Something strange happened in Toronto in 1969.
That year, municipal political parties were introduced to the city.
Liberals, Trotskyists, New Democrats and others pitted their candidates against each other, breaking more than a century of tradition and turning the Toronto election into a team sport for the first time.
That’s not the weird part. You can find political parties on ballots in countless global cities: Vancouver, Montreal, New York, Istanbul, Seoul and São Paulo, to name just a few.
The odd and fascinating thing about the 1969 election is that it didn’t set a precedent in Toronto, like it might have anywhere else. Instead, the local parties that spun up that year dissolved and were largely forgotten. With few exceptions, candidates for city council and mayor in Toronto have been politically independent ever since, at least officially.
That might all be changing. If history were written in verse, the 1969 and 2026 elections might be the rhyming ends of two stanzas. Some would argue political partisanship is back in the city and more influential than ever. Ascendant “municipal advocacy groups” today perform some of the key functions of a party without naming themselves as such, including drafting policy, presenting slates of candidates and recruiting volunteers to help campaign for them.
The most powerful of these outfits, Progress Toronto has, so far, helped incumbent mayor Olivia Chow and seven members of council get elected since 2022. This year, it’s facing challenges from new, competing groups that say the city could benefit from a little more partisanship. For the first time in almost 60 years, Toronto seems to be getting another referendum on political parties. The outcome could be vastly different this time.
Does Toronto hate parties?
Proponents of the party system say it helps voters by clearly denoting which of the many candidates share their values. Parties should also hold their politicians accountable, in order to preserve public image and support for the organization.
“Once a political system becomes large and complicated enough, you need political parties,” said veteran political journalist John Michael McGrath. “As a political organization, the city of Toronto today is larger and more complicated than the province of Ontario was in 1867. Parties would, I believe, make it easier for voters to know who they are hiring to run that machine.”
McGrath, who has argued that municipal advocacy groups are essentially parties already, said in absence of a partisan system, candidate name recognition ends up winning elections. This, he said, makes incumbents and former federal or provincial politicians nearly unbeatable, which doesn’t always “give us the best governance results.” Parties, he said, would be able to loudly criticize incumbents and propose alternatives.
Ontarians, for the most part, don’t think the juice is worth the squeeze at the city level. Opinion polling shows a strong preference for the municipal nonpartisanship status quo, with respondents saying they value what they consider to be a more meritocratic system that uplifts independent thinkers.
“Ontario stands out among advanced democracies in the depth and consistency of its commitment to municipal nonpartisanship,” reads a 2024 study by Canadian political scientists that surveyed thousands of Ontarians. “Across nearly all relevant subgroups of the public, antipartisan sentiment predominates.”
Still, the surveyors found that more than a third of respondents had no opinion on the matter. A pro-party politician could try to persuade these undecideds, but they would “do so in the face of a skeptical public” and incur “substantial risk” upsetting their constituents, about half of whom are “resolutely opposed to municipal partisanship.”
Local opposition is so ingrained that politicians in the city use accusations of party affiliation as a cudgel. Mayoral candidate Brad Bradford frequently calls Chow the “NDP mayor” in statements and criticizes the former New Democrat MP for retaining her party membership after becoming mayor in 2023.
But things are a bit different behind the scenes.
Federal or provincial parties ties might still be gauche for local politicians, but many would still welcome help from the special interest groups that mimic them. Progress Toronto’s founder, Michal Hay, became Chow’s chief of staff after she was elected. She’s now working on her re-election campaign. According to reporting in The Local magazine this month, Bradford privately encouraged the creation of one of the conversative answers to Progress Toronto, called ABC Toronto, after he lost the 2023 mayoral byelection. Bradford did not respond to a request for comment about this from the Star.
Where do these groups see themselves heading?
The Star asked the three main municipal advocacy groups whether they aspire to become parties. Progress Toronto said it did not and disagreed with the notion that it behaves like one already. ABC said having parties at the municipal level would benefit the electorate, but that becoming one is not its “focus.” IntegrityTO, a group that is further right on the political spectrum, said it’s “too premature” to try to legislate municipal parties now, but “we’ll see how things play out after this election.”
