Open letter
An Open Question to Mayor Olivia Chow, Councillor Brad Bradford and Mr. Chris Alexander
To Mayor Olivia Chow, Councillor Brad Bradford and Mr. Chris Alexander:
Each of you has been invited to the major debates of this campaign, broadcast or streamed by CP24, CityNews, CBC and TVO. Most of the candidates whose names appear on the same ballot have not.
Debate organizers have relied on a polling threshold to decide who takes the stage, using polls run by privately owned companies. Those polls survey only a small sample of residents, often around a thousand people, in a city with well over a million eligible voters. The public is never told who those people were, how they were chosen, which neighbourhoods and communities they came from, or how their answers were adjusted to stand in for all of Toronto. Yet these unseen few have been allowed to decide which candidates the rest of the city gets to hear.
The polls are taken before voters have had any fair chance to hear from the full field. The candidates who were excluded never got the exposure that drives poll numbers, and those numbers were then used to justify excluding them. A field of 53 certified candidates was narrowed to three names in the polls and on the debate stage, and since October 6, to two. Voters never agreed to that closed loop.
To Mayor Chow and Councillor Bradford: How do you feel about benefiting from a process that excludes the majority of your fellow candidates? Do you believe it is right that privately run polls, rather than voters, decide who Torontonians get to hear from? And when the public is shown only two choices in a field of many, are voters really being given the full truth about who is running for Mayor?
You hold the offices of Mayor and City Councillor. You have the standing to call for a fair stage, and you have chosen to accept an advantage that others were denied, and to stay silent. How can voters trust those who use the privilege of public office to their own benefit while their fellow candidates are shut out? And if you will not stand up for fairness in this election, how can anyone trust you with the future of this city?
To Mr. Alexander: You were given a place on the debate stage and the media attention that came with it, ahead of candidates who remain on the ballot today. You then withdrew on October 6, as advance voting began, while your name remains on the ballot. Do you accept that your place could have gone to a candidate committed to seeing this race through? And will you now call publicly for organizers to open the remaining debates to the candidates who were shut out?
You have had the platform that others were denied. I invite each of you to use it to call for every registered candidate to be given a fair hearing before October 26.
To my fellow candidates for Mayor: I invite every registered candidate to respond as well. Do you agree that this process has denied voters a fair choice and denied candidates a fair hearing? I welcome your views, whether or not you agree with me.
I will publish all answers I receive on my campaign website, unedited, so that voters can read them for themselves. If any of the candidates addressed here chooses not to respond, that will be noted as well.
Dr. Bahira Abdulsalam, PhD, P.Eng.
Candidate for Mayor of Toronto
Responses
Responses received will be published here unedited.
Toronto needs an engineer. Vote Bahira.
On October 26, vote Bahira Abdulsalam for Mayor of Toronto.
Dr. Bahira Abdulsalam, PhD, P.Eng.
Independent Candidate for Mayor of Toronto
bahira.ca
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