Final mayoral debate held week before 2022 Toronto election

Several Toronto mayoral candidates had their final chance as a group on Monday to make their pitch to voters with exactly one week before residents head to the polls in the municipal election.

The second and final mayoral debate, hosted by the Toronto Region Board of Trade, took place Monday afternoon at The Carlu.

John Tory and his main rival, Gil Peñalosa, as well as Chloe Brown, Sarah Climenhaga and Stephen Punwasi, were asked during the 90-minute debate about how they would improve transit and transportation, increase housing, support businesses, cut red tape and processes for business operators and address budgetary pressures.

There are also 26 other candidates running for mayor (a full list with contact information can be found here).

The debate was stopped a few times due to heckling from the audience. At one point, an audience member went on stage in front of Tory and tried to question him on affordable housing.

Tory reiterated his record throughout the debate, such as improved transit fare policies, the creation of a legal process for laneway suites, the creation of a small business property tax class and online business licence renewals.

When it comes to highlights of what Tory would do if re-elected, he promised to “finish the job” and advocate municipally for the subway expansion plan put forward by the Doug Ford government, create the legal ability to build midrise buildings on transit corridors “as of right,” expand the legal ability to divide a house into a duplex or triplex and set aside land for co-operative housing.

Peñalosa took aim at Tory throughout the debate and accused him of failing on big issues like affordable housing and lacking vision.

He put forward several policy highlights should he be elected, such as the creation of new bus rapid transit lanes, protected bike lanes and sidewalks, allowing for the “as of right” conversion of homes for up to four units, creating 100-per-cent affordable housing buildings on City-owned land, and scrapping the eastern Gardiner Expressway rebuild in favour of a boulevard and repurposing $500 million from that project.

RELATED: How and where you can vote in the 2022 Toronto election, and what’s new this year

Throughout the debate, Brown called out various points made by all of the candidates on stage and advocated overhauling municipal governance and processes through technology.

Among the highlights of her platform, if elected, if elected she would work to lower all TTC fares to $1, reconfigure the TTC board to get transit workers on it, tax land in order to boost revenues, work to limit Ontario Land Tribunal appeals so development can move ahead, take a sector-by-sector look at modernizing, and automate building permit processes.

Climenhaga promoted her platform commitment to drop TTC fares for seniors before extending it to all residents and finding a different way to fund transit. She also pushed for the implementation of “low-cost rapid transit” initiatives that can be done now before the Toronto subway expansion projects are done.

Other platform highlights included taxing vacant properties, legalizing rooming houses, increasing public participation before and during development projects, dropping COVID-19 vaccine mandates, cutting the number of Toronto bylaws and introducing participatory budgeting.

Punwasi also took opportunities to call out various candidates on the stage at times. If elected, he said among his commitments would be to convert City-owned land into commercial and residential uses and use that revenue to fund transit, create revenue-neutral and purpose-built rentals on City-owned properties, establish a municipal payment processor that negotiates lower credit card processing fees for small businesses to help them reduce costs and set up a community venture fund to help foster business and innovation.

The second debate comes as numbers show advance voter turnout was down nearly 7 per cent from 2018 and down nearly 30 per cent from 2014.

The city said 115,911 voters cast early ballots during the eight days of the advanced voting period that ended on Friday.

The Toronto election will be held on October 24. Click here for what you need to know before heading out to vote.

Last week, Tory faced off against four of his competitors in a round table discussion, and as expected, he found himself on the defensive. The newly established “strong mayor” powers and the relationship with the province proved to be another point of contention.

With files from Mark McAllister, John Marchesan and Michael Ranger