The controversial Harper minister has returned with a thin platform and a whole lot of political baggage.

The man who brought us the “barbaric cultural practices” hotline is running for mayor of Toronto. As of August 7, a Liaison Strategies poll puts his support at 10 percent.

According to his website, Chris Alexander—former Canadian ambassador to Afghanistan and Stephen Harper’s last immigration minister—wants to make Toronto better. He believes it’s underperforming and has been “standing still for three years.” Transit, he says, should be faster, more punctual, and safer, while “bolder moves” are needed to “end traffic jams.” Perhaps the only specific proposal is a “well-designed network of protected bike lanes elevated and separated by curbs from motor traffic and pedestrians.” On Billy Bishop Airport, a subject of considerable debate in recent months, Alexander commits only to building a “broad-based consensus about its long-term future.” On housing, he thinks it should be more accessible and that unhoused Torontonians should have greater stability. Neighbourhoods, meanwhile, need to be “empowered to build on their strengths.”

This is all hard to disagree with, but it’s also an exceedingly thin platform for a potentially serious candidate hoping to govern Canada’s largest city. His late entry has also scrambled what had looked like a two-person contest. Mayor Olivia Chow remains the frontrunner: the Liaison Strategies poll has her at 47 percent among decided and leaning voters, versus 40 percent for Toronto City Councillor Brad Bradford, her principal rival.

Unsurprisingly, detractors came out swinging. The ink wasn’t even dry on Alexander’s nomination papers when right-wing commentary website The Hub began excavating a plot to bury his campaign. Columnist Stephen Staley dismissed his ideas as “vacuous” and said he has “no obvious constituency beyond the man he meets while shaving.” The problem, argues Staley, is that Alexander would split the right-wing vote in Toronto, handing Chow another four-year term, thus “saddl[ing] Toronto with four more years of crime, chaos, and decline.”

According to the Toronto Star, Warren Kinsella—acting in his capacity as campaign adviser to Bradford—called Alexander a “kamikaze candidate” on social media. Kinsella then deleted the post. Bradford added to the dogpile. Speaking from city hall, he said, “I’ve never seen him in my life. I don’t think he’s ever stepped foot in this building before. I’ve never talked to him. I literally didn’t know who he was.”

He’s not alone: according to the Liaison Strategies poll, Alexander remains unfamiliar to most Torontonians. Given his checkered political past, anonymity may be his greatest asset.

Even without a background in Toronto municipal politics, Alexander can claim some local pedigree. He was born there and represented the adjacent federal riding of Ajax–Pickering from 2011 to 2015. He also comes from a political family: his grandfather was mayor of Huntsville, and his father was an assistant deputy minister for the Government of Ontario.

Alexander’s professional CV is objectively impressive. Prior to his political career, he had a long stint in Canada’s foreign service, joining in 1991. He worked in the Canadian Embassy in Moscow through the turbulent 1990s and early 2000s—which, broadly, covered the breakup of the Soviet Union, the collapse of Communism, the Russian economic crisis, and then the subsequent rise of Vladimir Putin—before becoming Canada’s first resident ambassador to Afghanistan in 2003. He served in this role for two years before then becoming one of two deputy special representatives of the secretary-general of the United Nations for Afghanistan.

One might think this would make for a very good mayoral bid, especially for a city with an international reputation and multicultural population. But Alexander’s time in government (as well as incidents since) raises questions about his suitability for the role. Bradford wasted no time highlighting the dubiousness of Alexander’s political values, noting his unwillingness to stop supporters from chanting “lock her up” (about former Alberta New Democratic Party premier Rachel Notley) during his campaign to become Conservative leader in December 2016.

But what Bradford focused on, with good reason, was Alexander’s role in the bill the Tories passed in 2015, just a few months before that year’s federal election. Bill S-7—also known as the Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act—criminalized early and forced marriages, including the removal of children from Canada for such purposes. It addressed “honour killings” by amending the Criminal Code to clarify that the defence of provocation could not be used to reduce murder to manslaughter merely because the victim’s conduct was seen as bringing shame on the accused or their family.

Protecting women and girls from coerced marriages, abusive relationships, or murder would be laudable if it wasn’t for the fact that describing certain practices as “barbaric” stigmatized the very immigrant and Muslim communities the Conservatives were proposing to help. What was clear to experts—including the lawyers and social workers who had worked with the victims Bill S-7 hoped to protect—is that everything it aimed to address was already a crime in Canada.

Further, it was abundantly obvious the government hadn’t consulted with the victims or the people who worked with the victims to get input on the legislation.

But what really inflamed the controversy was the decision by Alexander—and fellow Conservative Kellie Leitch—to promote the idea of a “barbaric cultural practices” tip line Canadians could use to warn police about crimes that might be prosecuted under Bill S-7. Critics called it a snitch line. Were this not all bad enough, the proposed snitch line had not been discussed with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, despite the fact they were to be responsible for it. Critics also pointed out that such a phone line already existed: it’s called 911. The scheme quickly became toxic.

