The first person to stand up and speak at Brad Bradford’s July 15 crime and safety townhall said he wanted to buy a gun.

The declaration didn’t seem to perturb the audience of roughly 40 people gathered in the small, brightly lit hall at Glenview Presbyterian Church in North Toronto. Mayoral hopeful Brad Bradford was seated, listening, at the front of the room, his features arranged into a look of grim concern. It had been just four days since a shooting at a street festival on St. Clair Avenue West had killed two and injured five others, and the forum was supposed to be an opportunity for residents to air their concerns about violence in the city. Held in one of the city’s wealthy garden suburbs, Lawrence Park South, the conversation was dominated primarily by fears about property theft and break-ins. Hence, the gun. Fears of a home invasion had driven both of the speaker’s grown children to get their gun licenses, he told the room. “I’m going to get my gun license,” he said, his voice steely. “It’s time to be proactive. We can’t be reactive. We can’t just wait.”

His anger was not out of place at the townhall. It did not matter, in this room—the first public event after Bradford’s campaign launch—that break-ins in the city had in fact plummeted during the pandemic and have never returned to their pre-2020 levels. Nor did it matter that, after rising briefly between 2022 and 2023, they’ve gone down during Chow’s time as mayor. What mattered to Bradford was how you felt. When Toronto’s deputy chief of police said after the St. Clair shooting that Toronto remained one of the safest cities in the world (gun deaths and injuries have trended steadily downward since 2019), Bradford seized the opportunity to criticize the city’s leadership. “People don’t experience life in a spreadsheet,” he repeated, first in a campaign video set to tense violin strings, then at a press conference. “They ask one simple question: do I feel safe?”

The moment—criticized by some as a cynical exploitation of tragedy early in the lead up to the Oct. 26 municipal election—appears to have solidified a principle of Bradford’s campaign: feelings trumped facts. And the overarching feeling that has characterized his run at mayor seems to be anger. Anger at incumbent mayor Olivia Chow, primarily. But also, in some ways, anger at the police force, and at the visible crisis of homelessness and addiction on city streets. It’s a feeling shared by a not insignificant number of Torontonians.

Publicly, Bradford’s image is characterized by a relentless drive to win in the race for mayor, and particularly to win against Chow. There’s little else that one really knows about the candidate or his interiority. In wanting to learn more, I spoke with his former staff, with his colleagues and critics on city council, with constituents and old friends and mentors. Many of them struggled to pin down what Bradford really believes, or who his friends on council are, or what changed in his two-term arc to the political right. They agree he is driven, and capable of being incredibly hardworking. But former staff allege that Bradford has screamed and sworn at his employees, sometimes pushing them to tears. Colleagues describe him as a bully on the council floor. And almost everyone I spoke to identified, under layers of unyielding energy and intensity and ambition, that Brad Bradford seems pretty angry.

Bradford’s most famous war, and the one that has most fuelled his critics, is with himself. First-term Beaches-East York councillor Bradford, in particular, has been a scourge to the campaign of mayoral hopeful Bradford.

When he was first elected to represent Ward 19, Bradford was an eager, bike-riding city planner in his early thirties, with a young family. He enjoyed the rare dual endorsements of both the mayoral frontrunners, John Tory and progressive Jennifer Keesmaat. His biggest priority, he told the Toronto Star after his win in 2018, was road safety.

Bradford was, perhaps, overestimated as progressive by virtue of his age—in his first term, he voted with Mayor Tory 93.7 percent of the time. But he took vocal stances on things that he has since had to publicly, repeatedly disavow. In 2020, he voted alongside the City’s progressive bloc in favour of cutting 10 percent of the police budget, and later that year, largely in favour of a raft of policing reforms. In fact, he was one of the small number of councillors who voted in favour of consultation with municipal bodies representing Black and Indigenous communities in establishing these reforms. Today, the hiring of 1,000 police officers is one of the cornerstones of his campaign.

While he voted in favour of renaming Yonge-Dundas Square to Sankofa Square in 2023, Bradford spent the early part of his campaign this summer criticizing the move, and proposed renaming it Toronto Square. And of course, there’s the bike lane issue. Bradford’s early identity was so tied up with bike-riding that it was the one thing people knew about him if they didn’t know anything else. Now, he’s proposing the removal of bike lanes on part of Bloor Street West that he himself voted to implement, and promising not to build bike lanes on arterial roads (he says he remains supportive of the lanes on Adelaide, Richmond, and Sherbourne Streets, which he helped initially vote in).

