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2023 Toronto Mayoral by-election

Who gets your vote for Mayor of Toronto?

  • Ana Bailao

    Votes: 18 16.4%
  • Brad Bradford

    Votes: 3 2.7%
  • Olivia Chow

    Votes: 58 52.7%
  • Mitzie Hunter

    Votes: 2 1.8%
  • Josh Matlow

    Votes: 20 18.2%
  • Mark Saunders

    Votes: 4 3.6%
  • Other

    Votes: 5 4.5%

  • Total voters
    110
  • Poll closed .
But while I can see the *generic* centre/right coalescing, I can *also* see Doug Ford offering his own monkey-wrench candidate anyway, a la Saunders. For you see, those first two names *could* galvanize a big tent--but unlike the very last name in that list, they wouldn't be "Doug's choice". And Doug would be antsy in the absence of "Doug's choice". He probably couldn't resist offering Mikey or Kinga, oblivious to how the "Doug's choice" element is actually an albatross around their necks, much as it was w/Saunders. (That is, *if* Doug's still in power by the time the next election rolls around)

Ford will likely stick his fat face into the next election with a preferred candidate whether he's still in power or not. I'm sure CP24 and all the usual suspects will be happy to give him media megaphones. Would he actually have the nerve to push Kinga given the rumors about the two of them having an affair? Given what happened to Tory and all? Ah, who am I kidding? Of course he would. Rules and decorum are for other people, aren't they?

As for Mikey, the Fords' usual fans might be a little less enthused about him since he doesn't appear to be a radical right nutjob like his uncles. I can't see his squeaky-voiced demeanor doing him any favors, either. Media interviews with him would be like listening to Minnie Mouse. And dear old Unca Crackhead might have poisoned the grounds for any future Fords running for the position of Mayor. Pretty to think so, at least.
 
As for Mikey, the Fords' usual fans might be a little less enthused about him since he doesn't appear to be a radical right nutjob like his uncles. I can't see his squeaky-voiced demeanor doing him any favors, either. Media interviews with him would be like listening to Minnie Mouse. And dear old Unca Crackhead might have poisoned the grounds for any future Fords running for the position of Mayor. Pretty to think so, at least.
Let's not forget that said delivery-deficiency also plagued Saunders--he was way too softspoken for the big he-man law-and-order guy DoFo tried to portray him as. Which only reinforced notions of him as a weak puppet.

Incidentally, I haven't seen Mitzie Hunter discussed so much in these postmortems--maybe because there's something too "good-natured" about her to earn the easy sneers directed at a Saunders or Bradford, even though she was just as much of a tin-eared disaster with her silly "Fix The Six" slogan and all. Perhaps it's a little because unlike Bailao or Bradford, she didn't have conservative "fixers" on board--but she also didn't have Matlow's bourgeois-urban-NIMBY/progressive base. She was sort of like, just, *there*, a wouldbe Queen of Scarberia--though given her nature and given how Scarberia swung, it might well be that not unlike Matlow, her base was likelier to default to Olivia than to Ana.

In the end, to use the old horse/camel metaphor, Mitzie's problem is that she came across as a Chloe Brown if she were designed by a committee.
 
Has anyone calculated Gong's sign to vote ratio?
Judging from his popularity with the kids, probably a million-billion-zillion to one.

In that popular-with-the-kids light, Gong was truly the Roofi of the byelection.

 
Is that an option?
Well, Trump's asked for one; so, why not Gong. And he can present a petition from a whole bunch of school children: "We Want Gong!". And just to make it simple and economical, just make it Chow vs Gong, nobody else...
 
Gong (and Sky too) are just making themselves look like a couple of fools. They really should quit while they're behind.
 
Is that an option?

Not really, no.

Is there a theoretical possibility? Sure, but that would be determined by a Court, not election officials and would require an extraordinary heap of evidence of irregularities and/or fraud likely to have impacted the outcome.

That latter part is key. The legal standard for that remedy requires evidence not merely of wrong-doing or technical error, but of a reasonable likelihood of a different result.

Which is to say......barring any extraordinary surprises............. not happening.
 
Not really, no.

Is there a theoretical possibility? Sure, but that would be determined by a Court, not election officials and would require an extraordinary heap of evidence of irregularities and/or fraud likely to have impacted the outcome.

That latter part is key. The legal standard for that remedy requires evidence not merely of wrong-doing or technical error, but of a reasonable likelihood of a different result.

Which is to say......barring any extraordinary surprises............. not happening.
Well, let's put it straight. I was being sarcastic in suggesting a redo of the election. (The last significant example within the GTA that comes to mind was York North in 1990, which Maurizio Bevilacqua won by a landslide for the Libs after a disputed, teeter-totter knife-edge Lib vs PC result in the 1988 federal election was voided by the courts.)

In Chris Sky's case, the calls for a recount are largely performative in the Trump/Kari Lake vein, and it's a popular gesture among crackpot MAGAs (in the '22 GOP primary for the Georgia governorship, Kandiss Taylor refused to concede despite getting *3.42%* of the primary vote). In Gong's case, it's *probably* (though, who knows) more a matter of misunderstanding what recounts are all about--that is, they happen when the race is close enough so that the winner is in doubt, not when a bottom-tier candidate finds his/her numbers questionable, "I put up all these signs, bought all this advertising, even had a Pride float--and *this* is all I got? It doesn't make sense!". Well, maybe it *might* make a difference if there's a bottom threshold for candidate reimbursement--but I haven't heard of recounts conducted on those grounds.

In any case, while one can see Sky's crowd crying "fraud" into eternity (even though for what they were, his numbers were actually fairly *solid*), it seems like Gong made that one tweet asking for a recount and it wilted on the vine, I haven't heard of any followup--so at this point, he'd probably be better off bracing himself for any questions from the City about his election spending...
 
Ana Bailao won Humber River-Black Creek by 2 votes.

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