Episode Transcript
Antifascist Dad Podcast, Episode 50: Brad Bradford, Toronto's Mamdani Backlash Candidate
Guest: Inori Roy
Matthew Remski: Hello everyone, my name is Matthew Remski. This is Antifascist Dad Podcast, Episode number 50: Brad Bradford, Toronto's Mamdani backlash candidate with Inori Roy.
Inori Roy: I think he's a feelings not facts guy. Like that has been really the thing that has stood out to me is just this sense of he wants people to know that he cares very much about how they feel regardless of whether how they feel is a reflection of the reality in the city because a lot of the most prominent feelings, the two that I really identify in this article, are fear and anger.
Matthew Remski: You can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name and I'm on YouTube and TikTok as Antifascist Dad. And the Patreon for this show is Antifascist Dad Podcast. And subscribers there get early access to a second weekly episode. And this week, that second episode is my interview with Diana Yoon, who's currently running for Toronto City Council in University Rosedale, and it's about how she came into tenant organizing through climate work. So, that's up on Patreon right now for my generous supporters. Thank you so much for helping me keep this going, but I will be unlocking it pretty soon, like on Sunday, because the election is upon us.
And just a note for my international listeners, I do realize that I've set my focus of late on Toronto politics and this is a little narrow in relation to my show mandate, but next week I return to the big picture of fascism and antifascism with an interview with Max Haiven about his brilliant new book, The Player and the Played: From Gamed Capitalism to 21st-Century Fascism. Now, this book is open access from MIT, so you can even download it and read it in advance of our interview. So, I'll put that link in the show notes where you will also find a link to my own book, Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times. So, every once in a while, the journalism stars align to offer a strong political intervention at the right time. And that's what's happened with the skills of Inori Roy crossing paths with Brad Bradford starting in 2022 when she noticed that he was doing interesting work on the traffic safety file she was reporting on.
At the time, he'd been councillor of my ward 19 of Beaches East York since 2018. Now, that reporting foothold let her track his progress for years through a failed mayoral bid in 2023 and then also a seeming personality change which somehow transformed into political capital as a right-wing populist. And this is the figure that Roy puts under the microscope. She draws on interviews with former staff, council colleagues, constituents, former allies, and a grad school friend. There's three former staffers whose accounts Roy checked against messages from the time, and they all allege that Bradford yelled and swore at employees until some of them cried. Two of them say that he called female councillors b****.
They also describe a kind of gym bro office culture of, you know, him giving briefings or taking briefings from his exercise bike where he's talking about needing big dick energy to put his mandate forward and also holding these group sessions in which he's disparaging opponents including constituents. And Bradford and his campaign took these allegations by email from Roy and didn't deny anything. A current staffer who defended him was later identified as his deputy campaign manager right now and a former staffer the campaign offered as a source declined to speak once he heard the allegations. Now on the record, Toronto councillors Gord Perks, Paula Fletcher, and Alejandra Bravo describe bullying from him and a marked personality change after he decided to run for mayor. MPP Mary-Margaret McMahon, who endorsed him in 2018, now says he is not who she thought he was.
Constituents and tenant organizer Ryan Endoh describes neglect of ward 19 including years in which he did not respond to complaints about the worst landlord situation in the country at 500 Dawes Road. This is a property that I talked about with Jennie Worden in a previous episode. Roy also documents Bradford's flip-flops on police funding, bike lanes, and the renaming of a downtown Toronto square, and spotlights how his campaign team is drawn from the networks of Pierre Poilievre and Doug Ford. In Bradford, Roy sees a candidate whose politics appear driven more by contempt for opponents than by any conviction. And now he's running a close second to the incumbent Olivia Chow in a race that anyone watching for signs of socialist possibility in our time on the municipal level in the wake of Mamdani should pay attention to for lessons in what it takes to detect and also beat latent and manifest fascism. Now, Chow has a progressive background in the NDP's neoliberal era.