In the press, Bradford has characterized these changes of heart not as ideological, but as a response to evidence that has emerged in the aftermath of the decisions. “We were able to see and feel the real-world feedback,” he said about the Bloor Street West bike lanes in an August press conference. “It became clear that council, including me, got this one wrong.”

“Some people are going to want me to double down on a bad take…I will not do that.”

Early in his time as councillor, Bradford’s policy ideas weren’t tied to any particular side of the political spectrum. He was an action guy—he seemed to really care about bike lanes, road safety, and housing—and he was adept at navigating the bureaucracy of city hall using the experience he’d gained as a planner with the City.

This was the context in which I first noticed Bradford, when I investigated the road safety records of city councillors in the 2018-2022 city hall term. The Beaches-East York councillor was leagues ahead of his colleagues in improving road safety in his ward because he regularly waived long, bureaucratic processes in favour of simply installing speed bumps or stop signs because the community wanted them. “The local residents on the local street know their street better than the bureaucrats at city hall,” he told me in 2022. “If they think traffic calming measures are necessary, I’m going to be there to support them, and move that through the machinery of government.”

In my conversations with former Bradford staffers and with his colleagues on council, I’ve been searching for a particular turning point, a catalyst that helped form the Bradford we recognize today—or even a clear answer on when that transformation really happened. No single answer emerges. It’s not just that Bradford is distinctly more right-leaning now than he was even a mere four years ago. Perhaps more importantly, it’s that he today appears to be driven not by an enthusiasm for the policies he’s advocating for, but by a contempt for the ones he’s advocating against.

First-term Bradford wavered between passionate and aggressive, says Jessica, a former senior staffer who worked with Bradford through part of his first and second terms. “But I think rather than staying true to that,” Jessica says, “he’s definitely leaned quite heavily into the anger, frustration, aggression.”

For this story, I independently spoke with three former staffers from Bradford’s office who were willing to share their experiences with me. Their stories were verified against each other, and using contemporaneous correspondence from that time sent via email and text. The Local viewed messages sent and received by the sources at the time that mentioned Bradford’s anger, yelling, and instances of staff crying. In politics, employees are expected to never speak openly about current or former employers—the staffers quoted in this story have been given pseudonyms to protect their employment.

In the earlier years, there was a puerile, bro-y energy in the Bradford office, the staffers say. This atmosphere became more professional, and more demanding, in his second term, sources say. Bradford would change into his cycling kit and get on his exercise bike in the office, they say, sometimes having staff read him prep notes while he worked out . Jessica and another staffer, Tim (also a pseudonym), both recall him employing the term “BDE”—big dick energy, a slang term that captured the public imagination for a hot minute in 2018—when he wanted his staff to pursue something aggressively. They say he would frequently do things an employer doesn’t usually do: ask about peoples’ love lives, share personal details, pal around with the staff.

These purported quirks could, if one were feeling generous, be chalked up to the tone-deaf idiosyncrasies of a man who had grown up playing sports. (In his youth, Bradford was a figure skater—a talent that many only found out he had after he made a video with Tessa Virtue this year. He played rugby in university, and following a knee injury, took up cycling and co-founded a competitive team, Toronto Hustle.) But the staffers paint a less generous picture, of a boss who wasn’t afraid to occasionally venture to the outer boundary of appropriate office behaviour.

Towards the later part of Bradford’s first term, Tim tells me, Bradford began to show a disdain for the people who disagreed with him. “It kind of became this constant barrage of, ‘let’s openly complain about people who disagree with us,’” Tim says. No one was off limits: constituents, average-joe social media commentators, fellow councillors, he adds.

There were times when Bradford would come back from having an argument at city council or a committee meeting and would perch at the edge of a staffer’s desk in the main office, Tim says, and lead the office in a group discussion about how his opposition was wrong and he was right. Tim and Jessica both say that he was harsher about female councillors, and on occasion, that they heard Bradford use the word “bitch” to describe them.

Jessica says that Bradford “couldn’t talk to certain staff without being really belligerent, yelling or screaming at them.” It wasn’t uncommon, she adds, for staff to cry during or after these encounters. Sometimes, to some people, he would apologize, she says, but his actions did not meaningfully change in the time she worked for him.

“Brad kind of created an environment of fear where he yelled and swore a lot at staff, and would throw mini-tantrums if he didn’t feel like he was getting what he needed,” says Tim, describing some of the incidents as akin to “verbal abuse”.

A former staffer who declined to be quoted for this story described having the same experience working under the councillor—that he would lose his temper easily, yell and swear, and, they feel, fail to conduct himself as an employer should.

