uniteTOlove.ca

A letter to the seven in ten

Dear seven in ten,

Every four years, this city writes about you. The turnout columns arrive on schedule — the hand-wringing, the shame, the civic-duty lectures, the panels on “voter apathy.” You are studied, measured, modelled, and blamed. And in all of it, one thing never happens.

Nobody writes to you.

So this is a letter to you, not about you — and it starts by putting down the stick, because you have done nothing wrong.

Here is what happened in October 2022, by the City Clerk’s own count: 1,898,750 names were on the voters’ list, and 563,124 ballots were cast. That is 29.7 per cent1. You, the people who stayed home, are more than 1.3 million strong2. You are the majority of this city’s electorate — and whatever Toronto’s electorate said in 2022, most of it said: no.

We think that “no” deserves to be taken seriously, because here is the part the columns never concede: the math was on your side. The median winning margin in 2022’s council races was 32 points; fifteen of the twenty-five wards were decided by more than thirty3. In most of this city the result was not in doubt, and you could see it. You were told your vote was your voice — and a lot of you looked at a foregone conclusion and declined to spend an hour on a result that was already written.

That doesn’t look like apathy to us. It looks like a verdict — and if we’ve read it wrong, come tell us; that’s what the conversation is for. A democracy that loses seven of every ten of its people does not have a laziness problem in its people; it has a believability problem in its politics. You noticed first.

(And none of this is a word against the 563,124 who did line up. They kept the door open.)

But the arithmetic has a second half, and it belongs to you.

When almost nobody shows up, the people who do show up decide everything. Had everyone come in 2022, more than three times as many people would have shared the decision — and even then, two wards came down to 0.4 and 0.5 points4. In a city of landslides, the close races were settled by a block party’s worth of neighbours. The same smallness that made your one vote feel weightless makes any organized handful of you enormous. You are the largest unspent political force in Toronto — more than twice the size of the entire crowd that decided the last election5 — and the arithmetic of every safe seat quietly assumes you stay home.

The columns call that the problem. It’s the lever.

Who is “we”? A fair question, and here is the honest answer: neighbours. There is nothing here to join but a conversation, and no one here to follow. No party, no candidate, no donation asks — nobody pays to participate, and the blueprints are free forever. Behind this letter sits a public library of receipts about this city that serves everyone in it identically — voter, non-voter, candidate — and endorses no one. Don’t trust us; check us.

Now the ask.

We are not asking you to vote. You’ve heard that pitch every four years, mostly from people who rarely asked what you thought. Whether you vote on October 26 is your call — and if this conversation ends with you wanting to make that call count, good; that door was always yours. Either way, you remain a protagonist of what happens next.

The ask is thirty seconds: join the conversation about what this city should become. A name and a way to reach you — kept to exactly that, never sold, never handed to any campaign. Toronto is deciding its future this fall, on one ballot and in rooms all over the city, and every name added helps build the public count the whole city will watch: proof that the seven in ten were never gone.

One door, one step wide: unitetolove.ca

Voting day is October 266. The conversation starts before it, and it doesn’t end with it.

Come say what you’ve been thinking.

Seven in ten of us stayed home. Imagine what happens when we show up.

— your neighbours

P.S. — If you’re one of the roughly 900,000 people inside the city limits who were outside the 2022 franchise entirely7 — the permanent resident, the student on a permit, the teenager — this letter is yours too, and so is the conversation. The ballot has a citizenship requirement; the conversation does not. (Under-18s sign with a parent’s OK — the door explains how.) And if you’re the commuter from Brampton or beyond: you build this city every day with no ballot at all. Same door.

Receipts — where every number comes from

  1. City of Toronto, 2022 Municipal Election Report (City Clerk): 1,898,750 electors on the final voters’ list; 563,124 total ballots cast — 29.7%. Official declarations and poll-by-poll results: toronto.ca election results. Re-verified at source August 6, 2026.
  2. Computed from receipt 1: 1,898,750 − 563,124 = 1,335,626.
  3. City of Toronto 2022 official results, compiled ward by ward in State of the Election: median council winning margin 32 points; 15 of 25 wards decided by more than 30.
  4. Same compilation: York South–Weston, 0.4 points; University–Rosedale, 0.5 — State of the Election, §2.
  5. Computed from receipt 1: 1,335,626 ÷ 563,124 = 2.37.
  6. Voting day: Monday, October 26, 2026 — how to vote, every date sourced to official City and provincial pages and re-verified August 5, 2026.
  7. Statistics Canada, 2021 Census (Toronto: 2,794,356 residents) against the City’s 2022 final voters’ list (1,898,750). The vintages differ by one year, which is why the figure says “roughly.” The honest breakdown: State of the Election, §5.

Found a mistake?

That’s the system working. Every figure above traces to a public source or a computation shown in full. If one is wrong, tell us — every correction is published, dated, and left visible.