She displays just basic human empathy. She works for the right things in terms of housing and social care and progressive taxation, maybe not always forcefully enough. There are backslides. There are regressive compromises on police funding and restrictions on anti-genocide protests through Toronto's so-called bubble zones, which are ostensibly meant to protect synagogues but have the effect of suppressing pro-Palestinian protests especially when those synagogues are hosting real estate events to market properties in the West Bank. Chow is also hamstrung by reactionary legal frameworks imposed on Toronto over the past 30 years that have centralized administrative power to the province while downloading social commitments to the city. And this has set up this perpetual class war between anti-woke suburbanite homeowners and downtown renters getting bled dry if they're not in tenant unions. And this is a ripe situation for a right-wing populist to emerge and surge forward.
Now, I can confirm Roy's coverage, or at least part of it, by noting that almost everyone I know here in Ward 19 hates this guy. He really does ignore calls, emails, tenant issues, road works. He always seems to be running for the next office. I don't think he's going to stop at mayor. But the most important thing in my view at this point in time, with manifest fascism to the south of us and some polite fascism energy now in Ottawa, Roy says that Bradford has decided to campaign on fear and anger over the alleged decline of the city. And this too is part of an old right-wing grift. In his first term, Bradford voted with former mayor John Tory over 90% of the time to push through austerity measures, starving the city's social programs. And that's the play: you starve out the commons and then you blame results on the left. And accordingly, online Bradford fans can't stop talking about Olivia Chow being a Chinese communist. So, he's rubbing shoulders with outright racists.
In March, he co-signed an attempted legal injunction against a pro-Palestinian parade, saying it was a hatefest. He's expressed thinly veiled contempt for the unhoused. He wants to hire a thousand more cops. He wants to corporatize the public water system and build more data centres. Oh, and he's been using an Israeli AI app to flood comment sections with propaganda. So, here's my conversation with Inori Roy about her excellent work on this rising right-wing populist, and at the end, I'll add a few more thoughts.
Matthew Remski: Hello, Inori. Welcome to Antifascist Dad.
Inori Roy: Hi, Matthew, thanks so much for having me.
Matthew Remski: Well, first I have to congratulate you on this incredible piece in The Local. It's a real public service to offer such a robust profile of someone relatively unknown, but also who's quickly gaining a lot of momentum in this mayoral race. When did you start working on this piece? And was it hard to nail down corroboration, fact-checking, and legal all in time for like what, two weeks out from election day?
Inori Roy: Funnily enough, in some way, this profile has been in the works since the last municipal election because that's when I first noticed Brad, because I interviewed him for a story about road safety in which it was an investigation about road safety improvements in the city and which councillors were doing the best job basically, and he actually came out on top. So I spoke to him in that context, didn't think twice about it. He seemed really nice at the time actually. And then in the 2023 municipal election he pops up again because he's running for mayor, and in doing so is completely different than he was even just a year prior. And so I knew then, especially given the scale of his failure—he had I think 1.28% of the overall vote, fewer people voted for him in that election across the whole city than had voted for him in his own ward the year prior, which is an astounding loss. And so I knew then that he was going to try again because he was so aggressive in his campaign. And so then it was just a matter of waiting. You know, I was interested in what his political shift represented about the moment that we're in right now. I think he's a symbol of something bigger than himself. And so, it was just about sort of biding my time. And also, I actually have never written a profile before. I've always wanted to. I knew that this would be the one. And so, in some ways, it's been in the works since 2022 and 2023, but I've also just been working on it since June essentially and a lot of that started with just chasing their campaign and asking them to give me access to their media list. So ever since those first emails being like "hi I'm covering him, will you arrange an interview" and then following up 8 million times before they said yes, it's been a process since then.
Matthew Remski: So we'll get to that bigger thing that you believe his particular political arc is pointing to. But let me just talk about your method first because I just read this article yesterday and then I reached out to you. But then in researching your work, I realized that along with Tai Huynh, you're responsible for basically the main public knowledge we have around how when nursing home management in Ontario is outsourced to third party contractors, whether the home is private or public, the injury and death rates rise. And I get that your method really is kind of as a data-first journalist. And so is that fair? And why is that? Like why do you start with the numbers?
