Does Olivia Chow want to be Toronto’s mayor again?
We’re just wondering
When Mayor Olivia Chow makes announcements, such as yesterday’s launch of the 2026 budget, the journalists in attendance often shout out a question we’re all starting to ask: Does Chow plan to seek re-election this fall?
Back in December, in an interview with Now Toronto, Chow said she hadn’t decided whether to make another mayoral run. “I haven’t wrapped my head around it yet,” she said. “We have so much work to do.”
Valid! And presumably that work included finalizing said 2026 budget, which launched this week. With that out of the way, and now that we’re in the same calendar year as October’s mayoral election, journalists have continued to ask if she wants to keep her job.
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“I don’t know,” she said on Monday. “What I am focusing on is delivering an affordable and caring, safer city. I believe this is so important.”
Nominations for the election aren’t open yet, but Councillor Brad Bradford announced his intention to run way back in October. (Bradford was a candidate in the last mayoral election, finishing with two per cent of the vote.) Former mayor John Tory, who resigned in 2023, is thinking about it too, though he is said to be “on the fence” about running again, according to a Toronto Star report from last June. That’s an indecisive position as well, but shouldn’t our current mayor have a sense of whether she wants to continue working here?
Maybe she’s waiting for the snow to melt so Torontonians won’t be mad about the lack of snow removal making our streets a mess. Perhaps once the city’s new recycling program functions properly, that would be a better time to give us a hint. Or maybe she’s waiting on the Eglinton Crosstown to finally launch—three hassles she inherited, to be fair. (As we’ve previously reported, the snow removal contracts were signed by former mayor John Tory, our recycling was contracted to a private company as of this year, in an arrangement handled by the province and the Eglinton Crosstown was marred by delays long before Chow took over.)
Still, we are admittedly curious about what Chow will decide when the vibes are less off.
Related: After targeting luxury homes, Olivia Chow promises a lighter property tax hike in 2026
Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
