WARMINGTON: Furey has reason to smile after strong finish to campaign
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He may not have won the job as Toronto mayor, but Anthony Furey won the respect of everyone in politics with his strong fourth-place finish Monday in the byelection.
“I feel great,” said the former Toronto Sun columnist. “This is not the end of my commitment to the city, but just the beginning.”
When you think about it, he started with no name recognition in the political world and was not included in any of the early debates, but won people over all across the city.
And he did it with a positive, clean and respectful campaign.
“I learned so much about the city,” said Furey. “It is a great city.”
He ran on a platform of keeping an eye on spending, hiring more police to combat the rising crime rate and offered solutions to replace the drug injection sites with addiction treatment centres.
While Toronto voters decided to go with Olivia Chow as mayor, the message Furey brought will now have to be on the debate table at council, which is going to have a difficult time condoning the dozens of overdose deaths in the city’s parks and streets.
Chow has promised housing to get the homeless out of the encampments and into a better life. She will need to be held to account on all of this because, as Furey believes, Toronto is just a few steps away from what has happened in San Francisco and Seattle.
If it does end up that way — with Chow’s leftist, top-down approach leading the city — then Furey will be poised to take another run for the mayor’s job in 2026.
But this time, people will know his name. They won’t be able to keep him out of the debates and they may even have to listen to him.
“He burst onto the scene, made an impact on the race and created an awareness of issues that people have been concerned about and that others didn’t want to talk about,” said fellow mayoral candidate Rob Davis, a former city councillor who threw his support behind Furey. “This was an excellent performance for his first go-round.”
Bringing in about 5% of the vote was less than what Furey had hoped for, but to have more than 35,000 votes and be ahead of sitting councillor Josh Matlow with 1,447 of 1,451 polls reporting was no easy feat and one heck of an achievement.
It was not lost at his campaign headquarters in Scarborough, where they cheered him as he entered.
He got hugs from former federal finance minister Joe Oliver and MPP Roman Baber and high-fives from his wife and three kids.
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He also got high praise from Oliver, who has been around the political block and was impressed with his effort.
“He started at 1% and got as high as 11 and was rising until John Tory threw his support behind Ana Bailao and people started to coalesce around her to stop Chow,” said Oliver. “But Anthony made his point, showed tremendous leadership on his policies and show incredible competence to a point where we will be hearing more from him in the future.”
While Furey won’t be mayor of Toronto this time, his run will be talked about and studied by candidates outside the front-running bubble for years and many elections to come.
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