Toronto Mayor John Tory leaves his office at City Hall in February, 2023.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
Former Toronto mayor John Tory says he won’t be running again for the top job at City Hall this fall, citing the toll it would take on his family.
The announcement, posted to X on Tuesday, ends months of speculation about a return to politics for Mr. Tory, who resigned in early 2023 after acknowledging an extramarital affair with a staffer.
In the post, he said that he had been urged to run again by business and community leaders but has decided against it. It had been widely reported that he was actively considering throwing his hat in the ring for the Oct. 26 vote.
The 71-year-old Mr. Tory said his decision was not because of a lack of energy or desire – but because it would affect his family.
“I will not be running for mayor because I feel I cannot put my family and the people I care about through the inevitable attacks on me and my personal life that we’ve started to see before I’ve even announced my intentions,” Mr. Tory said.
“I’m not asking for you to feel sorry for me. I did hold myself to account by stepping down, and I know that politics is a tough business – at times brutal. What I’m asking for is your understanding.”
In his statement, Mr. Tory said if he were to run again, his focus would be on business investment, safety, reliable transit and low taxes. He said the city can’t normalize “open air drug-use on our streets and encampments in our parks.”
In a interview on Newstalk 1010 on Tuesday, Mr. Tory said it was through discussions with those close to him that he realized his past would come back to hurt them again.
“They felt that the likelihood of that coming back in a way that would cause more harm was very real,” he told host Deb Hutton, a long-time Progressive Conservative strategist.
Mr. Tory also confirmed on the show that he is now with the woman with whom he had the extramarital relationship, and said others seeking the job had already planned to use his personal life against him.
From 2023: Embattled John Tory marks end of tenure as Toronto mayor
Toronto’s current Mayor, Olivia Chow, a 68-year-old former NDP MP and city councillor, has not yet confirmed if she intends to run again.
She won the mayoralty in June, 2023, in the byelection held after Mr. Tory’s resignation, nearly a decade after her unsuccessful bid in the 2014 race that put Mr. Tory in power.
The most obvious other beneficiary of Mr. Tory’s decision is Councillor Brad Bradford, who has vowed to run for mayor for a second time. Before the announcement, he faced the possibility of being dramatically overshadowed by the higher-profile Mr. Tory, and dividing the right-of-centre anti-Chow vote.
Mr. Bradford, a former city planner, had won Mr. Tory’s endorsement in 2018 when he first ran for his east-end council seat in Beaches-East York. But in the crowded 2023 mayoral race, Mr. Bradford finished in a distant eighth place, winning barely more than one per cent of the vote.
In a Tuesday post to X, Mr. Bradford paid tribute to Mr. Tory: “John Tory has given years of service to this city. I will always be grateful for the support he gave me when I first decided to run.”
Mr. Tory, a former lawyer, Rogers Cable executive, provincial PC leader and radio talk-show host, first ran for mayor unsuccessfully in 2003.
He took office in 2014 after the tumult of Rob Ford, the current Premier’s late brother, whose term as mayor was marred by substance abuse and erratic behaviour.
Mr. Tory attempted to rein in the police budget, launched an affordable housing plan and kept his vow to limit property-tax hikes. He also championed an expensive plan to realign the easternmost section of the elevated Gardiner Expressway rather than tear it down.
But his move to charge tolls on the Gardiner and the Don Valley Parkway was scuppered by then Liberal premier Kathleen Wynne. And his widely criticized SmartTrack transit plan, meant to add local stops to the GO Transit commuter rail network, has all but disappeared.
He won a commanding re-election in 2018. But the city’s municipal vote was disrupted by Premier Doug Ford’s move to slash the number of council seats by almost half. It later emerged that Mr. Ford had briefly raised the idea with Mr. Tory weeks before it was announced.
Before his easy re-election in 2022, Mr. Tory had steered the city through the lengthy crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But in February, 2023, he quit after acknowledging the affair with the female staffer, calling it a “serious error of judgment.” The resignation came on the heels of a report in the Toronto Star about the relationship.
The city’s integrity commissioner later ruled that Mr. Tory broke ethics rules by voting on Toronto’s World Cup deal with sports giant MLSE, since it then employed the person with whom he was having an affair. The integrity commissioner also concluded that Mr. Tory had not followed proper procedures when she was employed in his office.