Inori Roy: Yeah. So, I actually have a background in investigative journalism. I have a master's degree in investigative journalism. And I think that data provides you with a really strong foundation to be able to speak to people who don't already agree with you. Um, because you can argue the question of like, on principle, should we privatize or not privatize, and people will inherently feel that you're on a particular side of the argument and therefore aren't worthy of engagement. But I think when you just give people the numbers, if they're in good faith, then they have more of a reason to pay attention, to sit up and listen. And I think a lot of our journalism fails to do that in this country, actually. We have an incredibly weak investigative journalism wing of the industry. And it's because it's the work that takes the most money and the most investment, and we're just not willing to do that. And also, it's the most conflict-ridden because you're really confronting the idea that something might not be true or that something might be very wrong when you choose to look at the data and the numbers behind it. And I think we're very cowardly and we really take a step back. We pull our punches all the time as an industry. When you look at our investigations compared to investigations in the States and in the UK, there's a profound difference for no reason other than we have this sort of culture of non-conflict and non-confrontation. And so I like data because it allows you confrontation with the most robust evidence. And so yeah, a lot of my work is data-first, and the data is never the endpoint. It's always the means to the end because the end is always the human stories that we're telling. But data is a really excellent way to get there.
Matthew Remski: You know, the investigative journalism that I've done is all in stories of spiritual abuse within cultic communities and I don't get to start with data. I get to start with stories which are sometimes at the level of the whisper network or they're sometimes allegations that are made online and then they're dropped or they disappear or things like that. And so there's something about what you're able to do that I can really appreciate because I'm already at the starting point of the work that I've done in a conflict zone with regard to who is to be believed and whose side are you assumed to be taking when of course, if you're doing a report on abuse, you are taking a survivor's perspective for the most part if you're doing it well. And so, you don't really have a lot of numbers to back you up to start with, right? And so, I really appreciated that you're able to seize on this for this work.
Inori Roy: Yeah, it's tough. Not every investigation can have data. That's completely right. And actually, as a country, our data infrastructure is also terrible. So even just in the kinds of stories that I get to do, there's so many obstacles, but there's so much value in both. I just wish we actually had a level playing field where we had more of both and more data in our investigations.
Matthew Remski: Well, also money because to be frank, I haven't done one of these in a long time because the freelance money for that has dried up. Like you know, I did a couple of pieces for The Walrus, I did some things for other online publications, but then it's just very very difficult to get funded for an investigation. But the other thing that I wanted to ask about the data approach is that I feel like with a story like the Bradford story, it gets at the Achilles heel of the austerity propaganda which is always touting the numbers of saving costs, until you start to look at what's actually being saved and for whom. Like, is that fair?
Inori Roy: Yeah, I think that there's a real question of who do we believe when they tell us that we're saving money or that this particular policy strategy is the right approach. I think that in a lot of daily news reporting there isn't enough of a willingness to push back against what we're being told in the moment. And so being able to look at the numbers on something—which I actually didn't get to do that much in the story, but even looking at Brad's plans for Toronto Water or looking at his idea of a line-by-line budget audit—there are so many things where you can't take the proposal at face value. There needs to be some kind of critical engagement with that. And so I think data allows you to do that a lot. The thing that was tricky about this one is that there's actually, besides the main thing that you could say as a data framing for the story—the ability to look at what he's proposing now versus what his votes were even just a few years ago—I think that was one of the key things that allowed me some tangibles to point to. But a lot of what we were looking at with Brad was starting from a gut instinct. And so this is actually probably the furthest I've ever been from data reporting in the sense that this was really a question of starting with, "okay he engenders this feeling among his constituents, his supporters, his former staff and colleagues, so let's talk about those feelings and what they might reveal and what they might mean". So in some ways very far from where data has taken me before.
Matthew Remski: But you do open with a data punch-up, which is you open with this meeting in July which is a discussion of the perception of rising violence against homeowners and people thinking that they need to go out and get their gun licenses because break-ins and car thefts are increasing. And then you basically say but actually no they're not. And then you go into the actual falloff of violent crime during the Chow years. And so I don't know, I think you're saying you're getting farther away from maybe the data that you had to navigate while you were working on nursing homes, but you still put that front and forward at the top.
