Scott Stinson: Is it too late for Brad Bradford to capitalize on Chris Alexander’s exit from Toronto mayoral race?

Chris Alexander, seen here in a 2017 file photo, has dropped out of the Toronto mayoral race, but too late to take his name off of the ballot. Photo by Dave Abel/Toronto Sun/Postmedia

Article content

Chris Alexander has said that he entered the Toronto mayoral race in part because he didn’t think that Brad Bradford could win it.

Article content

It would be ironic, then, if his brief dalliance with municipal politics ensures that Bradford does not.

Article content

Article content

Alexander, the former federal Conservative cabinet minister, ended his mayoral candidacy on Tuesday, 20 days before election day and on the first day of advance voting. His tardy departure, after consistently running a distant third behind incumbent Olivia Chow and Bradford, her would-be conservative challenger, ensures that Alexander’s name will remain on the ballot. It will also come ahead of Bradford’s, due to the incontrovertible nature of the alphabet. Will that peel away some of Bradford’s potential votes? Possibly. And in a race that should be tight now that it is down to two main candidates, that could make a significant difference.

Article content

Article content

And so ends one of the stranger political campaigns in recent memory. Alexander, was also a former Canadian ambassador to Afghanistan, represented Ajax-Pickering in the Stephen Harper government. He became best known, and not in a good way, for promoting the “Barbaric Cultural Practices Hotline” that the Harper Tories floated in the dying days of a desperate — and losing — 2015 campaign.

Article content

Article content

Alexander was an also-ran in the 2017 Conservative leadership campaign won by Erin O’Toole, but has otherwise mostly stayed out of public life, right up until he announced his bid to defeat Chow at the very end of July. This was almost universally met with confusion. Alexander had no connection to City Hall or the Toronto electorate, and he gave himself almost no time to make those inroads before the campaign was in full swing.

Article content

In announcing his departure at his campaign office on Tuesday morning, Alexander said that “our path to success, it became clear to me over this weekend, was not obvious, and perhaps not there at all.”

Article content

To this, one must wonder if Alexander had not looked at a poll until Saturday morning. He had been steadily more than 20 percentage points behind Bradford and even further back of Chow. The Alexander wave that he would have needed to turn things around hadn’t amounted to even a ripple by Labour Day, but he soldiered on, muddying up the waters for a Bradford campaign that wanted to scoop up all of the anti-Chow voters.

Article content

Article content

No groundwork, late entry, late departure: a real masterwork of political operations.

Article content

Article content

Alexander didn’t endorse either of his rivals on Tuesday, although that could come later, especially if he was being honest in his statements that removing Chow, the former federal NDP MP, was the main motivation behind his brief run.

Article content

Alexander told the Toronto Star recently that people who were “keener political observers” of the city than he was — a strange thing to confess when running to lead that city — didn’t think that Bradford could win. “I don’t think he’s the ideal candidate, but if I had confidence that Chow was on the path to being removed, I very well might not have run,” Alexander told the Star.

Article content

That sounds like someone who should be throwing his support, such as it is, behind the only person with a realistic shot at removing Chow. But, as already noted, no one would accuse Alexander of being a master tactician at this point in the process.

Article content

Bradford, not surprisingly, appealed on Tuesday for Alexander supporters to jump to his campaign, positioning himself as the only change candidate on offer. Chow, also not surprisingly, warned that the choice was now clear, between the “caring” Toronto that she leads and the “bad old days” that Bradford represents. “Cut and slash,” as she described it. “Everything falling apart,” she said. Brad Bradford as Scrooge McDuck, that kind of thing.