{"id":278212,"date":"2025-11-12T11:24:24","date_gmt":"2025-11-12T11:24:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/278212\/"},"modified":"2025-11-12T11:24:24","modified_gmt":"2025-11-12T11:24:24","slug":"unlike-new-york-canadas-mamdanis-are-on-the-way-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/278212\/","title":{"rendered":"Unlike New York, Canada\u2019s ‘Mamdanis’ are on the way out"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Are voters tired of failed progressive policies and turning away from left-wing mayors? Not<\/a> in New York City<\/a>, evidently. But in Canada there is hope of a return to some degree of sanity at city hall.<\/p>\n

Montreal has just replaced retiring two-term mayor Valerie Plante with former federal cabinet minister Soraya Martinez Ferrada, widely regarded as more centrist. And on Oct. 20, Calgary mayor Jyoti Gondek was roundly defeated<\/a> in her re-election bid, finishing a distant third and becoming the first incumbent mayor to be defeated in Calgary since 1980. She tallied only 71,466 votes, or 20 per cent. Four years earlier, 176,344 Calgarians, 45 per cent of those who turned out, had voted for her.<\/p>\n

What happened? Among other things, Gondek declared<\/a> a \u201cclimate emergency,\u201d said<\/a> the city should \u201cmove past\u201d oil and gas, spent more than $200 million<\/a> of taxpayers\u2019 money on the alleged emergency, defended a later-reversed<\/a> 2023 decision by city staff to cancel<\/a> Canada Day fireworks thought to be racist or culturally insensitive, and significantly raised property taxes, including by 7.8 per cent<\/a> in 2024 and 6.4 per cent<\/a> this year. Calgary homeowners were in for another 5.4 per cent property tax hike in 2026 but newly elected mayor Jeromy Farkas says<\/a> that number must come down.<\/p>\n

Discontent with left-wing mayors can also be seen in Toronto, where the next municipal election is in just under a year. A new One Persuasion poll<\/a> commissioned by A Better City (ABC) Toronto<\/a> suggests that in a mayoral race between incumbent Olivia Chow and Coun. Brad Bradford, who has already declared his candidacy, Bradford would win 40 per cent to 32 per cent. Former mayor John Tory has not yet entered the race but according to the poll would win a three-way contest with 36 per cent support compared with 33 per cent for Chow and 29 per cent for Bradford. Approximately 70 per cent of Toronto voters believe the city is going in the wrong direction and even one-third of those who voted for Chow in 2023 now say it is time for a new mayor.<\/p>\n

A recent Canada Pulse Insights survey<\/a> suggested Chow would actually be a slight favourite in a crowded mayoral race but, like One Persuasion, found 64 per cent of Torontonians believe the city is on the wrong track, 51 per cent say Chow is doing a poor job and 65 per cent want new leadership. A Leger poll<\/a> published last week also shows growing dissatisfaction with Chow. According to Leger, her approval rating fell to 43 per cent in October and those who \u201cstrongly disapprove\u201d jumped to 27 per cent from 17 per cent previously. Only nine per cent \u201cstrongly approve\u201d of the job she\u2019s doing as mayor.<\/p>\n

There is good reason for Torontonians to be discontented with Chow. In her first two budgets, she outdid even Gondek\u2019s property tax hikes, whacking Toronto homeowners with a 9.5 per cent increase in 2024 and piling on another 6.9 per cent this year. Important city services such as public transit<\/a> and snow removal<\/a> have performed miserably<\/a> in recent years. From April 2021 to October 2024, the city\u2019s homeless population<\/a> more than doubled. And although city hall obviously isn\u2019t the only influence on Toronto\u2019s broader economy, poor municipal management has clearly not helped.<\/p>\n

A recent TD Economics report<\/a> highlights that while the unemployment rate in April 2023 was only 5.6 per cent in the larger Toronto Census Metropolitan Area (CMA), by September 2025 it had risen to 8.9 per cent \u2014 close to its highest level since 2012, not counting the pandemic. Toronto\u2019s unemployment is fourth worst of Canada\u2019s 41 major CMAs, while its unemployment rate has risen faster than in the rest of the province since the beginning of 2024. Toronto\u2019s youth unemployment rate currently sits at around 20 per cent.<\/p>\n

Moreover, despite a housing crisis \u201cconstruction hiring has been a multi-year sore spot.\u201d The TD report includes a line chart whose title reads simply: \u201cToronto\u2019s Homebuilding Industry Depressed.\u201d It shows housing starts falling approximately in half since mid-2023, a decline markedly steeper than in the rest of Ontario. Employment in the construction sector is well below what it was two years ago.<\/p>\n

Thanks to democracy, Torontonians do not have to put up with worsening municipal services and declining economic prospects. Next year, they can do as Calgarians have done and dispense with their poorly performing mayor and move on from repeating the mistakes of the past.<\/p>\n

Matthew Lau is a Toronto writer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Are voters tired of failed progressive policies and turning away from left-wing mayors? Not in New York City,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":278213,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[126949,49,48,126950,167,44,126948,3302],"class_list":{"0":"post-278212","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-canada","8":"tag-brad-bradford","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-jyoti-gondek","12":"tag-new-york-city","13":"tag-news","14":"tag-olivia-chow","15":"tag-toronto"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278212\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/278213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}