Inori Roy: That's so true. The principle is still there. And the truth is I don't understand why this shouldn't just always be in every story we do about crime in Toronto: that the feelings about crime are completely different than the facts about crime in this city. And the crimes that have been rising have, funnily enough, when you look at the police data, a lot of those crimes have been going up since 2014, which is when John Tory came into office. And so the Bradford campaign's insistence that this is a Chow problem is actually so actively negligent of the facts of when we've seen crime rise and also about what Chow inherited as a mayor in terms of the state of the city and the kinds of crises we're experiencing post-pandemic. There's a real negligence in the media when we don't put those figures at the top of these pieces about crime.
Matthew Remski: I'm just thinking about the incentive for the journalist who doesn't think clearly enough about this, who thinks that the story of that meeting at that town hall in July is the feeling in the room and that you want to actually foreground or accentuate how Torontonians are feeling because you know that's where their real humanity lies, when the fact is that the feeling can be manipulated for blatantly political purposes, and then where are we? Do you see that in the industry of people who really want to grasp onto the human emotion—maybe it's more clickable online when they produce their reports, who knows?
Inori Roy: I think it's a couple of things. It's definitely grabby. Maybe it's easy because readers like to see themselves represented in pieces. And so to have a reader read a story where it's like, "Oh, the city feels so unsafe," and they're like, "Me too, I am also afraid of people who are visibly doing drugs on the street". There's like an inherent sort of lack of empathy to the fear-based approach, I think. And so I think maybe it's that sort of complacency and the interest more in readership than in truth and accuracy. I think it's also a matter of the austerity within the industry itself. There's a real dearth of time and freedom. There's a real sense of "oh you're going to lose people with every line so you have to be really tight and keep it really short". Obviously as a magazine writer those are not the principles that guide my work. But in the Toronto Star they're turning around several articles a day, covering a bunch of things happening in real time, and there isn't the time to go away and spend an hour or two looking at the Toronto Police database, taking screenshots of every chart across every different variable and looking at how things have changed over the years. And so there's a dearth of interest and also just a lack of resources to be able to do that work and a failure to see it as prudent and essential to the reporting. And I think this is a chronic Canadian journalism problem.
Matthew Remski: So let's turn to the article itself. How would you, in the broadest terms, describe Brad Bradford's current political instincts—and I'm not using the word plan here for a reason—but just his instincts?
Inori Roy: I think he's a feelings not facts guy. Like that has been really the thing that has stood out to me is just this sense of he wants people to know that he cares very much about how they feel regardless of whether how they feel is a reflection of the reality in the city because a lot of the most prominent feelings, the two that I really identify in this article, are fear and anger. A lot of those can be channeled towards one person, can be channeled towards Olivia Chow and her tenure. And I think that there's an instinct to look at the city and say, "I know you're so scared and you're so distressed, and let me find the simplest possible answer for that," which is that one leader has made a series of bad decisions, as opposed to recognizing the profound complexity of everything that's happening and the way that it's tied in with a chronic 30-year deterioration of public services due to austerity and budget cuts, and a relationship with the province and federal government that isn't actually serving the city, and the sort of social alienation that came with the pandemic. There's so many factors to consider that don't fit into political soundbites. And so I think he's really a guy who's like, "well, forget the complexity, forget the nuance, let me focus on just making people feel good, like assuaging that panic that they're feeling". And I think that's really the thing that's ruled his campaign so far.
Matthew Remski: Well, the concern is for how certain people feel, right? Because there's one very complex topic you don't touch in your report, and I think that's the theme of Islamophobia. Back in March, he joined Doug Ford and councillor James Pasternak in seeking an injunction to stop the Al-Quds Day parade, which he called a hatefest associated with violence. These are not true things. And this was particularly galling to me given that as my own Ward 19 councillor he represents about 10,000 of my Muslim neighbours here and he's also leaning into the "anti-Zionism is antisemitism" attack on the anti-genocide movement. Do you think this is working for him? Do you think that appealing to certain feelings of certain populations is just more efficient than appealing to everybody's feelings?
