Bradford says Chow never joined the mayors' call to action on drugs. She voted to join it, with him.

Council voted 22-0 to join the campaign he says she skipped

The claim is in the video, not the caption. Speaking to camera on 18 August, Bradford said:

But for two years, Olivia Chow has been completely absent from this conversation. She hasn’t joined the chorus of mayors from across the province calling for action.

The chorus is Ontario’s Big City Mayors and its Solve the Crisis campaign, launched in 2024 to press the province on homelessness, mental health and addictions.

Toronto joined it by recorded vote. Council item 2024.MM22.14, decided on 9 and 10 October 2024, opens: “City Council declare its support for Ontario’s Big City Mayors ‘Solve the Crisis’ Campaign.” The item goes on to ask the province to commit to immediate action on addictions, appoint a responsible minister, strike a task force and fund municipal supports.

The vote to adopt carried 22-0. Olivia Chow voted yes. So did Brad Bradford.

Where he is right

The crisis is worsening, and none of what follows disputes that.

Toronto Paramedic Services has recorded a 54 percent increase in calls related to drug toxicity since 2019, driven primarily by opioid overdoses, according to the Medical Officer of Health’s January 2025 report to the Board of Health.

On mandatory treatment specifically, we found no statement from Chow either way. His line about it is hedged as a claim about his own memory, and it may be accurate.

His disagreement with her is real. Her record runs to harm reduction, crisis response and supportive housing. He wants compelled treatment in the most severe cases. Which approach works is a clinical and legal question this site takes no position on. The question here is only whether she has been absent.

Her health department applied to run one of the province’s treatment hubs

When Ontario closed five Toronto supervised consumption sites, it offered closing sites the chance to become Homelessness and Addictions Recovery Treatment hubs, the province’s own addiction recovery programme. From the same Board of Health report:

Toronto Public Health (TPH) applied to establish a HART Hub and on January 2, 2025, received notification that the application has been approved in principle.

Her public health department applied to the province to run an addiction treatment hub, and was approved, nineteen months before he said she had done nothing. The report also notes what the model excludes: “The HART Hub model does not permit supervised consumption, safer supply, or needle exchange services.”

The rest of the two years

From the City’s published voting record, Chow’s recorded votes on this file since August 2024:

Date	Item	Chow
9-10 Oct 2024	MM22.9, urging Ontario to keep funding all operating supervised consumption services past 31 March 2025	Yes, twice
9-10 Oct 2024	MM22.14, Toronto’s support for Solve the Crisis	Yes, carried 22-0
18 Dec 2024	EC17.4, Shelter Safety Action Plan	Yes
27 Mar 2025	CC28.2, refugee and emergency shelter pressures, where she also moved an amendment	Yes
29-30 Jul 2026	EX33.28, supportive housing with wrap-around supports	Yes

She has also spoken publicly. On 20 August 2024, the day the province announced the closures, her press secretary Arianne Robinson said in a statement that Chow was concerned the closures would have “significant consequences, such as increased overdose deaths, greater strain on first responders and emergency rooms and more public drug consumption,” and that “any change to evidence-based harm reduction programs should be made in consultation with Toronto Public Health.”

That statement falls two days into the two years he says she was silent.

He made the same claim in writing, and added one more

The video went up 110 minutes after a second post carrying the plan on four cards. Card two puts the claim in writing and drops the hedge: “Since becoming Mayor, Olivia Chow has been absent from efforts to solve the drug crisis.” That widens the window from two years to her whole term, and the record above covers it.

Card three goes further:

Mayor Chow has accepted this crisis as the price of living in a big city.

Asked about drug policy in May 2024, Chow said decriminalization was only part of the solution and that other services were needed. Her words: “I’d rather focus on something practical. House these folks, get them into a treatment program.”

Getting people into treatment programmes is the thing card four proposes. She said it two years earlier.

On his plan itself, one thing deserves credit. Its first two planks are to “call on the province” for a mandatory treatment law and to “fight for Toronto’s full share” of treatment beds. Mandatory treatment is provincial law and treatment beds are provincially funded, and he says so rather than implying a mayor could legislate it. The consequence is that two of his three planks are advocacy directed at Queen’s Park, which is the same category of action as the mayors’ campaign he says Chow skipped.

The mayors he invokes are asking for the review his post rejects

His caption opens: “Toronto’s drug crisis demands action, not another review.”

A review is what the mayors asked for. Their October 2024 resolution seeks an immediate review and update of the Mental Health Act and the Health Care Consent Act to determine whether mandatory treatment is, in London Mayor Josh Morgan’s words, the “right thing to do.” Morgan, speaking for the caucus: “There are diverse opinions in our caucus,” and on mandatory treatment, “We have no position on whether that’s the case at this point.” References to involuntary treatment were removed before that vote.

The ask had not changed by the day before his post. Reporting from the mayors’ meeting in Ottawa on 17 August 2026 describes the campaign calling for a state of emergency, a stand-alone minister, scaled-up investment in recovery-based treatment, and a review of the Mental Health Act and the Health Care Consent Act.

Two figures we could not source

“Overdoses are up 46% in Toronto.” No timeframe is given and no published series we can find produces that figure. Every published measure points up, and several point up harder: paramedic drug toxicity calls are up 54 percent since 2019, and suspected opioid overdose calls rose 82 percent between April 2025, when the consumption sites closed, and January 2026. His number may be conservative. We are not rating it without knowing what it counts.

“A waiting list for up to 72 days.” We could not find this figure in any published source. Ontario wait times for publicly funded residential treatment are documented as long and highly variable, so it is plausible, and it still needs a citation.

The ruling

He said she has been completely absent for two years and has not joined the mayors calling for action. She voted to join them, on the record, in a vote he cast alongside her. Her health department applied to run one of the province’s treatment hubs and was approved. Her office warned publicly about the closures two days into the period.

He can argue that what she has done is the wrong approach, too slow, or too small. That is a real argument and he is entitled to make it. It is a different argument from the one he made.