By Napas Thein

Edited by Savannah Harlan and Alexi Guindon-Riopel

Decision-making that impacts our city goes through a rigorous process that involves multiple players, including the public service, stakeholders, and elected officials. Many important agenda items in the municipal jurisdiction ranging from alcohol in parks to new taxes to declaring homelessness an emergency are voted on by elected City Councillors and the Mayor.

Although municipal policy wonks may be able to tell you about the ongoing dynamics of each city politician, key issues, and how our local democracy is carried out, ongoing analysis of the overall voting decisions of the City Council is available but difficult to find.

In the spirit of local democratic transparency, the City of Toronto provides open datasets on the voting records of each and every one of its political representatives. These datasets help reveal not only whether representatives are clocking into work regularly, but also how they vote on issues. Understanding the voting patterns of the City Council is also important not just for democratic accountability but also for understanding how politicians make strategic decisions that impact urbanites.

Analysis of the City of Toronto voting records has been done before. The IRPP conducted a study in 2021 that revealed that 89% of staff reports in Council were approved without material amendments. Despite the drama of political debate, most decisions in city hall were being almost entirely deferred to unelected civil servants, suggesting that the positions of the civil service were more important in determining where the city was heading than the positions of elected representatives.

A look at the data reveals some interesting characteristics. By reviewing each City Council member’s voting win rate—the frequency of which their votes align with the overall decision—clusters of individuals with similar political win rates start to emerge, revealing imperfectly the various factions of City Hall.

What do we find?

City Council Members agree a lot. The range of win rates among City Council members exceeded 50% for all members, with the bulk of members within the 66-90% range of win rates.

Mayors have high win rates. Mayor Olivia Chow and Former Interim Mayor Jennifer McKelvie won council votes around 96% of the time. Chow’s predecessor John Tory had a 90%-win rate upon leaving council.

The new progressive coalition is winning. The progressive shakeup of the 2022 election of multiple new left-wing City Councillors has manifested into a winning result. New progressive Councillors, including Amber Morley, Ausma Malik, Jamaal Myers, Alejandra Bravo and Diane Saxe, cluster together with an 83-89% win rate. This does not include Josh Matlow, who has a 74% win rate.

Conservatives and centrists do not win as much. Two clusters of centrist and conservative Councillors have emerged as well.  The first cluster includes Councillors such as Michael Thompson, Paula Fletcher, Brad Bradford, Lily Cheng, Mike Colle, and Nick Mantas, with a 75-79% win rate. The second cluster includes Gary Crawford, James Pasternak, Anthony Perruzza, Vincent Crisanti, Jon Burnside, and Jaye Robinson, with a 66-71% win rate. Nearly all of these Councillors were endorsed in 2022 by former Mayor John Tory.

Stephen Holyday Does Not Win Much. A major outlier is Stephen Holyday, who has a 51%-win rate and is known well for voting against many City Council agenda items. Holyday is a strange actor in the area of Toronto city politics. He is perhaps the most conservative politician in City Council, even going as far as voting the most against conservative John Tory for being too supportive of issues such as bike lanes, patios, and modular housing.

A look at the Council’s individual agenda items and their pass rate also presents an interesting perspective. The data points in this visualization are filtered only to motion items where a vote was made to adopt an item, with or without amendments, to help simplify analysis.

What do we see here?

Exponentially more motions in City Council are supported with a supermajority of around 87-100% of Councillors in support. The contentious issues where motions were carried or failed with a small margin include issues such as:

• A Vote on Deadly Tanker Truck Crashes on Highway 401 (Failed)
• A Review of the Nomination Process of Mayoral Candidates (Failed, then Carried in another vote)
• Implementing Bill 109, the More Homes for Everyone Act (Failed)
• Improvements to the Modular Housing at 175 Cummer Avenue (Failed)
• Fine Equity: Balancing TTC Fare Evasion and Parking Fines (Passed)

Very few votes fail when it comes to adopting items. Some of the failed votes include:

• A vote on Moving Forward with a New Study on Better Options for the Gardiner East
• Mechanical Vacuum Leaf Collection Program

What are the possible explanations for a City Council with mostly uncontested decision-making outcomes? It may be a sign that the political culture in municipal affairs is more consensus-based, with members choosing to propose motions that likely have the backing of their colleagues. It may also be a result of usually dismal turnout of municipal elections creating a situation where political leaders get their way in the city without the need to stir controversy. It may also be a consequence of a lack of political partisanship in municipal affairs, which is not illegal but restricted due to fundraising and advertising rules in Ontario.

Additionally, the introduction of the Ontario Government’s Bill 3, Strong Mayors, Building Homes Act 2022 has effectively increased the powers of the Mayor of the City of Toronto to propose, veto, and override processes in the passing of the municipal budget. Mayor Olivia Chow committed during the 2023 election to not use these powers to override City Council due to its undemocratic nature (not that she needs to with a very high win rate of 96%).

Nevertheless, the option to deploy the Strong Mayor Powers is still there. Growing municipal budget pressures and calls for its use among advocates on the left to be more emboldened to reverse TTC service cuts, build more affordable housing, and cut the police budget may seem enticing.

It is unclear if voting dynamics have changed in City Hall because of this new legislation, but theoretically, it may embolden more risk-taking among her supporters on the progressive left and more concessions on the centre and conservative right.

More work should be done towards understanding and following the work of the Toronto City Council. Keeping municipal politicians in check means taking advantage of these open datasets as tools of transparency and democracy.  For those looking to explore further, visit the City of Toronto’s webpage here, download one of the various datasets, and share your findings with the policy community.

Napas Thein is a Master of Public Policy Student at the Munk School. He did his undergraduate in public policy, urban studies, and economics and is actively interested in exploring methodologically different ways of looking at public policy, particularly with regard to novel statistical methods. His policy research areas include, but are not limited to, democratic development, economic development, and global affairs.