Why Toronto’s Davenport riding represents a crucial tipping point for the Liberals and NDP
The Star is looking at key races across the country to see who's running, who's voting and why - and what local battlegrounds tell us about the national fight.
On a hot Saturday in late August, the kind of day in Toronto when the air can summon sudden rain from nowhere and everything and everybody at least kind of smells, Jagmeet Singh, Canada's most popular political leader, stepped from his tour bus onto the sidewalk outside a Pizza Pizza.
Singh stood for a moment in the heavy heat - a few metres from a dumpster surrounded by buzzing wasps - then began to bounce, joyfully, on the balls of his feet. As a small, masked crowd chanted his first name - Jagmeet! Jagmeet! Jagmeet!" - he stooped his body low toward each new person he saw, bumping elbows then bounding up and down in a kind of one-man political party bop.
How you doing, Davenpoooort!" he yelled into a microphone, extending the o" in a long, rock concert howl, then pumping his left fist.
Singh was in Toronto that day on a quick-fire tour through the ridings his party hopes to steal from the Liberals in the urban core this election, including Jack Layton's old riding of Toronto-Danforth and Spadina-Fort York, where the retiring Adam Vaughan has given the NDP an unexpected opening in what had been considered a safe Liberal seat.
The Pizza Pizza sidewalk, on Bloor Street, just west of Dufferin, was his fourth stop that day and maybe his most crucial. Standing next to him, in the shadow of the massive bus that bore his giant, smiling face, was Alejandra Bravo, a community activist, organizer and neighbourhood staple who both Liberal and New Democratic insiders believe has the NDP's best chance of winning a Toronto seat this election.
Can you give it up for an incredible candidate," Singh called out to the crowd, Alejandra Bravooooooo!"
But the battle in Davenport is about more than just a single riding. It represents a crucial tipping point for both parties. If the New Democrats can't win here, it's unlikely they'll win anywhere in the city, strategists for both parties believe, dooming the party to another Parliament without a single MP from the country's largest and arguably most progressive city.
The Liberals would like to shut the door on the NDP," said Tom Parkin, a long-time NDP organizer and strategist who lives in the area. And if they can shut the door in Davenport, then they can shut the door everywhere."
But the stakes are just as high for the Liberals. The party triggered this election with one goal: to win a majority. To do that, it needs to win at least 15 new ridings, but it also has to hold the close ones it already has, including Davenport, where the incumbent, Julie Dzerowicz, won by fewer than 1,500 votes in 2019.
A loss in Davenport would likely mean the NDP's numbers had come up across the GTA, putting more Toronto seats at risk, and helping the Conservatives win more three-way races in the Toronto suburbs. At that point, a majority would be out of the question. Even a minority would be at risk.
Holding onto Davenport, in other words, will be crucial for the Liberals, but it won't be easy. The riding has increasingly been leaning left in the last three or four elections," said Bob Richardson, a Liberal organizer and senior counsel at National Public Relations.
Long split between a more urban, progressive south and a working class, immigrant north (the area is considered a national hub for the Portuguese diaspora) Davenport has gentrified significantly in recent years as housing prices have soared across Toronto, pushing more young professionals into previously lower and middle income parts of the city.
The New Democrats believe that dynamic helps their chances. They're also high on Bravo, who has lived in the riding for more than 20 years, has a strong base of support in the area and speaks fluent Portuguese as well as her native Spanish (Bravo's family fled Pinochet's Chile when she was three).
Walking down Bloor Street on a recent afternoon, half a dozen supporters greeted her by name, in three different languages, within about five minutes. Bravo, who has run for city council three times, losing narrowly each time, has never felt like politics was a choice.
One of her earliest memories is of her mother lying on top of her during the air raids that opened Pinochet's coup. Her father was out in the streets, fighting for the democratically elected government, a choice that would leave him branded as a dissident for the rest of his life. He went back to Chile, twice, first with his family when Bravo was a child for two and a half years, and then later on his own.
For a long time, Bravo thought she would go back too. I wanted to, because I wanted to fight," she said. But I found my fight here, especially on child care." (Bravo has been a public advocate for affordable, public daycare since her first daughter was born, 25 years ago.)
