Eleven years ago in this journal, Zack Taylor and Gabriel Eidelman lamented that “scholarship on the institutions, processes, practices and impacts of Canadian urban politics is anaemic” (Reference Taylor and Eidelman2010: 961), identifying four major approaches demanding further attention: institutions, regional governance, social-political governance and local-global studies. Today, their thoughtful critique has been rendered largely (and thankfully) outmoded, a development perhaps best represented by two pioneering book series: Innovation, Creativity, and Governance in Canadian City-Regions, published by University of Toronto Press; and Fields of Governance, published by McGill-Queen's University Press. Even these titles reflect the advances made in our study of city-regions, urban governance and Canadian cities’ positions in a global economy. During this maturation, however, it seems that institutional studies—those concerned with municipalities, rather than the urban—have been left comparatively underdeveloped. To be sure, a raft of exploratory articles and books on the subject have pushed the subject along, including Jack Lucas's and R. Michael McGregor's (Reference Lucas and Michael McGregor2021) recent edited collection Big City Elections in Canada, but the stuff and substance of municipal politics has proven consistently abstruse due to, among other complicating factors, the (general) absence of political parties (see Breux and Couture, Reference Breux and Couture2018) and a paucity of both electoral and voter-level data (see Couture et al., Reference Couture, Breux and Bherer2014).
Electing a Mega-Mayor sets itself the task of correcting this lacuna. Somehow, it is the first book-length study of a Canadian municipal election in over 40 years. It is animated by a pressing sense of making up for lost time and thus establishes an impressive range of goals: not only to empirically explain why voters in 2014 embraced John Tory over one-time frontrunners Olivia Chow and the Ford brothers (chapters 2 and 3) but also to elucidate the disparate coalition of “Ford Nation” (chapter 5), to better understand how voters perceive local governments (chapter 4) and to locate the insights that a party-less electoral environment may yield for political behaviour studies. The authors’ central resource is their Toronto Election Study (TES), an ambitious rolling panel survey from the 2014 campaign period (complemented by follow-up surveys both immediately after the election and in 2016). The TES is itself unprecedented, and the authors should first be commended for such a substantive contribution to the data-starved world of municipal studies.
Given its ambitious scope, the book is unsurprisingly more successful in achieving some of its goals than others. An unimpeachable success is the Ford Nation chapter, which substantiates the common narrative that Rob Ford's 2010 mayoral campaign gave sudden voice and legitimacy to a loose constellation of Toronto's most disaffected and, at the same time, offers useful cautionary nuance in characterizing both the motivations and fidelity of this coalition. Likewise, the book confirms, with novel data-driven rigour, much of what we already suspected about municipal voters in Canada: they are ill-informed about the powers and responsibilities of municipalities; and in the absence of political parties, they overwhelmingly claim to prioritize policy over personality in candidates but often fail to live up to this claim. One of the book's most interesting findings is that despite being generally well informed of candidates’ leanings and insistent that such things are important to them, voters nevertheless regularly prefer—and vote for—less ideologically amenable candidates, sometimes preferring those with radically opposed policy positions.
Where the book is less successful is in those areas where the contrast between a typical municipal election and the bizarre 2014 Toronto election cannot be escaped. This is not, it should be said, the fault of the authors: Who could have anticipated a crack video, a trip to rehab, a “pseudo-incumbent” (5) or for the remarkably popular Chow campaign to crater? Torontonians certainly paid attention: turnout was a record 54.67 per cent, more than 13 per cent higher than in 2018. This raises important questions of how generalizable TES data should be assumed to be. Did the forces bringing Torontonians to the polls in record numbers also distort their beliefs about municipal government or their knowledge of and preferences toward candidates? In at least some ways, the answer would seem to be yes (for instance, all movement in the polls occurred before the campaign period, suggesting an unusually attentive electorate).
These concerns are acknowledged by the authors but are too sanguinely dismissed. As one example, the partisan stripes of leading candidates—a New Democratic Party Opposition critic, a former Progressive Conservative leader and radio host, and the son of a Progressive Conservative MPP (and brother of Rob Ford)—were remarkably clear, but the authors nevertheless argue for these candidates being roughly nonpartisan in the eyes of voters (13) so as to make a broader case for generalizability. Elsewhere, they suggest that the 2014 election's outlier status makes it a sort of “most likely” case for theory testing, an interesting reconciliatory effort that readers may find either compelling, not entirely persuasive, or (as with this reader) both at once. In any case, by pursuing two orthogonal goals—better understanding the thousands of municipal electoral environments across the country, on the one hand, and the single most bizarre election of our lifetimes, on the other—the book occasionally struggles to maintain simultaneous traction on both fronts.
But this is a quibble common to any case study and one already being resolved as further studies come to fruition and allow for comparative development. Electing a Mega-Mayor is an ambitious and laudable contribution toward better understanding the politics of Canadian municipalities and the municipal voter. As a text, it is especially well suited for high-level undergraduate or graduate seminars: at a concise 145 pages of analysis, with a range of questions to be considered and an appropriate soupçon of unavoidable salaciousness, it offers a long-needed substantive basis for discussion of municipal elections within urban politics courses. Particularly when coupled with Big City Elections in Canada, it offers compelling proof that the same factors that have long rendered Canadian municipal politics a black box—relative public disinterest and an absence of parties—can, with the right dataset and conceptual approach, offer generative insights to electoral and political behaviour studies.
