By John Lorinc
Spacing
So, here we are on the eve of the firing of the starter’s pistol for the mayoral race, and Brad Bradford is already mired in the company-you-keep problem.
Or, maybe to put it more precisely, the judgment deficit problem. Because the j-word is definitely something voters, including those who are right-of-centre but not maniacally so, will have to contend with as e-day approaches.
This week’s choice example has to do with an X-post by his spin doctor, Warren Kinsella, who first opined that Mayor Olivia Chow was over-reacting in the run-up to Wednesday’s biblical storm, and then had to issue an exceedingly rare apology in the face of all the destruction, not to mention the blow-back on Bradford’s campaign.
Kinsella is a for-hire bomb-lobber, and the attention to his tweet over-shadowed the more salient point, which is that Bradford hired him in the first place. And this wasn’t his only recent miscalculation: Bradford, who has raced early towards the endorsements chapter of the election narrative, got a plug from former small business lobbyist Catherine Swift, only to walk it back within hours after the social-media universe shared recent evidence of her Islamophobia.
Exhibit C, for me, is Bradford’s expedient retreat from his hard-line stance on bike lanes, which he show-cased earlier in the summer with a pledge to remove the Bloor lanes through the Kingsway and into Etobicoke.
As has been widely reported, Bradford voted for said bike lanes, but now thinks bike lanes should be routed through an imaginary off-street path. Trickier, though, is how, as mayor, he’d deal with the Ford government’s much more expansive desecration, which includes, initially, all the lanes on Bloor, Yonge, University and Danforth, as well as a veto on future ones.
On Wednesday, he attempted to thread the political needle by claiming he still supports the very lanes that will be torn out (except the Kingsway and points west ones), then asserting that none of this would have happened three years ago if the city had “listened to the community,” whatever that means.
And herein lies the essence of Bradford’s judgment deficit, as well as his related habit of saying anything that he thinks will win him votes. In the last several weeks, as the volume on the race ratchets up, Bradford’s been making hay with an entirely fatuous, and obviously self-serving, line of reasoning. He’s blaming Chow for Ford’s excesses — Ontario Place, the Science Centre, the island airport mess, bike lanes — because it appears to position him, a candidate for mayor, as a critic of Chow, while actually not critiquing the current provincial government.
He claims, all evidence to the contrary, that he’d have negotiated better deals with Ford to save the family jewels. But how do we know?
The rhetoric reminds me of the way Pierre Poilievre has spent much of the past year fruitlessly blaming Mark Carney for not landing some kind of deal with Donald Trump’s insane administration. Again, how do we know he’d have done a better job?
The conflation of accusations that lack any basis in reality with the appearance of offering both a critique and a forward-looking plan is the sleight of hand here, an attempt to bamboozle voters who might be sitting on the fence by, well, performing opposition.
There’s plenty of room to take issue with Chow’s leadership — high tax increases, no obvious effort to confront the city’s bureaucratic excesses, a lack of responsiveness to mounting evidence of police corruption, some waffling on zoning reform.
But as Poilievre does with his endlessly shifting attacks, Bradford test drives various talking points — there was a whole series of short videos with business people frustrated by red tape earlier in the summer — but invariably gravitates back to the click-bait issues: violent crime (Salsa), homelessness (Sankofa Square), and attacks on Chow that should really be attacks on Ford (but for his lack of spine).
As for his proxies attacking Chow for somehow allowing Toronto’s infrastructure to be vulnerable in the face of a violent storm, Bradford’s own participation in years of municipal decisions about huge capital budgets puts the lie to these claims, which nonetheless went viral on social media in the past two days. (For the record, as my colleague Matt Elliott recorded, council two years ago, on a motion by Chow and former Scarborough councillor Jennifer McKelvie, unanimously — i.e., including Bradford — adopted a far-ranging strategy to reduce run-off and mitigate flooding.)
Setting aside the specifics, Bradford and his alternates are tacking directly in the opposite direction from what we’re seeing nationally — the public’s appetite for, and support of, stable leadership and meticulous strategic planning. What voters don’t want is more of the news-cycle sugar highs that seem to be the preferred mode of engagement for Alberta separatists, B.C.’s weird conservatives, Poilievre and his spin-doctors, and, now, a forty-year-old planner turned councillor who wants everyone to believe he’ll be a better, well, somethingorother.
That positioning, to my mind, reveals the calculus of an unserious politician with demonstrably poor, if not terrible, judgment, the evidence of which is really starting to pile up.
To borrow a phrase, Toronto can do better than a cynic like Brad Bradford.
