Faizul Mohee is a 40-year-old engineer who had never run for any public office prior to his run for mayor of Toronto.Marina Freire-Gormaly/Supplied
A 40-year-old engineer who came to Canada from Bangladesh, Faizul Mohee has never run for any public office. His only political experience is volunteering on others’ campaigns and contesting the leadership of professional associations. Yet he wants voters to elect him mayor of Canada’s biggest city.
“For a better tomorrow, vote for Faizul Mohee,” says his flyer, which notes that he is not a career politician but brings fresh ideas to the table. “Let’s fix the city together.”
Mr. Mohee is one of the no hopers, a collection of eccentrics, cranks, grifters, strivers, activists, idealists and egotists who are running for mayor knowing full well they have zero chance of coming out on top when Toronto votes to replace the departed John Tory in a special byelection on June 26.
They get next to no attention in the media. Mr. Mohee complains that, until now, he has rated precisely one paragraph of ink, in a CBC News survey of the candidates.
They are excluded from the broadcast debates. Most of those feature the half dozen or so contenders who have recognized names and at least some support in the polls.
Who are the candidates for Toronto’s 2023 mayoral election?
With all the fixers and spin doctors and rain makers clustering around that core group, the outsiders have to get by with the help of their friends and family. Mr. Mohee has just seven or eight volunteers to help him with his canvassing and leafletting.
They forge on regardless. A fast-talking guy with a big smile, Mr. Mohee is busily pursuing his impossible dream – knocking on doors in suburban apartment towers, visiting mosques to get out the word or posting his ideas on Twitter. He tells voters he would repair decaying public housing units and fight climate change by purchasing electric buses and installing solar panels at TTC stations. When asked why on earth he thinks he has a chance, he says simply: “I’m trying really hard.”
He is far from alone. No less than 102 candidates are running for mayor of Toronto in the byelection. Voters who went to advanced polls were handed a paper ballot the size of a dinner tray.
Some are old hands trying to steal into the limelight, like Giorgio Mammoliti, a notorious blowhard who allied himself with mayor Rob Ford during his days of infamy and who once ripped off his shirt in city council to express his dislike for a nude beach on the Toronto Islands, and Anthony Perruzza, known for his impassioned but wandering speeches at council.
Some are committed fighters for social change, like Knia Singh, a lawyer who has run for mayor twice before, and Chloe Browne, who actually did well in last year’s contest.
Some are a little hard to figure out. Blogger and director Paul Collins would “celebrate the raccoon” as a symbol of Toronto and make the city one of the headquarters of a cryptocurrency central bank. Toby Heaps, son of former Scarborough councillor Adrian Heaps, rollerbladed to City Hall to register and said he was running alongside his rescue dog, Molly, which he says would be an “honorary dog mayor.” Steve Mann (“scientist, inventor, professor … mayor”) is a champion of all things tech who “envisions a revolutionary transformation of the number system to facilitate more seamless and effective human-computer interaction,” though what that has to do with filling potholes, he doesn’t say.
Mr. Mohee himself promises both to lower the property tax by 10 per cent and hire 5,000 more city employees, a neat bit of work even for an engineer. He is not the only one who says he will cut taxes, despite a billion-dollar hole in the city budget. Edward Gong, the controversial entrepreneur who has plastered the city with his blue-and-yellow campaign signs, says he will give taxpayers a $1,000 rebate if they spend it on fixing up their houses.
It’s all a bit much for some observers of the municipal scene. To narrow the field of candidates to a more digestible size, they would raise the hurdle for running. All you need now is 25 signatures and $200, which means that just about anyone can join the contest.
But the field tends to narrow itself naturally, as it has in this round of voting, and it’s hard to see what harm is being done by having such an embarrassment of choices. It might even be doing some good.
Voter turnout in the 2022 Toronto election was a pathetic 29 per cent. People are becoming more and more disengaged from politics, from the issues, from the news – from the world, you might even say. These candidates are all in.
As odd or half-formed as their ideas might be, they bubble with enthusiasm. Many care deeply about the city and want to make it better. While most of us would hesitate to join a race we are sure to lose, they have thrown their hats into the ring, come what may.
Mr. Mohee’s supporter and fellow engineer Marina Freire-Gormaly, an assistant professor at York University, says that “he was courageous enough to put his name out there and I think that we need to give support to people who are trying.”
Just so. Good luck to Mr. Mohee on June 26.