Inori Roy: It's interesting because I've wondered this myself because he has really leaned into the pro-Israel part of the city, which is a population that is specifically folks who are Zionist and who believe that anti-Zionism is antisemitism and who are vociferously supportive of Israel. And also feel that Palestinian protests in support of Palestine in the city shouldn't be happening, that the protests themselves are a hateful act, which is obviously not true. There's a really profound support for Brad among that particular community. There are also people I know who are more conflicted because they feel that Olivia Chow has failed on the rates of antisemitic hate crimes that are reported to the police. And it's obviously an incredibly complicated set of dynamics to bring into the local political sphere. And Brad was one of the key proponents for pushing the bubble zone bylaw, the idea that protest should be restricted, specifically because they didn't want to allow pro-Palestine protests in places where people felt that they were targeting synagogues, and in some cases, the location of those protests was actually because there was a pro-Israel event happening there. So, there's a lot of nuance and complexity that's missing.
Matthew Remski: Not just a pro-Israel event, but in some cases, real estate auctions or real estate events to sell off parcels of land in the West Bank that are probably or actually illegal. And so, that gets conflated with some sort of attack on a place of worship. So, do you have this sense that the feelings of Zionists within Toronto are just more legible, louder, and that's where the traction is, whereas I don't see him express any particular listening or affinity to our Muslim neighbours here in Ward 19?
Inori Roy: I think "legible" is a really good way to put it because it's easier to break those arguments down into big feelings and present them as big feelings. To someone who is completely ignorant on the subject, saying "our religious sites are being targeted by protesters" is a big incendiary thing to say. The truth is though, I think that Brad has had a lot of success among the pro-Israel anti-protest community—this very specific niche community—but it's also a really small population of the city. It's really important not to make the presumption that all Jewish people in the city support him. Actually, when I went to the safety town hall, I was very discreet because they weren't communicating with me or putting me on their press list, so I just walked in and they didn't know I was press right off the bat. And I could hear people coming in and signing up saying, "Oh my god, you're the only candidate that any Jew in the city will vote for". And there were these really big generalizations being made. And I think it's important not to do that. When I've been to pro-Palestine protests, it's really important to recognize the contingent of anti-Zionist Jewish people in the city who are concerned about the kind of rhetoric that Bradford has been pushing. So the truth is, I don't think that the average voter is going to be swayed by this particular issue. I think it's a niche argument that's really working for a particular set of people, but I don't think it's going to be the thing that clinches the election in any meaningful way.
Matthew Remski: I want to back up and turn to this mystery of how did he become who he is now and whether or not there's an early indication of this right-wing slide. Most people knew Bradford back in 2018 as a cyclist and bike lane advocate, but not exactly the Olivia Chow with Jack Layton on a bicycle built for two type of guy. You write the following: "In the earlier years there was a puerile bro-y energy in the Bradford office. The staffers say—these are staffers that you spoke to, you gave pseudonyms to—Bradford would change into his cycling kit and get on his exercise bike in the office. They say sometimes having staff read him prep notes while he worked out. Jessica and another staffer, Tim, also a pseudonym, both recall him employing the term BDE, big dick energy, a slang term that captured the public imagination for a hot minute in 2018 when he wanted his staff to pursue something aggressively. They say he would frequently do things an employer doesn't usually do: ask about people's love lives, share personal details, pal around with the staff." So, we go from the cyclist who advocates for cycling lanes to the guy working out in his office talking about BDE with his staff. Does this indicate a turning point or a sign of how his public persona begins to morph into this other thing?
