John Tory says mayoral opponents planned to drag his personal life into their campaigns
“The woman I had a relationship with, I still have a relationship with,” the former mayor admitted
Former mayor John Tory issued a lengthy statement yesterday, announcing that despite months of speculation, he had decided against running in October’s mayoral election.
The statement emphasized how much he enjoyed being mayor, calling his tenure “the honour of a lifetime.”
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But further down, things took a turn. Tory explained that his decision was ultimately due to wanting to protect his loved ones from unpleasant commentary.
“I will not be running for mayor because I feel I cannot put my family and the people I care about through the inevitable attacks on me and my personal life that we’ve started to see before I’ve even announced my intentions,” he said. In the statement, he did not detail those attacks, or who was behind them.
He later appeared on Newstalk 1010, and told host Deb Hutton that his would-be opponents had started to, in Hutton’s words, “play dirty.”
“The woman I had a relationship with, I still have a relationship with,” Tory admitted, referring to the city hall employee with whom he had an affair, leading to his resignation in 2023. “The notion that my family would be hurt again… I wasn’t prepared to take that risk, for them.”
On the Toronto Today show this morning, Tory said more. “There was real concern on the part of people close to me, a couple of my kids in particular, that the events that happened years ago in my personal life—and I held myself to account by quitting my job—that the reopening of that would cause harm. I had no interest in causing harm.”
Host Greg Brady specifically named Progress Toronto as a group that intended to make Tory’s personal life a focus. (Progress Toronto is a not-for-profit political advocacy group.)
It wasn’t limited to that organization, Tory claimed, suggesting that others planned to use personal information about Tory to try and win the election, too. (In an email to Toronto Life, a representative from Progress Toronto denied the allegation.)
“Somebody criticizing my record on taxes or on housing is not going to cause any harm, to me or to anybody else. That’s part of what an election campaign is all about. But when you go beyond that, into something that was in my personal life, that to me is not relevant.”
Tory said that plenty of Torontonians approached him to encourage him to run, and said they were not concerned by the circumstances under which he resigned.
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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.
