It felt this week like candidates in Toronto’s race to pick a new mayor started to use their elbows a little bit more.
Multiple candidates issued statements and tweets taking shots at their rivals.
Ana Bailao called former council colleague Josh Matlow, a “plagiarist,” accusing him of cribbing his platform from former candidate Gil Penalosa. Mark Saunders also took a swipe at Matlow, saying during an announcement “I usually chuckle when I hear candidates like Josh Matlow chastise people for using cars.”
Saunders had previously lashed out at Olivia Chow over safe injection sites.
But Saunders found himself the target of some fire this week. Former columnist, Anthony Furey took a shot at the former police chief, saying that he himself “started soft on injection sites, then tried to shift to my position” and also accused him of copying a promise to tear up bike lanes.
“Mark Sanders isn’t a leader, he’s a follower“ Furey tweeted.
So what’s the strategy behind the shots candidates seem to be firing off at one another more frequently? Well there may not be just one.
“If there are 10 lines of attack, there are 11 reasons that you are witnessing those attacks,” political strategist and commentator Scott Reid told CP24.com.
He said, for example, that Saunders’ attack on Chow could in fact be directed at all other candidates as part of an effort to signal to the city that it is a choice between the two of them.
“It's a flex, it's a power move,” Reid said. “It's an attempt to eclipse all of the other candidates who might notionally be in the orbit of Saunders and say, ‘I am the actual champion. She is the champion of the left. I am the champion of the rest, and therefore, I'm taking her on.’”
But other attacks might be efforts to clear the board ahead of a final showdown between just a handful of candidates.
“What campaigns want is clarity, and by that I mean clarity in terms of the path to victory,” Reid says. Multiple candidates searching for the same voters, riffing off of relatively the same percentage of name recognition — that's the opposite of clarity. That is one muddy stream to go fishing for votes in.”
That could motivate some candidates to launch attacks on others where they feel they might be able to gobble up a percentage of the votes that person might otherwise get if they’re able to knock them out of the race.
“It might be that you’re trying to vault yourself up into the top tier, it might be they’re already in the top tier and you want to define the race in ‘me versus them’ terms, or it may be that you're trying to eclipse and effectively eliminate would-be rivals for your own same vote.
“So there's a bunch of different things going on. And they're all enormously complicated by a lack of resources because these people don't have a ton of money.”
While it may feel like more candidates are resorting to negative campaigning early in the election, Reid says what we’ve seen so far is likely just a taste of what’s yet to come.
“I would say they're hitting each other with foam fingers so far, the knives are going to come out,” he said.
Especially if candidates find that they are not able to pull away from the pack, they may resort to more negative attacks in order to improve their position, even at the risk of drawing negative attention to themselves.
“What you'll see is that if nothing moves, the tenor of these attacks will intensify,” Reid says. “Because they will come to the conclusion that in order to get noticed, in order to get traction, they will have no choice but to say things that are more voluble. And with that comes risks, because it may be that you draw as much attention to yourself in a negative fashion as those that you have your rifle pointed at.”
Generally speaking, he said, negative campaigning does tend to work because people are more inclined to believe negative news about a politician than they are to believe positive statements.
“That's the unfortunate place that we're at in terms of cynicism around politics. So pure efficiency of effort, you know, you're more likely to be rewarded for saying something terrible about an opponent.”
All that said, the race still appears to be a place for ideas about how to make the city better. From free TTC fair for seniors to using libraries and community centres as hubs for young people, candidates have floated a range of ideas they’ve promised to implement. Not to mention plenty of discussion around safety on the TTC, the opioid crisis and housing.
“Toronto is in a very bad mood and people feel disaffected,” Reid says. “They're anxious about crime. They're anxious about affordability. They don't feel that basic services are working and none of those discussions really occurred in the re-election of a mayor (John Tory) who looked certain to get 60 per cent of the vote, no matter what happened.”
He said he'd expect to see even more ideas pitched more intensely before the campaign is over.
“I don't think that candidates have quite caught up yet with the mood of the electorate, and I think the mood of the electorate is certainly that it is looking for change.”
