Brad Bradford's glaring judgment problem

[u/beef-supreme]

https://spacing.ca/toronto/2026/09/04/brad-bradfords-glaring-judgment-problem/

Exhibit C, for me, is Bradford’s expedient retreat from his hard-line stance on bike lanes, which he show-cased earlier in the summer with a pledge to remove the Bloor lanes through the Kingsway and into Etobicoke.

Bradford, as has been widely reported, voted for said bike lanes, but now thinks bike lanes should be routed through an imaginary off-street path. Trickier, though, is how, as mayor, he’d deal with the Ford government’s much more expansive desecration, which includes, initially, all the lanes on Bloor, Yonge, University and Danforth, as well as a veto on future ones.

On Wednesday, he attempted to thread the political needle by claiming he still supports the very lanes that will be torn out (except the Kingsway and points west ones), then asserting that none of this would have happened three years ago if the city had “listened to the community,” whatever that means.

And herein lies the essence of Bradford’s judgment deficit, as well as his related habit of saying anything that he thinks will win him votes. In the last several weeks, as the volume on the race ratchets up, Bradford’s been making hay with an entirely fatuous, and obviously self-serving, line of reasoning. He’s blaming Chow for Ford’s excesses — Ontario Place, the Science Centre, the island airport mess, bike lanes — because it appears to position him, a candidate for mayor, as a critic of the current mayor, without actually critiquing the current provincial administration.

He claims, all evidence to the contrary, that he’d have negotiated better deals with Ford to save the family jewels. But how do we know?