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Olivia Chow stood on the stage at the mayoral debate hosted by the Daily Bread Food Bank and said that Toronto is living up to its full potential. One statistic from Daily Bread’s annual report shows just how wrong Mayor Chow is.

Since Olivia Chow came to office in 2023, visits to food banks across the city are up 47% and came in at 3,760,888 client visits .

Now, if we are being fair to Mayor Chow, she can’t be held responsible for all the policies and factors that led to such a massive increase in food bank use. What her answer tells us, however, is that on this front, as on so many others, Mayor Chow is willing to accept a city in decline.

We as voters should not be willing to do so.

Chow is running on a promise to build an “affordable, safe and caring city.” She and her campaign will tell you all the things she has done to take us there. In fact, based on her answer, there’s nothing left to do.

The city Toronto used to be

Chow said “the crime stats are down” during the debate Monday night. This is the talking point from Chow and her NDP and far-left supporters who want to defund the police: crime stats are down, so you don’t need to worry about it.

And yes, if you just compare crime stats to last year, then they are down, but Toronto’s crime stats for last year are still much higher than the 10-year average.

Toronto Police Service consistently tracks 10 major crime indicators such as assault, assault with a weapon, motor vehicle theft, robbery and sexual assault. In 2025, they logged 43,046 such incidents, which is down from the all-time high of 49,692 in 2023.

The three worst years on record have all happened under Chow’s watch.

Now go back over the last 10 years and you see how badly things have changed.

There were 3,285 auto thefts recorded in 2015 and, in 2025, 7,363 cars were stolen in Toronto. Chow would record that as a decrease because the number spiked even higher in the years in between.

Assaults are up almost 40% over the last decade, reported sexual violations have increased by 46% in that time, and thefts over $5,000, which don’t include autos, have effectively doubled.

Where are Mayor Chow’s priorities?

Pipes, needles and failed policies

Handing out millions of dollars’ worth of drug paraphernalia branded with city logos. Between 2021 and 2025, the city handed out 2.34 million meth pipes, 3.45 million crack pipes and 14.92 million syringes.

On average, that’s almost 700,000 crack pipes handed out each year, just shy of half a million meth pipes and close to three million syringes.

The claim is these programs save lives.

The hard evidence doesn’t back that up. Opioid overdose deaths in Toronto continued to climb even as the city handed out more drug tools and expanded its so-called safe-consumption sites.

It was only after the province pulled funding for these failing sites and pivoted toward treatment for addiction that opioid overdose deaths fell in a significant way. Chow opposed the province’s move and, in fact, backed the decriminalization of all drugs in a letter sent to the federal government asking it to exempt Toronto from Canadian drug laws.

That is the same policy that was instituted to such disastrous effect in British Columbia that its NDP government begged Ottawa to end the pilot program early. It’s the policy that is still backed by Progress Toronto, the third-party group that acts as an attack dog and shadow campaign for Olivia Chow.

Progress Toronto still calls for decriminalizing all drugs, defunding the police and raising taxes, all policies Chow has backed.

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Toronto deserves better

Under Chow, Toronto continues to fail at delivering basic city services such as garbage pickup, road repair, relieving traffic congestion and children’s recreational programs. Food bank use is up 47%, crime remains persistently high, and we have normalized open-air drug use, with crack and meth being smoked openly in parks, on subways, streetcars and buses.

We can all see Toronto isn’t living up to its full potential. Everyone can see it except Olivia Chow.

Toronto, it’s time for change at City Hall. Chow must go.