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Opinion

When Capitalists Use Hunger to Maintain Power

By Dr. Bahira Abdulsalam, PhD, P.Eng.

Candidate for Mayor of Toronto

Oct 11, 2026 | 3 min read

Take a good look at this weekend’s photo from Daily Bread Food Bank. Olivia Chow, Brad Bradford and Doug Ford, side by side, gloves on, sorting food for the cameras two weeks before Toronto votes.^[1]

See the photo, posted by Jermaine Wilson on X

They want you to believe this election is a fight between them. The photo tells a different story. The mayor, the councillor who wants her job and the premier who calls his relationship with the mayor phenomenal.^[5] The same establishment, in the same shot.

Between them, they have held power over this city and this province for years. Ford has been premier since 2018. Bradford has sat on city council since 2018. Chow has been mayor since 2023. They have had their hands on our rents, our wages, our transit and our taxes. And the whole time, the line at the food bank kept growing.

At this weekend’s sort, organizers said Daily Bread client visits topped 2.5 million between January and August 2026. In the same months of 2020, there were 664,876.^[1] That is nearly four times as many visits. Across the city, food banks saw 3.75 million visits in 2024, and Daily Bread expected more than 4 million in 2025, almost five times the level before the pandemic.^[2]

Let me be clear. The volunteers who give up their Saturdays at Daily Bread are the best of this city, and the staff there do heroic work every day. My quarrel is not with them. It is with the people who hold the power to shorten that line and instead show up once a year to be photographed beside it.

Chow has posed at this food sort every year since she became mayor.^[3][4][1] Every year, the photos look the same, and every year the line is longer. Two weeks before an election, standing beside people’s hunger for the cameras is not compassion. It is a photo opportunity built on the struggle of families who cannot afford groceries.

A photo is not a policy. Families at the food bank do not need politicians packing boxes once a year. They need:

• Rent they can afford, with public land kept public and homes built on it that people can own.
• A one-year freeze on residential property taxes, and a city that answers for every dollar it spends.
• Transit that shows up, on the way to a fare-free TTC.
• Local jobs first, with city work going to local businesses and local workers.
• A City Hall that stops wasting their money, on blank cheques, cost overruns and contracts nobody checks.

I am not in that photo, and not by choice. I was never invited to it, just as I was never invited to the mayoral debates. That is how the establishment works: it decides who gets a stage and who gets left outside, and then tells you there are only two choices. They left me out because I am not one of them. I am with the people. I have never held office at City Hall or Queen’s Park, so I have no record of failure to defend. I am a structural engineer, and I have spent my career fixing what is broken.

The establishment has had its turn. If the same people keep producing the same result, it is time to change them.

Read more: Bahira Abdulsalam: Why Olivia Chow and Brad Bradford Need to Go

Dr. Bahira Abdulsalam, PhD, P.Eng., Candidate for Mayor of Toronto in the 2026 election, Founder, Be The Change Movement, bahira.ca

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