As I’m sure Brad Bradford intended way back in September 2025, this photo gracing the raggedy front page of the Toronto Sun lingered with me nearly 14 months later, all throughout this past municipal election campaign.
Whatever it was he was shooting for at the time, the image he wanted to imprint nine months before most voters would even begin to officially think about it, the thing that stuck with me was: What a dick.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The city’s a cesspool of crime and vice. Danger lurks at every doorstep. Nowhere’s safe. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.
But one man.
He’d had enough.
He wasn’t going to take it anymore.
He was going to stand tall.
He was going to give them law and order or die trying. Vigilante, city style—Judge, Jury, and Executioner. On every street in every city in this country, there’s a nobody who dreams of being a somebody.
Oh, and one more thing.
If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.
Who luvs ya, baby?
Shop worn, manufactured fear and anger set up to deliver trite solutions that get trotted out when you don’t have any actual answers.
This was the pose Brad Bradford decided to strike in what was going to be his second run for mayor of Toronto, the first one having fizzled out into an embarrassing 8th place finish in the 2023 by-election. That’s what he came up with after nearly 7 years as a city councillor, almost 5 of them as one of John Tory’s top lieutenants including the chair of the city’s important planning and housing committee until Tory’s personal flameout. Cheap, flame-throwing theatrics to mask what was clearly an empty pantry of achievements and accomplishments as an elected official.
If all else fails, get out the Cannon.
It’s not that anger and fear don’t work electorally, especially (and perhaps only) white guy fear and anger. We’re living in that world, aren’t we? Toronto experienced it up close and personal back in 2010 with the rise of Rob Ford and subsequently his coattail riding brother, Premier Doug. But it’s got to be accompanied by a persona. An angry persona. The outsider railing at the elite establishment. The fake TV successful businessman, bringing his fake business acumen to drain the swamp. Something the alienated, estranged, disenfranchised, disgruntled, not to mention reactionary affluent, can hitch their wrath-and-outrage wagons to.
But Brad Bradford just presented as angry.
There was no there there in his anger.
What the fuck did someone like Brad Bradford have to be angry about? Aside from having his ambitions to higher office foiled. And that’s a terrible look to be carrying around, carrying around your big stick for. Pure, unadulterated personal striving.
None of it was believable, credible or convincing. It came across as dress up. Cosplay, as the kids say if the kids still say that.
What’s mystifying, even more so than the 400k+ votes Bradford managed to garner despite the hologram of a campaign he waged, is how he became the anti-Chow/incumbent/right wing standard bearer in the first place. There’s no question Mayor Chow was vulnerable. Even progressives like me were fundamentally underwhelmed by her performance to date. The opposition field was so wide open that stories circulated about John Tory, disgraced former mayor John Tory, was considering another stab at it.
Yet somehow, an absolute nonentity like Brad Bradford managed to successfully circle the wagons around him in order to make this a two-horse race.
Quite possibly, the thinking in influential backroom conservative circles was, Why bother? Toronto already has a right-wing mayor sitting in the premier’s office at Queen’s Park. There was no need for duplication. Save the resources. Save the actual campaigning to keep that status quo in place. Inevitably, 8+ years in on the Ford era there was going to be some battles ahead. What didn’t need to happen was messy internecine infighting between the provincial government and City Hall.
So the way was cleared for Bradford to serve as sacrificial lamb. Or, in the unlikely case that he won, he’d serve merely as expendable fodder to be kept dutifully in place with no natural constituency to back him in any future municipal-provincial imbroglios and entanglements that would inevitably ensue as long as Doug Ford remained in place. A win-win situation for the city’s actual right-wing movers-and-shakers Brad Bradford only pretended to be.
Now, fingers crossed, this unbearable political lightweight will be relegated to obscurity, having left absolutely no mark or impression on either the elected office he held or shamelessly lusted after. Left to lick his wounds, we’ll be able to tune out his inevitable, insufferable podcast or drive-time AM radio program, never having to snicker at or concern ourselves with the name of Brad Bradford again.
