By now, most City Hall watchers know that Brad Bradford has selected, as a pointed wedge issue, a proposal to rename Sankofa Square while simultaneously using its apparently neglected condition as a symbolic cudgel to attack Mayor Olivia Chow’s record in office.
“It’s dirty, it’s unsafe, there’s open drug use in the middle of the afternoon,” he declared at a press conference earlier this week where he unveiled his new plank. “We’ve been told this is how it is. Mayor Chow has made her peace with this but I have not.”
He promised to not only clean and rename the space — “Toronto Square” is his equally unsubtle suggestion — but also to somehow work with the giant video billboard “brands” to project more meaningful content at the passersby and chip in to keep the place clean.
By now, many people also know, thanks to the Toronto Star’s reporting, that when council voted in 2023 to select Sankofa to replace Dundas, Bradford backed that change, although he now seems unconcerned, in a conspicuously Trumpian way, about getting ensnared in an inconvenient backstory.
These days, he’s all about the name/blame game, as are the spin-doctors on the right. “Real Torontonians will be cheering on the end of wasteful, woke, divisive Chow leading us into damning decline,” Liberal hack and failed mayoral candidate Stephen LeDrew wrote on X. (Whatever could he mean by “real Torontonians,” I wonder.)
I debated for a few days about whether it’s worth platforming Bradford’s coded position here and give it more oxygen than it deserves. But in the end, I think it is important to unpack what’s being said, insinuated and parroted with this gambit because Bradford’s choice, in my view, reveals some serious judgment issues.
Let’s start with parroted. The man who decided to weaponize Sankofa is Daniel Tate, the founder of IntegrityTO, which claims to have formed in response to the original re-naming but has turned into much more than that, as the name suggests.
For months now, Tate’s social media has been chock-a-block with a witch’s brew of antagonist attacks on anyone even vaguely connected with the left, Chow or Toronto Centre councillor Chris Moise, as well as click-bait images of homeless people or those with addictions in public spaces, especially the TTC. The impression he clearly wants to convey is that city services/spaces are overwhelmed with visible homelessness/addiction — they’re not — and that the fault for this state of affairs lies squarely with Chow.
It’s quite legitimate to raise issues of public safety in the context of a municipal election. But we should all be disturbed by Tate’s habit of photographing destitute people without their consent and then trafficking in these highly prejudicial images for political purposes.
Equally troubling, to me, is the fact that Bradford has chosen to effectively leverage Tate’s platform as a way of advancing his mayoral campaign. Tate, of course, has every right to express himself, but he’s a crank with a narrow agenda and I have no qualms about calling out someone who’s basically set themselves up as a troll who also sells merch.
This alignment alone is enough to raise questions about Bradford’s acumen. All elected politicians, but especially high visibility office-holders like mayors, should be thinking about whom they choose as their allies. I fully understand that many candidates are more than happy to pander in order to win over key supporters during election season.
But noisemakers like Tate will be emboldened to shout down or bully opponents if they end up on the winning side of a race, or otherwise leverage their political relationships in order to advance private agendas.
The third layer that disturbs me about Bradford’s Toronto Square wedge involves the textual and psychological association asserted between visible homelessness and drug use in the space and a name selected, quite explicitly, to acknowledge a strand of West African mythology chosen to respond to concerns raised about Henry Dundas’s slave holdings.
While Sankofa was a controversial choice, I’m not squeamish about arguing that Tate’s shrill attacks on this particular name, three years after the fact, clearly pluck on a racial chord, especially when they’re tethered to a lot of red meat rhetoric about safety, disorder, filth, and so on. There’s a not-too-subtle way to interpret how this rhetoric could land in certain ears, especially at a moment of rising anti-immigrant sentiment. Bradford’s making his bed…
Finally, there’s the issue of the square’s problematic urban design — a topic I don’t believe Bradford is interested in confronting. In the 1990s, when the city expropriated the land to create a central public space whose operations would be financed by parking revenue from the garage beneath the plaza, it selected an overly conceptual design, and then an approach to programming, that undermined its potential role as a civic space with gravitational pull.
The square itself is exposed and impermeable, lacks seating, amenities, and a focal point, and has no sense of enclosure or delineation at its edges. It is only animated by whatever the city decides to book there, and consequently the square has never become a casual destination in the middle of the downtown. The fact that Queen’s Park in 2024 shut down the supervised injection site on Victoria Street, right around the corner, also helps explain the visible drug use, which, of course, is the fault of a raging opioid epidemic, not the mayor.
If he wins, Bradford will bulk up the security there and give the place a whitewash — which is to say, he’ll achieve nothing. Nor will upbeat messages on the giant video screens (assuming the city can even extract such concessions from the outdoor advertising giants).
What’s needed for this space is a wholesale urban design makeover, beginning with the flawed premise that its animation is the city’s responsibility and thus is only intermittent. If Sankofa Square was a successful public space that attracted the public, Daniel Tate wouldn’t have dared attack the name, and Bradford would have had to look elsewhere for his wedgies.
As it stands, this fight will become the stupidest election issue’ of the 2026 campaign.
