Expectations are running high that veteran politician, community activist, and changemaker Olivia Chow will get Toronto on track to meet its climate and energy transition targets after winning the mayoralty of Canada’s largest city.
Chow won a close election race Monday over former city councillor Ana Bailão, who’d received an eleventh-hour endorsement from former mayor John Tory and assumed an early lead in the vote count before Chow surged to a 30,000-vote victory. Chow won with 37.2% of the vote in a 102-candidate field, taking 14 of the city’s 25 wards to Bailão’s 11.
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Chow won with a campaign that was relatively sparse on explicit climate policy but focused on climate-adjacent practicalities—from housing, to transit, to affordability, to local jobs and democracy—that are at the heart of many cities’ climate action plans. She takes over a city administration with a 2040 net-zero target and an ambitious climate and energy plan, TransformTO, that has never been fully funded.
“Wow, what a night,” Chow told supporters at her victory party Monday night. “If you ever doubted what’s possible together, if you ever questioned your faith in a better future, and what we can do with each other, for each other, tonight is your answer.”
The Globe and Mail has an evocative account of Chow’s own 53-year path to the mayoralty from the day she arrived in Toronto from Hong Kong at age 13.
A Climate-Adjacent Platform
As a candidate, Chow ran on an 18-point platform in which one plank, headlined climate-friendly buildings, laid out a menu of climate and energy initiatives. The plan cites buildings as Toronto’s biggest source of climate pollution, making them “critical to climate action but a huge vulnerability if we don’t act fast.”
“Many of our homes, businesses, and community spaces still rely on fossil fuels and they aren’t keeping us safe during extreme weather,” it states. “Toronto already has over 120 premature deaths per year due to extreme heat, and in the next 25 years we’ll have 60 days over 30℃ each year. Most older apartments without air conditioning don’t even provide an onsite cooling space for tenants and many are overdue to replace vital service systems.”
The plan includes:
• Maximum temperature limits for buildings, with priority for high-risk “hot spots”;
• Energy audits and retrofit financing for combined heat and power systems, with priority on older multi-unit buildings and especially those that house vulnerable populations;
• Wider use of green roofs and cool roofs to reduce heat and flooding risks across the city;
• Maintaining and strengthening the Toronto Green Standard for buildings;
• Expanding local renewable energy, battery storage, and energy retrofit projects through the municipal utility, Toronto Hydro;
• Maximizing public access to waste diversion programs.
The wider platform includes commitments to:
• Reverse transit cuts and significantly improve service to make the system safe, convenient, affordable, fast, and reliable;
• Prevent renovictions and build 25,000 new rental homes on city-owned land, including at least 7,500 affordable and 2,500 rent-geared-to-income units;
• Support renters and give them a voice at city hall;
• Urgently address homelessness in a city where hundreds of people are turned away from packed shelters each night;
• Using community benefit agreements to secure good, local jobs when the city pursues new construction projects.
High Hopes and Lots to Do
In the 24 hours after the vote, Chow’s mayoralty win drew a mostly positive reaction from people in Toronto and beyond who’ve spent years and decades working for a faster energy transition and deeper carbon cuts.
“Mayor-Elect Chow will certainly understand that we cannot choose between fighting climate change and attending to other social issues,” said Keith Brooks, programs director at Toronto-based Environmental Defence Canada. Doing both at the same time “means developing climate policies that work for everyone, including renters who cannot make decisions about the places they live in, or people who don’t own cars and depend on transit.”
While Chow’s climate platform “was a bit thin,” Brooks added, “we have every expectation that she will be a climate champion. Her record makes it clear that she gets climate change and is willing to act with conviction.”
With homes and buildings accounting for 60% of Toronto’s climate pollution, Bryan Purcell, vice-president of policy and programs at The Atmospheric Fund, said the biggest challenge in meeting the city’s climate targets will be to scale up deep energy retrofits.
“Getting on track for net-zero by 2040 requires retrofitting an average of over 60,000 homes per year, from single family through to high-rise condos,” he said. “We are nowhere near that yet, and the longer it takes to get up to pace, the faster that pace ultimately needs to be.”