“Progress Toronto is an independent organization,” said executive director Saman Tabasinejad. “We don’t whip votes at council, and the candidates we support don’t run on shared messaging or a common platform.”
This month, Progress Toronto unveiled the first six candidates it would be endorsing and campaigning for this election. The group said it selects its preferred candidates based in large part on responses to a survey it sends out. Tabasinejad said it looks for people who are committed to working on “affordable housing, faster and more reliable transit, and investing in services.”
ABC executive director Kelly Aizicowitz said groups like theirs do indeed “fill some of the gaps a party system would otherwise cover,” including drafting policy and “holding the government accountable,” but even still, they operate in an activist realm, not partisan politics.
“That said, if the province allowed parties at the municipal level, we think it would make it much easier for voters to understand who to support,” she added.
IntegrityTO executive director Daniel Tate, who is also running for a seat on council, said it is “clear” that organizations like Progress Toronto have been “operating as de facto municipal parties for years now.”
“They raise money, wield influence, and actively campaign for candidates while advocating against others,” he said.
Tate’s group began as a means of advocating against the renaming of Dundas Square. It is lighter on policy than its contemporaries and attracts considerable online attention for its controversial video uploads of homeless people in crisis, which it uses as evidence that Toronto needs a better approach to public safety. Tate said IntegrityTO fills “an important gap” in the city’s political discourse by acting as “a counterweight to Progress Toronto.”
“Having more groups who can provide alternative perspectives can only be good for democracy and ensure we have more high-information voters going into the election,” he said.
The path to party status
For a group to evolve into a full-fledged party — meaning their names would appear on ballots and they could fundraise for their candidates — the province would need to change the law. Special interest groups today are allowed to spend money supporting or opposing candidates during elections, if they register with the city as “third-party advertisers,” but cannot take direction from the candidates themselves. These groups are active in peacetime, too, publishing attack ads and policy demands.
Toronto’s political party experiment
Starting a local party was easier in 1969. In fact, it happened almost by accident. For former mayor David Crombie, who co-founded the Metropolitan Civic Action Party (CIVAC), which started the partisan craze of ‘69, it was an “intellectual pursuit” that grew beyond its humble intentions.
“There was this new thing called urban affairs studies,” said Crombie, who taught it at what was called Ryerson University at the time. Across the country, he said, like-minded people, many of them urban affairs teachers, were trying to organize to solve the issues of the day.
“Most of these were attempts to try and cope with what was happening in the States. Cities on the border were dying, being hollowed out,” said Crombie. “That quickened our understanding of what we needed to do for our generation.”
Crombie and his fellows began, over years, developing policies to address the problems of the age, he said. When election time came about, they let “whoever wanted to run” on these programs put their hats in the ring.
The Liberals and NDP wanted in on the action and started their own municipal iterations. CIVAC won five seats on council — Crombie taking one — the NDP got three, Liberals got two and the League for Socialist Action got zero. The remaining 12 seats and the mayoralty went to independents.
CIVAC faded in the following years. Members rarely voted in unison. In 1971, Crombie was quoted in the Star saying, “They say the parties are in disarray now; I would seriously question whether they were ever actually in array.”
Crombie actually considered this to be a virtue, finding that caucus discipline didn’t have a role in municipal politics, where local representatives needed to be beholden to the needs of their wards first and foremost.
“The reality is, the needs of local government — those weren’t things we could deal with in terms of political ideologies,” said Crombie, who successfully ran for mayor as an independent in the next election. “We didn’t sweat the fact that there were people on council who weren’t going to be with us on some things. They were following their own understanding of their own constituency’s needs.”
Crombie said he sees a commonality between CIVAC and the special interest groups of today. He said it’s healthy for democracy to have groups assemble to advocate for themselves. Like CIVAC they give people a chance to get involved in local government.
“I think that’s about as close as you can come to the use of a political party,” he said. “Working on the philosophy of policy frameworks that people can agree on — a group of people saying, ‘We want this to happen, we’re going to work hard to participate in the proper process to achieve it.’
“That’s what it should be about.”
