Toronto’s mayoral debate season kicks off with a protest, many winning lines — and one clear loser

“And so it begins...” mayoral election candidate Josh Matlow said Monday night, on a stage at the Daily Bread Food Bank, after having his record attacked by fellow candidates Ana Bailão and Brad Bradford. He smiled and mugged to the audience for several moments to let his wary amusement sink in before proceeding.

But in those few words, he might have been announcing for Torontonians that the season of election registrations has ended and the season of debates has kicked off. Let’s get r-r-r-r-ready to r-r-r-r-r-r-rumble (r-r-r-r-rrhetorically)!

With five of the six leading candidates onstage (out of the mind-bending list of 102 who have registered so far), Torontonians got their first chance to see behind the curtain (literally, as a ranting perennial candidate not invited to debate almost succeeded in pulling the backdrop down after storming the stage) and to witness how these wannabe mayors look on their feet.

I have been in the pundit game long enough to know that trying to call winners and losers in these things is hopeless — what looks sincere to me might look cloying to you, one man’s angry is another woman’s righteous determination, we might disagree based on our policy preferences whose plan sounded most well thought out or which attacks seemed most unfair.

I’ve rubbed up against this even before sitting down to write: None of the candidates looked terrible to me, but I thought, honestly, that Olivia Chow came out looking best: she seemed relaxed and comfortable, and like the only candidate on stage who was enjoying herself while the others did their best to furrow their brows and sound stern. She was speaking passionately and apparently off the cuff, often about people she knew, or about eye-level experiences such as waiting for the bus, or about her (admittedly long-ago) experience at city hall. Everyone else was shouting about math. The other candidates were aiming their remarks mostly at Chow, making the debate about her. While she sometimes seemed in need of a better answer to specific questions about specific parts of her plans, she appeared to shrug off the attacks and talk about how she plans to run the city. That’s how it looked to me.

But I’ve already spoken to other heavily engaged people who thought Chow did poorly — not enough policy specifics, not clear enough answers on how the numbers of her plans add up or whether and how she’d raise property taxes. For some, maybe there was too much excitement in her voice, making her seem extreme and unmeasured rather than passionate.

So, you know, it’s all subjective. Take these observations with a grain of salt.

But if moderate and measured was what you wanted, Bailão brought that. Maybe too much. Most of her responses and even her attacks on other candidates were offered in the matter-of-fact voice of an annoyed manager who feels the need to go over the bullet points again for the benefit of those underlings who didn’t read the memo. If her proposition to voters is of a steady, competent, experienced centrist ready to pick up the steady-as-she-goes torch from predecessor John Tory, then she got some of that across. But she didn’t seem to offer much beyond that.

Matlow did OK, getting off some lines about realistic costing and some attacks on the premier and the outgoing mayor, while conveying that he knows what he’s talking about. But he had a tendency to use city hall shorthand (for instance, repeatedly saying “RGI” to mean rent-geared-to-income subsidized housing) while going over policies in a way that might have sounded like gobbledygook to casual viewers, and he hasn’t figured out yet how to avoid sometimes coming across as a bit smug.

Bradford combined a bit of tech-bro think-fluencer dude-lingo with a kind of angry-attack line of thought — like when he repeatedly accused Chow of secretly planning to “jack taxes” and claiming people were terrified of her for it. To the extent those kind of punches hit their targets — and on my scorecard few were haymakers, though some did land enough to raise questions about Chow and Matlow’s records or plans — it’s unclear he is positioning himself to reap the benefits.

Mitzie Hunter, who has been seeing some slight upward movement in the polls recently, seemed a bit stilted. Among those on stage, she was most conspicuous in referring to notes and pivoting to preplanned talking points. She has a fun enough slogan, “Fix the Six,” but for those watching the whole debate (rather than seeing a short sound-bite clip later) it seemed more weird than endearing that she wedged that rhyme into virtually every answer she gave all night. But holding up a copy of her housing policy, she was able to get across that she had a serious plan for that serious topic.

On that topic: taking a step back, it may be most reassuring that for all the disagreement onstage, there was unanimity about the need to get a whole lot of affordable housing built as quickly as possible. That is table stakes in this campaign, clearly. And while that maybe shouldn’t be surprising in the housing-crisis climate of the city, it is a remarkable difference from a few years ago.

As I said, picking winners is hard, and subjective, but it’s difficult not to feel that the biggest loser — or at least lost opportunity — was Mark Saunders, who declined an invitation to participate. How does a man who sees himself as the leader of this city, at a time of an affordability crisis, skip the first televised debate of the campaign, on the topic of affordability, hosted by one of the largest front-line charities managing the effects of that crisis? The first step to success has gotta be showing up, right?

There’s still a long way to go before election day June 26, and a lot more debates on the way there (including two on Wednesday this week alone). Nothing is being decided quite yet, but the only chance to make a first impression is in the books.

Edward Keenan is a Toronto-based city columnist for the Star. Reach him via email: ekeenan@thestar.ca