Chris Alexander

You didn't have to actually register until m- May the 1st, but Mr. Bradford has made clear that, uh, he's wanted this job for a good long time.

And then, you know, just to sort of throw a monkey wrench into the whole thing, Chris Alexander, the former member of parliament, jumps in at the last, a- almost at the last minute, let's call it that, and, and is trying to have the kind of impact on the race that, uh, that so far he has yet to have.

And, um, and, and it's kind of curious as to why he's there.

Hmm.

Well, that's right.

You know, y- I mean, the, the way you win these races is by having a whole lane to yourself and, a- as Mayor Chow did three years ago.

And, uh, you know, Chris Alexander is sort of fishing i, in the same lake, uh, if you like, for votes as, uh, as Brad Bradford.

I know there's a technique, and, and you'll have seen it many times in the past too, where candidates, um, kind of dance around answers to questions by telling folksy anecdotes about people they've met on the hustings.

Poverty, housing, and transit were top of mind at the first mayoral debate of the Toronto election campaign.

Chris Alexander, Brad Bradford, and Olivia Chow took part in last night's debate, which was hosted by the Daily Bread Food Bank.

It covered a range of issues, including affordability and food insecurity.

We have to start with reliability.

Bradford skips debate over choice of moderator.

Mayoral candidates Olivia Chow, Chris Alexander, and Sarah McVie delivered a three-part harmony on stage Tuesday evening as they spoke of a need to increase funding to the arts sector.

At what was billed as a debate, but in the end featured little, if any, disagreement, the candidates promised to lavish the city's artists with more money and opportunities, restitution, they said, for years of underfunding.

They described such investment as a wise business decision, given the benefits the arts offer the city.

I also think that Torontonians still don't necessarily connect, I think, the decay in the city with her personally as her fault.

Are they maybe frustrated broadly with the safety, with the issues around, you know, the zombie apocalypse, uh, at Union Station at times? Yes, I think so, but I don't think they personally blame her, which is why you have maybe not quite Teflon, but there's certainly a quality to her that keeps her a bit up above of the fray of that, which is, I think, why it's so hard for, like, Bradford, and maybe to a lesser extent Alexander yesterday, to kind of land some blows to her at that debate.

You know, it's interesting to me that there are people who lean left, like John Moore in the morning and some of the, uh, people who are writing about the debate in the Toronto Star this morning, who are all saying f- "Could she please answer a question? Does every answer have to be the breakfast program?" John timed it yesterday.

I think he said it was 42 seconds in before she brought up the breakfast program.

Yeah, I heard him say that, which is interesting, right? Because typically if you're ahead, you don't want to do a ton of debates, because you don't want to give a platform to your opponents to kind of land some blows on you.

Now, there's some thought to that, right, is if you do so many they become so much noise.

The other thing is the more debates she does, the more likely that Chris Alexander gets a higher profile, which then eats into Brad Bradford's support.

So I, I think there's something to that.

Yesterday was the first time we saw the top three mayoral candidates take each other on head-to-head in a debate.

Though, I have to say that putting Chris Alexander in that top three category, I think is really misleading.

His support basically hasn't budged since he announced.

It's in the single-digit range, maybe 10%, depending on how the polling is done.

Oh, like, it's down this or that.

And I think that, uh, using an anecdote perhaps is an effort to address the fact that when you do talk about the fact that crime stats are showing quite a lot of decline, that there's an anecdote rather than a, uh, number that people might, uh, otherwise, uh, might otherwise question.

I think the greatest news in the debate is that several commentators said how great Chris Alexander was, and I'm really pleased to see that, having had to put up with Sarah Thompson, Joe Pantalone, and a whole bunch of other people as I tried to get that head-on-head with Rob Ford.

So I thought that Chris Alexander's performance was spectacular.

And I think the short answer, you just heard John Tory talk about it, and he's a man who's done more debates than any other single Canadian politician, I think, ever, is that it was fine.

It was a debate where each of them tried to do what they needed to do, each of the three contenders, Olivia Chow, Brad Bradford, and Chris Alexander.

But no one sort of excelled or punched above their weight, I don't actually think.

It was sponsored by the Daily Bread Food Bank.

And so for that reason, I thought he did well.

Don't think he slipped up.

Chris Alexander.

to me, came across as someone, even though that has not been common wisdom, including my own, that would take votes away from Olivia Chow if you don't like her, not from Brad Bradford.

And to do that, I'm gonna use a little bit of audio from last night's debate in Toronto.

The top three mayoral candidates, Chris Alexander, Brad Bradford, and Mayor Olivia Chow, all debated at the Daily Bread Food Bank.

Full disclosure, I am not a fan of Olivia Chow.

I don't understand how this woman got elected in the first place other than she had an impressive resume as a former federal member of parliament and she used to be married to Jack Layton, the former leader of the NDP.

Good afternoon, Jim.

Was the question of the night last night, Gord, who will Chris Alexander end up voting for? I thought that was the only thing that we needed to learn.

And I'm not sure we learned anything about him, although I did think he performed very well.

But I'm still not sure why he's there, Gord.