Alexander wound up, as one Maclean’s columnist put it, “the punching bag for the Conservatives, by his own choosing.”

Asked about it during a recent press scrum at Toronto City Hall, Alexander said, “I’ve commented on that now many times; I do regret it, and I own the fact that we played that issue wrongly. It was a mistake in that election.” Whether this constitutes an apology for an ill-conceived policy or the acknowledgement the policy likely cost the Conservatives the 2015 election is open to interpretation. Alexander went on to say, “I do not disassociate myself from my convictions, my values, on this issue, which relate to the rights of women and girls.” He then pivoted to Afghanistan, noting his first-hand experience there, and then pivoted again—perhaps with an eye to his immediate audience—arguing that journalism is effectively illegal under the Taliban. Good to know.

Chris Alexander may be eager to pivot away from these episodes, but his federal record is harder to leave behind. As immigration minister, he was sharply criticized for Canada’s failure to respond to the Syrian refugee crisis. Critics argued that Canada was accepting too few Syrians and processing them too slowly. The controversy intensified dramatically in September 2015 after the death of three-year-old Alan Kurdi; Alexander temporarily suspended his re-election campaign to address the crisis.

Though he defended the government’s record on refugees, critics pointed out that Canada had considerably greater capacity for refugees than was permitted, and that the Harper government prioritized persecuted religious minorities, such as Christians.

Alexander was further criticized for cuts to refugee health care, with the Federal Court determining the government’s treatment of refugees was “cruel and unusual.” Alexander responded to the criticism by saying he would vigorously defend “the interests of Canadian taxpayers” by focusing on “genuine refugees.” What constituted a bogus refugee was never articulated.

His tenure as immigration minister was marred by several other controversies as well, including his opposition to allowing women to wear the niqab at citizenship ceremonies. In a 2015 interview with Vice Canada, Alexander appeared to suggest women who wear the niqab are terrorists.

His missteps on key immigration and integration issues seemed to go hand in hand with a poor grasp of sensitive aspects of Canadian history. As an example, Alexander was a booster of the highly controversial “Victims of Communism” memorial, which was later found to have had numerous fascists, alleged war criminals, and Nazi collaborators—including people affiliated with the Ukrainian ultranationalist community—slated to be commemorated. Canadian Heritage ultimately decided to eliminate all commemoration entirely.

Alexander’s ties to the Ukrainian ultranationalist community in Canada are also a concern. On May 23, 2026, he addressed a Toronto conference hosted by the Canadian section of the Anti-Imperial Bloc of Nations (ABN), an organization whose legal predecessor was founded by Yaroslav Stetsko, a virulently antisemitic Nazi collaborator. Stetsko wasn’t ambiguous when it came to his feelings, writing, “I insist on the extermination of the Jews and the need to adapt German methods of exterminating Jews in Ukraine.” During the Cold War, Stetsko also led efforts to whitewash the reputations of Nazis who found refuge in the West, where they rebranded themselves as anti-Communist freedom fighters. (The Walrus emailed Alexander directly, as well as his campaign, with questions pertaining to these events. They declined to answer.)

All of this leaves Alexander with considerable political baggage without an obvious base to carry it for him. His last foray into politics was in 2016–2017, when he ran for the Conservative Party leadership, finishing tenth out of an original fourteen candidates. Though he has been described as a “centre-right” candidate, in cabinet he was a loyal Tory foot soldier, reliably defending some of the Harper government’s most controversial policies. Yet there are few obvious signs of that old Conservative network around his mayoral bid: no apparent cadre of Harper loyalists and, so far, no endorsements from his more prominent former colleagues.

If Alexander has kept a lower profile than you might expect for someone now seeking to lead Toronto, he has not entirely lost his taste for political combat. In the autumn of 2024, he accused veteran Ottawa Citizen defence reporter David Pugliese of being a Russian spy. The allegation, made before Parliament’s Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, was explosive. It was also based on photocopies of supposed KGB documents from the 1980s and early 1990s that were later determined to be elaborate forgeries. Alexander made the statement with parliamentary privilege and hasn’t repeated his claims publicly since. Pugliese received death threats in the aftermath.

The Walrus had previously reached out to Alexander concerning his allegations. Alexander refused to make any statement on the record, claiming the matter was a national security concern. According to Staley, Alexander’s unwarranted accusations are sort of thing that makes “a friend want to quietly pocket a man’s car keys.”

Whether Alexander has what it takes to win is up for the voters to decide. So far, his strongest hope for the job may be that Torontonians have a short memory.

Chris Alexander Is Back, and Toronto’s Mayoral Race Just Got Weird