Clifton van der Linden, the founder and CEO of Vox Pop Labs and the lead researcher behind the Signal, an election forecasting tool that aggregates and analyzes public polling data for the Toronto Star, believes that if an election were held today, Bravo would be heavily favoured to win. Our latest projections show Bravo with a 16 percentage point lead over Dzerowicz," he wrote in an email on Sept. 1, which is nearly six times the size of the lead Dzerowicz had over former NDP rival Andrew Cash in both the 2019 and 2015 federal election(s)."
But Dzerowicz has been counted out before. She was the underdog in both campaigns against Cash, a popular local fixture whose victory in 2011 ended almost 60 years of Liberal dominance in Davenport. (Cash decided not to run this year, opening the door for Bravo). And it's not in Dzerowicz's nature to concede anything to anyone.
On a recent afternoon, in the north part of the riding, she race-walked up the sidewalk, trailing a pair of young volunteers. During her first campaign, in 2015, Dzerowicz said, former Toronto Star columnist Tim Harper told her she didn't stand a chance. It's a slight that clearly still rankles, even if Harper says it never happened.
(I (and almost everyone else) thought Cash would be re-elected," Harper wrote in an email. He also thought Cash should be re-elected. But I would NEVER tell a candidate she didn't stand a chance.")
Dzerowicz speaks like she walks: rapidly and with purpose. At the doors, she can rattle off her accomplishments in the riding with blunt speed and parry critiques of the party with thumping detail.
I'm not crazy about how Trudeau talks a lot about First Nations but has not really done anything," one man told her. In response, Dzerowicz cited, from memory, specific numbers on boil water advisories lifted and dollars spent.
Dzerowicz has at least one thing going for her that Bravo doesn't: a history of winning. She's wanted to be an MP since she was a child. She's been a Liberal her entire adult life. She sold Gerald Butts his first Liberal party membership at McGill and has known Justin Trudeau since her 20s. She has already won twice as an underdog and has every intention of doing so again in September.
I want to be re-elected because I want to shape the world that we want to live in," she said. I want to actually start introducing new programs, new ways of supporting Canadians, and really have us think about: What is the new economic model ... that is going to lead us to a more sustainable, prosperous Canada?"
Dzerowicz and Bravo both speak passionately, in very different ways, about many of the same issues: climate change, feminism, Indigenous reconciliation, affordability, especially on housing, and COVID recovery. Where they differ is on approach.
In that way, the fight in Davenport is a mirror of the larger battle between Liberals and New Democrats across the old city of Toronto and in other centre-left parts of the country. It isn't really about policy goals, per se. It's about how to accomplish them.
Bravo, the consummate activist, fights from the outside to upend the system. Everything we have has been won by people who are struggling," she said.
Dzerowicz, the ultimate insider, works from within, leveraging connections to try to make the system work better. Of course you want to talk to ministers," she said. You will talk to anybody who's going to actually create the change that you're looking for, whether it's ministers or leaders or whatever it is."
What pollsters and party organizers all agree on is that, for now, it's too early to tell which way the voters in Davenport are going to lean. These ridings all have a DNA," said Lorne Bozinoff, the president of Forum Research. They tend to be more Liberal, more NDP, etc. This riding's DNA is pretty split."
Back outside the Pizza Pizza, after a quick speech and a round of photos with supporters, one corgi, one baby, and two Pizza Pizza employees, who chatted with Singh briefly in Punjabi before going back inside, Singh got back on his bus and Bravo and her team returned to the grinding work of a local campaign.
As Bravo set out canvassing, an older, white-haired man walked the opposite way around the corner to the campaign office. He took his seat at a table out front and sat alone, sliding metal stands into corrugated Alejandra Bravo" signs.
As he pushed one stand forward, the man knocked a red plastic cup over with his arm, spilling water onto the table. He stood and looked for something to clean up the mess. Finding nothing, he bent down and wiped it dry with his orange, NDP T-shirt.
He then sat back down and got back to his pile, pushing silver stands into orange signs, over and over again.
Richard Warnica is a Toronto-based business feature writer for the Star. Reach him via email: rwarnica@thestar.ca