Inori Roy: I really have tried to find the answer to that. I don't have an empirical answer. All I have is my analysis from having spent way too much time thinking about this person at this point. But my sense is that in the early years, Brad was internally in the office really struggling to figure out how to feel like a young person who was in line with his colleagues and employees, and also like a leader. One of the staffers I spoke to said, "we kind of have seen him grow up in the last eight years," because he would have started around 32, as he's now 40, which is incredibly young to be in office. And so I think a lot of that bro-y stuff is really a guy who's like, "well, I'm one of you, but also I'm really not," and not recognizing that as an employer, especially as a city councillor, you now have an incredible responsibility to be respectful to your employees because you're in a role of power that's even bigger than the average boss. So that's a lot of what you see in those early years. In terms of his transformation, I really think that the anger that we talk about in the story and the public anger that we see post-2023 mayoral failure are two parts of him that have a strong relationship. If he didn't have anger issues internally even before the mayoral run, then he probably wouldn't be conducting himself this way now publicly. We hear allegations of screaming and yelling and making people cry in the office that started much before the 2023 mayoral run. And so I think the transition to having that alleged anger make itself known publicly is that 2023 loss. Not being endorsed and not winning—he's a notoriously competitive person—clinched his desire to want to do this again and to do it very aggressively. And the politics is in some ways a byproduct of that because he knew that there was a niche that wasn't being filled in the city: after Tory left, there's no significant conservative personality who takes up space in city politics. A lot of the most conservative city councillors you see are also the ones who attract the least attention.
Matthew Remski: Yeah.
Inori Roy: Thinking of someone like Pasternak or Holyday. These are not charismatic figures who could be mayor. If you said James Pasternak to the average person, they'd be like, "who are you talking about?" And so if I had to venture a theory, people have told me he saw a gap that could be filled and molded himself accordingly, so my instinct is to go in that direction.
Matthew Remski: So I have a theory from my work on conspirituality and tracking the rise of the manosphere and the eruption of conspiracy theories. The BDE thing stood out to me because it started as a gender-neutral term in pop culture—applied to Pete Davidson, but also to Rihanna—and Bradford seems to be using it in a manosphere way to describe domination. Is he growing up in office while listening to Joe Rogan, Huberman, or other red pill characters? Do you get this manosphere or Barstool Sports sense from the culture you observed?
Inori Roy: I have no idea what he's listening to. I wish I had some insight into his interiority. I would have loved to spend more time with him and just ask, "What do you like? What do you do for fun?" So I cannot speak to what he listens to. What I can say is that seeing the people who showed up to the safety town hall in support of him, a lot of the older people were property owners concerned about their cars, but a lot of the younger people were young men, young dads, who were really good at talking in these reactionary politics terms and terms of fear, talking about people doing drugs on the subway. I wouldn't be surprised if there was an occasional Barstool Sports guy in there, though Joe Rogan might be a step too far.
Matthew Remski: Joe Rogan is the first step actually in my world.
Inori Roy: You think so?
Matthew Remski: Oh, 100%.
Inori Roy: I'm in my wonderful cushy liberal bubble.
Matthew Remski: Yeah, he's the acceptable one. 100%. Yeah, that's fair. And it's very good that you don't know what is on his podcast server, because I have way too many speculations. You do such a good job handling his inner life in your article, where you write: "Many of the better traits Bradford projects outwardly make him a natural fit for political leadership. In fact, it's puzzling to me that he doesn't mine his inarguably compelling personal history to build a public persona with more layers to it. Even the story behind his full name, which is in fact Bradford Bradford—he was named for his mother's last name, but then changed his own last name to match hers after his parents split—is a humanizing detail that could engender sympathy from voters." And then you go on to say that after this split between his parents, it involved his father's mental health and substance disabilities, which Bradford won't say much about. He seems to be guarded about this. Do you think leaning in would complicate this emerging robust or virile persona?
Inori Roy: Honestly, I have no idea. I know that's a dissatisfying answer. The reason I was so interested in that part of his persona was because this is stuff that I've experienced in my own life—I have a similar story about my own father, and I'm an open book about it. It's so interesting to me that he has this wall up and does not want to talk about that part of his life. I don't know if it's because it complicates his political messaging, because I actually think for a certain audience, if he led with that when talking about his drug policies—which are focused on mandatory treatment, which most scientists and doctors say is not the way to approach addiction treatment—there is a population that would say, "well this guy knows what he's talking about, he's lived it and seen it in his own life".
Matthew Remski: I didn't think of that angle, which is that it would actually support the carceral view. Like, "most people we hear from who have stories about addiction in their families take a kid-gloves approach, but you're saying my dad f***** up and I know how to deal with people like my dad".
Inori Roy: If I was his political strategist, that's probably what I would have told him too. Putting myself in the shoes of someone running that campaign, I would certainly lean into it more.
Matthew Remski: Yeah.
