Brad Bradford on what went wrong in his mayoral bid — and what he said to Olivia Chow on election night

详细摘要

In a post-election interview, Brad Bradford breaks down his loss to Olivia Chow, negative advertising, and internal debates inside his campaign.

In an alternate world, Brad Bradford would have spent the past two weeks preparing to take office as Toronto’s new mayor.

Instead, after falling short against Olivia Chow in the Oct. 26 election, he’s been winding down his campaign and closing out his council office.

In an interview 15 days after that defeat, Bradford sat down at a diner in the Beaches—East York ward he’s spent the past eight years representing and reflected on the election, the internal debates his team had over strategy, and what he told Olivia Chow on election night.

Bradford said his team had yet to do a formal analysis, but he didn’t believe there was any one thing he could have done differently that would have changed the race’s outcome.

Chow ended up winning with more than 54 per cent support, 13 points ahead of Bradford, and had the highest vote total of any Toronto mayor, with more than 532,000.

Still, Bradford noted that in every previous post-amalgamation Toronto election his haul of more than 404,000 votes would have been enough to win, and an incumbent has never lost a mayoral election. What his campaign was trying to do was “really hard,” he said.

“I don’t think that there was one extra street that we needed to hit or one extra transit stop that would have done it,” he said.

However, Bradford echoed statements his campaign staffers have previously made, and attributed his loss in large part to what he described as “vicious negative advertising” Chow put out during the final days. Her campaign raised alarm about Bradford’s proposal to create an arm’s length water utility and alleged that it would open the door to privatizing the water supply, a charge Bradford rejected.

“We put a lot of, I think, thoughtful policy ideas in the window. But that opened us up to unfounded misinformation and critiques. And I think in the end, coupled with all the money that they put into negative advertising in the last eight days of the election, our campaign was not able to withstand that,” Bradford said.

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