We fought 2 years to see the Ontario mayors’ group chat. Here’s what we found - Toronto Star

One organization fought ceaselessly, with the help of a large, well-respected Bay Street law firm, to conceal this correspondence from the public.

What the Star uncovered Thursday is a conversation spanning 18 months between a largely supportive ensemble who enjoys commiserating with each other.

It was kept under lock and key for two years: a secret chat room for the mayors of Ontario’s biggest cities.

That secrecy was pierced Thursday after a provincial freedom-of-information adjudicator ruled in favour of the Star’s request to view and publish the documents.

The records span 18 months of conversations between the mayors of dozens of cities, including Toronto, Hamilton and Brampton. In them, there is talk about the challenges of homelessness, drug use and finances. There are shared frustrations expressed with higher levels of government. And there is encouragement, particularly whenever someone pens an opinion article or is quoted in the media.

What there doesn’t appear to be, however, is anything that obviously warranted such secretiveness.

“We are all passionate, dedicated people who get up every day to serve the communities we represent,” Burlington Mayor Marianne Meed Ward said in an October 2024 message to the group.

“We are all passionate, dedicated people,” Burlington Mayor Marianne Meed Ward said in a supportive message to the group.

“We do this often under attack and facing significant challenges but we persist because we believe we can do something to make our cities and by extension our country better. Thank you to each of you for your tireless service to your cities and to this caucus. The issues we face are difficult and conversations can get bumpy but we all keep our eye on what matters and that’s the people we serve.”

The conversations do, indeed, get bumpy. In 2024, Hamilton Mayor Andrea Horwath appeared to accuse one of her peers of leaking a draft of a joint proposal to the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, in which the mayors planned to ask the province to use the notwithstanding clause to clear homeless encampments. 

“Congratulations to whoever decided to leak the draft motion and sabotage a campaign that we could all get behind … and break the trust of colleagues,” she wrote. “Also as predicted the heat has shifted to us and off the other orders of government as predicted. Great move.”

In 2024, Hamilton Mayor Andrea Horwath appeared to accuse one of her peers of leaking a draft of a joint proposal to the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

In other exchanges across the 101 pages of group chat correspondence, which the Star obtained Thursday after a legal battle with the Ontario Big City Mayors (OBCM) organization, mayors made biting comments about the higher levels of government. 

“Ottawa broke the housing market with an unsustainable and unpredicted and unprepared for increase in demand from their massive increase in immigration,” wrote Oakville Mayor Rob Burton in 2024.

“We need immigration, they just forgot about the fact that people need somewhere to actually live, not just work,” replied Horwath, to which Burton agreed.

In 2023, Waterloo Mayor Dorothy McCabe said Ottawa had created an “untenable” situation for Ukrainian newcomers, who arrived in her city for school only to find out they were not being classed as refugees and therefore would have to pay exorbitant international student fees.

“The federal government needs to start talking to municipalities before they set their immigration and refugee targets,” she said.

In response to a statement on the radio by Premier Doug Ford in 2024 that the province was “pouring money in” to build shelters and that he hoped the municipalities were “spending it wisely,” Burton said, “The money pouring in is news to Halton.”

St. Catharines Mayor Mat Siscoe replied: “Niagara would also like to know the location of the money spigots.”

Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow, meanwhile, was rather quiet. 

One October morning, she said she had to call-in to a group meeting because she was stuck in traffic on the Don Valley Parkway.

About a month into her mayoralty, she said Ontario mayors should “push for some immediate action and commitment” from the provincial and federal governments to help with an influx of asylum seekers. The following year, during a discussion about whether to present a united front to the province to ask for more hospital funding, she deferred to her peers, saying she was “supportive of what the team decide.”

In December 2024, Chow made a surprising admission to a gathering of reporters outside her office.

Earlier that morning, Ford had sent a letter to mayors around Ontario, letting them know he would grant municipalities enhanced legislative powers to override courts and dismantle homeless encampments. Many mayors had been pleading with the province for this. Chow was not among them. She explained that Toronto’s solution to homelessness would be housing and transitional and emergency services, such as warming centres and shelters.

But, she said, she understood why other mayors were taking a different approach. She knew this because she was in a group chat with them, where she said they had shared, among other things, pictures of homeless encampments. (No encampment photos were visible in the chat transcript the Star received.)

In December 2024 Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow, pictured in a file photo, told media outside her office that she was in a WhatApp group with other Ontario mayors.

“I do hear and see the desperation of many mayors across Ontario,” she said. “I read their numbers. We’re on a WhatsApp group together and every day they’re saying ‘Oh my god, what are we going to do? It’s getting cold,’ you know, and they have photos of people in tents in their city and it’s growing and growing and growing.”

The Star submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to examine these messages. Under this law, communication by the mayor in her official capacity is public record.

Although records show every single mayor in the chat agreed to disclose its contents to access to information co-ordinators — including Chow, who had to turn her phone over to the city clerk for inspection — the intergovernmental organization that represents them, the OBCM worked to keep them sealed.

OBCM is a non-profit with a membership consisting of mayors from the province’s 29 biggest cities. These cities fund the organization with public money paid in the form of an annual membership fee.

The OBCM retained Gowling WLG, one of Canada’s largest law firms. The only affidavit submitted in support of the OBCM’s appeal was written by the group’s executive director, Michelle Baker, who has not held elected office but is currently running for council in Mississauga. She wrote that group chat disclosure would “impair OBCM’s ability to carry out its governance functions.”

Gowling lawyers Hunter Fox and Michael Walsh argued that their client was not subject to the Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (MFIPPA) “merely because” it is made up of the heads of municipal institutions.

Making the group chat public would have a “chilling effect,” they wrote, cause “concrete operational harms” and “undermine trust and confidentiality required for meaningful collaboration.” If the province allowed the Star’s request, the OBCM would be forced to switch communication methods to “fragmented channels,” rather than the group chat, which would “impair co-ordination, record management, and candid engagement in the organization.”

The Star argued that act does not restrict transparency based on platform. It argued that the public pays for these internal discussions, so it has a right to see them; and that threatening to switch communications to more obscure channels flies in the face of the spirit of the act and the principle of an open government that is accountable to its electorate.

In the final If I Were Mayor event, business experts and the Star’s Adam Radwanski offer visions for the city’s growth.