Inori Roy: When we talk about political strategists in his inner circle, it's hard to know whether they're listening to Joe Rogan or focusing on the manosphere—they're probably one step removed from it—but we do know they are Poilievre folks in Pierre Poilievre's political network, and Doug Ford people. So even if we can't understand the media landscape influences, we know his Canadian north stars and the people influencing him in that way. That gives us a little bit more of an interior look into where he might be getting his advice and beliefs from.
Matthew Remski: Speaking of the consultant class, there is one indication you flagged that might suggest he has not fully explored his final form, which is that even Nick Kouvalis seems to hate Bradford's guts. For listeners who don't know, Kouvalis has been the political hack at the heart of many Canadian right-wing campaigns. He's not as smart as Steve Bannon, but that's where he'd love to be. Did it stand out to you that even Nick doesn't like this guy?
Inori Roy: Totally. I think that rift within Toronto conservatives is really interesting. You've got the Kouvalis faction, and we don't know what John Tory's relationship with Bradford is. Tory didn't endorse him in 2023 when Brad was younger and more inexperienced. I've always wondered whether Tory knew what Brad is like behind closed doors and had concerns about his leadership. No one replied to me, though I would have loved to interview them. Brad's trying to figure out which kind of conservative is willing to stand up for him, because Doug Ford does not seem to like Brad Bradford—he gave that wink-wink nudge-nudge endorsement of Olivia Chow and then walked it back. So Brad hasn't got traction there, nor has he gotten a John Tory endorsement yet. There's a real question of where he fits in among these centre-right people, and that's been a struggle for him.
Matthew Remski: Is that a function of him not having much of a legislative record? Maybe Tory and Kouvalis don't actually know what he's going to be for.
Inori Roy: He actually does have some performance track in his time as councillor—he's done some interesting things and he's hardworking. It's actually more that he's a bit of a wild card personality-wise. What Nick Kouvalis previously said is that Brad hasn't been loyal enough to Tory, because Brad has criticized John Tory at certain points. Among progressive and conservative critics, there's a sense that Brad's not loyal enough to the people who got him into this—Paula Fletcher noted he wasn't loyal to Jennifer Keesmaat, and Kouvalis noted he wasn't loyal to Tory. It's this wild card factor where you can't quite figure out where he's going to be in terms of temperament and politics that shapes those relationships.
Matthew Remski: One thing that is not a wild card in the personal profile you provided, and which will resonate with a lot of folks, especially women, are these accounts of him yelling at and berating especially women to the point of tears, as well as calling fellow women councillors b****. Many of us know that guy. But as a millennial guy, it seems more transgressive. In reaching out for statements, you got people on record saying Brad isn't like that at all. In these abuse of power stories, there are always defenders. Did you feel these defenses of Brad's behavior—which Brad himself did not refute or deny—were in earnest, politically motivated, or both?
Inori Roy: It's probably both. I learned so much in that process. I sent them a long list of allegations from former staffers, giving them the opportunity to comment. Initially I got an angry email from a spokesperson, and the next day two current staffers, one former staffer, and one supportive current MP/former councillor called me up. Cold calls from people I did not reach out to, after I gave the campaign the allegations. As journalists, if a staffer says one thing and another says "that wasn't my experience," out of fairness we include both. None of them said "Brad would never yell at his staff," but they said they hadn't heard him use the term b**** or be inappropriate in the workplace. About the yelling, they said, "does he yell sometimes? Yes, but he's not yelling at people". What does it mean to be an employer standing in your office yelling at a room where no single person is supposed to be the target? You can frame it as "he doesn't yell directly at people," but he's still yelling and swearing in an office, which is not a good trait for an employer. So there was no outright denial of that.
Matthew Remski: Do you know who uses that rationalization? People describing an alcoholic father who they want to say is just angry and dealing with their own issues, not directing it at anybody.