Purcell called on the city to set mandatory building performance standards for existing buildings and “lead by example” with an additional $500 million per year to bring its own building portfolio, including Toronto Community Housing, to net-zero. He cast that investment as “an opportunity to renew and improve public infrastructure, create good green jobs, and improve quality of life for tens of thousands of public housing residents.”
ClimateFast Co-Chair Lyn Adamson said Chow pledged during the campaign to fully implement TransformTO and made it clear “that she understands how urgent it is to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. She knows that doing so fits very well with the housing and transportation initiatives that will make life better for Toronto residents, and she said she is impatient to get things done.”
Adamson said Chow, an experienced community organizer, “will reshape our approach to emissions reduction, climate resilience, and the energy transition,” starting from a recognition that “we will only achieve our targets by engaging the community.”
Sheila Regehr, chair of the Basic Income Canada Network (and a member of the Energy Mix Productions board), pointed to Chow’s early experience living in Toronto’s St. James Town neighbourhood, her organizing background, and her past experience as a federal MP as factors that make her “the best bet Toronto has to tackle the really big issues like the climate and affordability crises and to support people here who are often forgotten.”
‘Living Community’ Every Day
Montana Burgess, executive director of Neighbours United in Castlegar, B.C., agreed that “Olivia is in tune with much of the community in Toronto. I’ve never met someone who lives community as much as her. Every day she is working with Toronto folks to help people improve the quality of their lives. The people struggling the most are often racialized, women, gender diverse, and low-income people, and that’s who she is working side by side with and who it seems like she’s focusing her platform on.”
Burgess added that “that’s what good climate policy should do, lift up people in need while lowering carbon pollution.”
But some observers said it will take all of those strengths to get Toronto in shape to meet its climate targets.
“Toronto City Council unanimously declared a climate emergency in October 2019, over 3½ years ago, and since then the COVID-19 emergency has come and gone,” said Corporate Knights Research Director Ralph Torrie. “We have seen what a true emergency response looks like.” But “Chow’s platform is a smorgasbord of measures that do not constitute a plan and lacks the urgency and imagination needed to adequately respond to the climate emergency.”
Most of the mayoralty candidates’ platforms fit that same description, Torrie added, suggesting “we just don’t seem to have reached the tipping point in the level of concern over this issue that will allow us to close the “say-do gap” between what we say needs to be done to address the climate emergency and what we are actually doing, or in the case of politicians even promising to do.”
Toronto Councillor Dianne Saxe, a former deputy leader of the Ontario Green Party, said she was concerned about whether climate will be one of Chow’s top priorities as mayor. “On the other hand, a number of her items are climate-adjacent, and things like better transit, better bike lanes, do work for a lot of her priorities,” she said. “Her lifelong personal commitments are important, and I’m hoping to work with her for climate action as a way of addressing the other things she cares about.”
Experience in cities around the world shows that women leaders “care more about the future, care more about youth, care more about climate, care more about the long term,” Saxe added. “Those are all things we’ve needed in Toronto that have been conspicuously lacking.”
A Different Life Story
CBC says Chow’s life story “isn’t one Torontonians are used to hearing from their mayor. But it’s one that represents the city she will soon lead,” a place where 55.7% of residents are visible minorities and 46.6% are first-generation arrivals from other countries. The news story notes that all three top finishers—Chow, Bailão, and former Toronto police chief Mark Saunders, who drew 78.3% of the vote among them—” immigrated to Canada when they were young and centred that story in their campaigns.”
At a news conference the morning after the vote, Chow received and answered a reporter’s question in Cantonese, in what CBC described as a first for a Toronto mayor-elect.
Politico Ottawa Playbook notes that Canada’s “two most populous cities are now led by progressive-leaning women,” Chow in Toronto and Mayor Valérie Plante in Montreal. And that assessment leaves out Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek, a strong advocate for economic diversification in Canada’s oil and gas capital whose “first order of business” when she took office in October, 2021 was to declare a climate emergency.
