Bradford says Chow declined every chance to act on public safety. Eight weeks earlier, he was criticising her safety plan.

What he said

On 20 July, Bradford posted a 79-second video with the caption: “Every chance Mayor Chow has had to take action on public safety, she’s decided not to. She’s made her peace with the status quo. I haven’t.”

The video itself is narrower than the caption. It tells one story: that Chow wrote Prime Minister Mark Carney a four-page letter setting out Toronto’s priorities, and that “in four pages, there was not a single sentence about bail reform, bail compliance, auto theft, organized crime, community safety.”

Two different claims are stacked here. One is about a document. The other is about a record. We treated them separately, because only one of them is the kind of claim a rating can attach to.

The claim about the letter: we can’t check it, so we don’t rate it

The letter is real. Chow wrote to Carney on 14 May 2025, shortly after his election, and coverage at the time described it as focused on the affordability crisis and the trade war — asking for federal help on housing, transit, infrastructure and school nutrition programs. Nothing in that coverage mentions bail, auto theft, or community safety, which is consistent with Bradford’s characterisation.

But we could not obtain the letter’s full text, and “not a single sentence” is a claim you either verify against the document or you don’t make. We are not rating it. If it holds up, it is a fair criticism of one letter’s priorities, and we will say so.

It is worth noting what that letter was: a request to the federal government for money, sent during a trade war. Bail reform and the Criminal Code are federal jurisdiction, and Ottawa did act on them — sweeping bail and sentencing reforms targeting auto theft, extortion and organized crime became law in June 2026, with or without a paragraph from Toronto’s mayor.

The claim about the record is the one being rated, and it is false

“Every chance Mayor Chow has had to take action on public safety, she’s decided not to.”

That is a universal claim. It does not survive one counter-example, and the record supplies several.

• Transit safety. Chow backed a transit safety plan adding 178 new front-line staff — 130 customer service agents, 30 field supervisors, six bus drivers — funded by reallocating $10.3 million, with $26.8 million more sought the following year. In November 2025 her office announced a broader transit safety strategy built on an expanded safety and security team funded in the 2025 budget: TTC staff, Streets to Homes outreach workers, LOFT’s outreach team, Toronto Community Crisis teams, TTC special constables, provincial offence officers, safety ambassadors, contract security and Toronto Police. In May 2026 came subway platform barriers and AI-assisted trespass detection.
• Police hiring. Under Chow, the police service board approved and the city funded a multi-year hiring plan running 360 officers a year through 2025 and 2026. This is the same plan Bradford describes approvingly, and accurately, six days later.
• Police budgets. The 2025 budget added $46.2 million over 2024. The 2026 budget rose to roughly $1.43 billion, an increase of about $93.8 million, including $20.5 million for 143 net new officers.
• Emergency response. Priority 1 response times fell from 26.7 minutes in October 2023, the month Chow was sworn in, to 12.6 minutes by March 2025.
• Crisis response. The Toronto Community Crisis Service was expanded citywide and is now treated as Toronto’s fourth emergency service.

A person can think every one of these was inadequate, badly designed, or too slow. That is a live argument. It is a different argument from the one in the post, which is that when the chance came, she declined it.

The part that gives it away

On 28 May 2026, Bradford went on CP24 to criticise a Chow safety plan. His objection was that it neglected part of the city: “It’s the latest example of Mayor Chow forgetting about Scarborough.”

That is a complaint about how Chow acted on public safety. It is an argument only available to someone who accepts that she acted. Eight weeks later, the same candidate told his followers she has declined every chance to act at all.

Both statements cannot be true. The May version is the one supported by the record.

What would have made this defensible

Narrower claims in the same territory would have survived a check. “Chow’s letter to the Prime Minister didn’t raise bail reform” — likely true, pending the document. “Chow has not lobbied Ottawa hard enough on bail” — arguable, and a real criticism. “Toronto’s public safety measures haven’t gone far enough” — a legitimate position, and the one he argues elsewhere in the same week when he calls for 1,000 more officers.

Political speech uses “every” loosely, and we would normally read that as emphasis. Two things block that reading here. The follow-up sentence — “she’s made her peace with the status quo” — restates the absolute version rather than softening it. And the video presents a single documentary example as proof of a general pattern of non-action, which is the structure of a factual argument, not a rhetorical flourish.

The ruling

The specific claim about the letter may well be accurate; we could not obtain the document, and we are not rating it.

The claim we are rating is the one in the post itself: that at every opportunity, Chow has decided not to act on public safety. Transit safety staffing, platform barriers, a funded multi-year police hiring plan, two budgets that paid for it, a citywide crisis service, and a halving of emergency response times all say otherwise. So, most directly, does Bradford’s own criticism from May, which faulted the geography of a Chow safety plan rather than its absence.

False.