I ask Bradford about these allegations on a sunny Monday morning in mid-September, over coffee at the Marriott bistro across from city hall. Bradford, who is compact, clean-cut, and perpetually clad in business casual, is unfazed by the question. He puts his coffee—black, no milk, no sugar—down. “I don’t think I’ve really had a lot of conflict with my staff.”

“[But] I hold myself to a very high standard when it comes to performance on the job,” he says. His voice is level, and sincere—he’s not grandstanding. “You know, we all need to perform. We owe it to the people who have invested their trust in us to lead. So I’m not a guy who does well with mediocrity. I’m not a guy who responds well, if the effort doesn’t match the urgency of the issues that we’re dealing with.”

Prior to publishing, The Local sent the Bradford campaign a detailed list of every allegation from former staff. “You spoke with 3 former staffers, unnamed. Brad has worked with hundreds of staff, colleagues and volunteers over 8 years at City Hall,” wrote campaign spokesperson Laryssa Waler. “We’re not going to spend the final weeks of the campaign responding line by line to anonymous accusations from people who won’t attach their names to them.” Neither Bradford nor the campaign denied any allegations.

The next day, the Bradford campaign attempted to connect me with a former staffer. After I described the allegations in this story, the staffer decided not to go on the record.

The Local then heard from two current staffers who describe having good relationships with Bradford. Both describe the office as a high-intensity workplace, but they say they’ve never heard Bradford swear at his staff, or refer to a fellow councillor as a “bitch.” Craig Ruttan, Bradford’s chief of staff the last three years, says he “can’t recall” a time when Bradford’s actions made staff cry, and that he hasn’t heard or experienced Bradford yelling and berating employees in the way he’s seen in other councillors offices. “Can I say, definitively, [that] I’ve never heard him yell? No,” he continues. “There have been some times where something quite bad happened, and he had a response to it. But I wouldn’t say it’s something that was typical or characteristic of him.”

Heather Purdon, who has worked as office manager for Bradford for two years, says that while she’s seen Bradford get upset and yell, she’s never seen him yell at staff, nor make anyone cry. She described Bradford as patient and supportive.

Some of Bradford’s colleagues on council attest to his temper. Gord Perks, outgoing councillor for Ward 4 — Parkdale-High Park, 20-year veteran at city council, and prominent ally of Chow, had one of the most visibly tense relationships with Bradford of anyone on council. Over the years, the two have exchanged sharp words, eye rolls, and occasional passive-aggressive snubs. “From day one, he’s been very competitive with other members of council, and been quite an attention-seeker. That’s been a consistent pattern all the way through,” says Perks. “The one thing that’s changed, though, is he’s gotten even angrier.”

At least while the livestream cameras are on, city council tends, on most days, to be a fairly subdued, collegial place, dominated more by finicky bureaucratic process than by impassioned arguments about principles. But Bradford has occasionally attracted attention for his demeanour on the floor of council—for sparring with progressive councillors like Alejandra Bravo and Gord Perks, for example, or for the time he described Toronto-Danforth councillor Paula Fletcher’s behaviour as “hysteria.”

According to Perks, it’s not beyond Bradford to swear at his colleagues off-mic. “He storms around like a bull, and tries to use swagger and intimidation to get his way,” he says.

When I ask Bravo, she is measured in her response. “He doesn’t work well with his colleagues,” she tells me, “and it will be challenging for him to be able to govern with a majority of council.”

Perks and Bravo are, of course, all part of Chow’s progressive coalition. For this story, I also tried to speak to councillors who had a more positive relationship with Bradford, like Stephen Holyday or Jon Burnside, or those who have endorsed Bradford for mayor, including James Pasternak and Vincent Crisanti. Holyday declined to speak; everyone else did not respond to multiple attempts to reach them.

Jennifer McKelvie, former city councillor for Ward 25 — Scarborough-Rouge Park and current Liberal MP for Ajax, joined council at the same time as Bradford, in 2018. “He’s smart, he works hard, and he cares,” she told me.

During her time at city hall, McKelvie worked with Bradford on key policy pushes, she tells me: the legalization of muti-tenant housing, setting a goal to build 285,000 homes over 10 years, reducing red tape and zoning barriers to build faster. She has now endorsed him for mayor.

When I ask her about the allegations of bullying and anger fellow councillors and former staff have raised against Bradford, she says, “I’ve also seen how very kind he is to the residents…I know there’s many employees of his that are currently working on his campaign and also hold the utmost respect for him as well.”