Chris Alexander in Toronto on Sept. 9, 2016. Alexander announced his bid for mayor of the city late last month.Jessica Darmanin/Supplied
Chris Alexander is either running the strangest campaign for mayor that the City of Toronto has seen in some time, or is actually making a subtle bid for a very different job: to be Toronto’s poet laureate.
On Monday, Mr. Alexander posted on X: “A bed is for the worst night of your life. A home is for the rest of it. My job as mayor is both.” We can infer that the statement is some new form of Haiku, because it makes no sense as political communications. (Is Mr. Alexander saying he will expand shelter spaces? He doesn’t elaborate. Will he rip up zoning regulations? Nothing on that either. Perhaps he will rephrase in iambic pentameter.)
A few days earlier, he posted that “Toronto doesn’t need strategists. It needs earned leadership” – an important distinction, apparently, from leadership that is, uh, not earned? Referring to municipal power seized by … violent revolution? Unclear. It’s useful to ask ChatGPT to try again when it spits out phrases like these.
Mr. Alexander continued, perhaps in an effort to clarify: “The votes of Torontonians are not a pie to be split up by strategists sitting behind closed doors somewhere – you have to earn them. That means arriving with a sense of urgency, a program and a plan.”
Former Conservative cabinet minister Chris Alexander enters Toronto’s mayoral race
Unfortunately, Mr. Alexander, who announced his bid for mayor of Toronto late last month, has not arrived with any of those things. The campaign website for the former Canadian ambassador to Afghanistan and federal Conservative minister of citizenship and immigration is nearly bare: His campaign lists five main priorities that are entirely non-specific. For example, number four, which is to “Strengthen Neighbourhoods,” is comprised of just 79 words of banal decrees including about how “potholes and damaged infrastructure must be fixed, not ignored.”
At the time of writing, the “Contact” and “Media” pages on his website are broken. He lists zero endorsements (his Harper-era cabinet-mate Lisa Raitt has endorsed Brad Bradford, who is the main challenger to incumbent Mayor Olivia Chow). He has promoted few appearances at public events, cultural festivals or community meet-and-greets, with the exception of one strange video on his Instagram that shows him taking a selfie with two men in Ghostbusters costumes at the Taste of the Danforth festival.
The most curious aspect of Mr. Alexander’s campaign for mayor is his focus on matters of foreign policy. Candidates running for elected office typically adhere to strict message discipline, and for a Toronto municipal election, that would mean living and breathing Toronto, and making his case at any and every opportunity for why Torontonians should elect him as their next mayor. But instead, Mr. Alexander is posting about the fall of Kabul, about NATO, and about Russian aggression, and then attempting to make weak connections when called out: “Failure to defeat naked Russia aggression in Ukraine makes everything harder in Toronto,” he argued on X, “from fixing potholes & building subways to sustaining our prosperity.”
He also dubbed Toronto’s homelessness crisis “a failure of connections,” and said, “I’ve moved systems like this before, in Kabul, at the cabinet table. We will connect them here.”
What does that mean in practice? He doesn’t explain.
Mr. Alexander says he wants to become mayor because “Toronto has been standing still for three years,” and ostensibly, he wants to get things moving again. But he has not provided anything close to a plan for how he will do that, nor has he articulated why he should be considered the vote for change. Polling currently has his support at around 10 per cent, which is 30 percentage points behind Mr. Bradford, who has actually served on Toronto City Council and who, importantly, appears to be running a real campaign with specific policy proposals. Ms. Chow’s support is currently at 47 per cent, which means that Mr. Alexander is siphoning just enough of the “change” vote to be a spoiler for Mr. Bradford, thus condemning Toronto, in Mr. Alexander’s words, to four more years of “standing still.”
So why, then, is he running for mayor? The real reason, I mean, not because the city is “adrift,” as he told the Toronto Star. Did Mr. Bradford run over his cat and this is Mr. Alexander’s way of exacting revenge? Is he secretly a fan of Ms. Chow’s dancing, and wants to see more of it? Is it because he wants Toronto to be the first municipality to secure NATO membership?
Or maybe it’s because he wants to show off more of his poetry, like this:
“If speeches built beds, Toronto would have a surplus. You were in the room. You had the votes. Where are the beds? Where are the homes?”
Please snap.