Inori Roy: Yeah, and the workplace is the least appropriate place for that. I cannot imagine yelling at someone below me or being yelled at by my boss. One source asked, "you guys don't yell at The Local?" and I said no. She said, "it must be a really relaxing workplace," and I said, "it's a newsroom, it's pretty stressful, but we just don't yell at each other". Neither of the people who spoke to me mentioned at the time that they were part of his campaign. Only after the fact did I check and find out the first person who called me was his deputy campaign manager. The second person is in photos of him campaigning and didn't respond when I asked if she was part of the campaign. They also had a former staffer contact me who, when I laid out the allegations, said, "You know what? Actually, I'm not going to be able to speak to you for this story". That's a very illustrative anecdote.
Matthew Remski: I agree. Letting the facts speak for themselves is very effective. Returning to how this turn happens, you write: "In my conversations with former Bradford staffers and with his colleagues on council, I've been searching for a particular turning point, a catalyst that helped form the Bradford we recognize today, or even a clear answer on when that transformation really happened. No single answer emerges. It's not just that Bradford is distinctly more right-leaning now than he was a mere four years ago. Perhaps more importantly, it's that he today appears to be driven not by an enthusiasm for the policies he's advocating for, but by a contempt for the ones he's advocating against." Also, professors Dennis Raphael and Toba Bryant wrote an op-ed stating: "The goals of right-wing populism are often obscure, undeveloped, often contradictory, suggesting that right-wing populism is not about ideas at all, but rather a cynical political strategy employed by opportunistic politicians to gain power and employ it in their own interests." Does that resonate with your reporting?
Inori Roy: Yeah, it really does. It brings up the concept of municipal populism happening locally. I think Brad now probably thinks he's right and has bought into what he's selling, but his urgent desire to win plays into that. Everyone can tell he wants to be mayor so bad, and that's a dangerous motivation when running for public office because it colours what you're willing to do. It's hard to square how he genuinely reconciles who he presented himself as four years ago versus today. To want power this much is unsettling.
Matthew Remski: Four years is not that long, but during the height of the pandemic, many people became politically activated in different directions. Listening to you describe this desire pokes at some old anarchist stuff in me—anybody who wants power that much, you've got to stay far away from. Olivia Chow seems much more like a reluctant public servant.
Inori Roy: I feel the same way. You should not desire power in this way; you should have the skills and reluctantly be nudged into it. To want it this much is unsettling.
Matthew Remski: Be dragged kicking and screaming. Last question: I'm going to title this episode "Bradford: Toronto's Mamdani Backlash Candidate." Do you think that's fair?
Inori Roy: Well, the fact that Brad isn't willing to employ a lot of the things that made Mamdani's campaign so successful is very telling. There's a distinct lack of joy in it, a lack of love for the city. Halfway through his campaign he started saying "Toronto is not broken, it's stuck," attempting to get away from constantly denigrating the city. We've seen success with Mamdani because he elicits incredible joy in people, and I wonder if Brad's lack of that is going to ding him at the polls. He lacks a positive vision.
Matthew Remski: Get back on the bike, eat a shawarma, let it run down your cycling shirt.
Inori Roy: Exactly!
Matthew Remski: Inori Roy, thank you so much for the work that you did on this. I hope it really informs people for October 26th.
Inori Roy: Thank you so much, Matthew. It was such a joy to bring this story to life.
Matthew Remski: Now, as you can see, Roy is meticulously fair as a journalist who avoids all speculation. I just could not do that—I am a jaded cynic whose brain melted by covering the manosphere during COVID. Here's my speculation on what Bradford voters are getting: a fitness bro who feels a lot more than he understands and who may learn his politics in the same way Joe Rogan does, through audience capture and a desire to alpha dog over everybody else. He's only 40 years old and early in his bro-fluencer arc. His origin story of an absent ill father and single mother reminds me of Scott Galloway, who praises his single mother while doubling down on reactionary anti-feminist policies.
I voted for Olivia Chow in early voting not because she's perfect, but because she'll slow down the flood. Capital wants Bradford, but capital didn't want Mamdani in New York City. How did Mamdani win? Ground game and messaging. Chow has both, but her campaign is trending a little liberal and betting on the centre rather than getting aggressive against what Bradford really stands for. Turnout will decide it on October 26th, and we can't let this guy accelerate the Ford and Carney right-wing wrecking ball. Thanks for listening everybody, take care of each other.
