I got assigned to cover election night and ended up at Tory’s election party. Here’s how it panned out.

Toronto voted for “One Toronto” tonight, electing former businessman and provincial politician John Tory as mayor.
Tory ended the night with 40 per cent of the vote, leaving Doug Ford at 33 per cent and Olivia Chow at 23 per cent.
“As your new mayor, I will work… in moving Toronto not left, not right, but forward,” said Tory to the media, volunteers and supporters who filled the Liberty Grand banquet hall.

What was truly amazing, said Tory campaign director of operations Tamara Kronis, is the voter turnout that premeditated this event.
“I was a ward captain in a poll where we got 80 per cent of the identified John Tory voters out,” said Kronis, captain at ward 15.
Kronis was taken aback by the positive response from Tory supporters.
“I’ve never had so much enthusiasm at the doors,” said Kronis, “You pick any poll at random and I’m telling you, we got everybody out.”
Meanwhile, Ford and Chow quietly offered congratulations to Tory while reaching out to their own bases.
Chow told her constituents to “keep the faith,” while Ford reflected on his brother’s reign as mayor.
“We introduced the idea of government for the people,” he said in his concession speech.
With the election over, Tory promised Toronto he would fulfil his election vows.
“The aim will always be the same… to unite Toronto,” said Tory, “We will get SmartTrack up and running in seven years.”
The issue of transit was paramount throughout the campaign, and candidates made transit improvement a key plank in their platforms.
Leading candidates took shots at their rivals over their respective expansion proposals, as well as plans to finance the new routes.
While Chow touted a one per cent land transfer tax hike on sales over $2 million, netting a projected $20 million annual increase in revenue, she took flak and raised doubts over allusions to “more progressive city taxes”, as she said on her website.
Tory also took his share of grief over his SmartTrack subway extension, which would be paid for using tax increment financing, a method of leveraging projected tax revenue and increases in a predetermined area to pay for current development.
“The real danger here is that those values don’t increase in the way it was predicted at the start,” Enid Slack, director of the University of Toronto’s Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance, told the Globe and Mail.
Doug Ford took over for his brother Rob when the incumbent was diagnosed with liposarcoma, a rare but treatable cancer.
Ford continued with his brother’s trademark promises of lower taxes, spinning himself as a down-to-earth everyman.
He even went on the offensive to promote his “man-of-the-people” narrative, referring to Tory a “downtown elite” who is “out of touch,” as the Toronto Star reported.
In the weeks leading up to the election, the Tory campaign began to pick up steam. According to an Oct. 23 poll by the Toronto Star, Tory sat at 42 per cent, with Ford at 31 and Chow at 25.

John Tory to replace Rob Ford as Toronto’s mayor