced an increased incidence of (luxury) car theft and home invasions, such as the one that occurred over the weekend in the Bridal Path and left three members of a family injured and, presumably, highly traumatized.
I will admit to feeling perhaps less sympathy than I should for people who’ve had their $70,000 German SUVs swiped. But the home invasions — which are often carried out with the express purpose of grabbing a key fob — are truly terrible, and have the potential to create a deeply problematic response, which is the privatization of security in neighbourhoods that can afford to take matters into their own hands.
Many affluent neighbourhoods have already crossed the Rubicon of hiring private security guards to patrol at night. But the runaway popularity in the U.S. of AI-enabled surveillance technologies — e.g., Flock video cameras and license plate readers — may be coming here, with all the downstream potential for privacy invasion and racial profiling. All this has existed for years on private neighbourhood Facebook groups or other sites, but it may now be served up with a helping of AI-enabled cameras trained on public spaces, including residential streets.
It’s bad enough when the police start using this stuff, but the worse scenario is high-tech vigilante-ism. In a climate in which moral panic over home invasions is spreading quickly, the take-up of this kind of technology, but acquired by individuals or neighbourhood groups, will only accelerate.
Chow, City Council, and the police have to rapidly get at the root of this particular crime wave before we dive headlong into a dystopian future of digitally-ring-fenced neighbourhoods.
I’d also say that Chow shouldn’t ignore another part of Bradford’s safety agenda, although she can take a much more progressive approach to solving it. One of his critiques of some public spaces in the city — Yonge-Dundas Square, Union Station, etc. — is that they’ve become the more or less exclusive preserve of people contending with addictions and homelessness.
The City, under Chow, has made real progress on developing and protecting deeply affordable housing, including transitional housing, with much more to come. There’s also been a better effort on the part of the City’s housing and shelter operations to treat people in encampments humanely, per the recommendations of the Toronto Ombudsman.
But if the mayor wants to enliven Toronto’s public spaces and make them seem safer for everyone, she should be directing the City’s parks planners to find ways of encouraging people to go to these places and then hang out. I’ve ranted about this issue many times before in this space: more seating, more moveable seating, more tables, more shade. Not rocket science.
The result — as has been shown in countless other cities over many years — is public space that is used by lots of people feels livelier and safer. It’s a way for Chow to address a strand of Bradford’s safety agenda, but do so without resorting to his tactics.
