One council, 25 wards, one very online mayoralty
Toronto's City Government
How Toronto is actually governed post-amalgamation — the mayor and city council system, the architecture of City Hall itself, and the mayoralty that briefly made the city a global punchline.
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Toronto is governed by an elected mayor and a city council, currently 25 councillors representing individual wards, under a structure that dates only to the 1998 amalgamation covered in our history guide — before that, six separate municipal governments ran the constituent cities that now make up Toronto.
City Hall itself
The current, unmistakably modernist Toronto City Hall — two curved towers wrapped around a domed council chamber — opened in 1965, the winning entry in an international design competition won by Finnish architect Viljo Revell. It replaced what's now called Old City Hall, a Romanesque Revival building from 1899 a block away that still stands and now serves mainly as a courthouse. The plaza in front of the new City Hall, Nathan Phillips Square, hosts the city's outdoor skating rink each winter and the annual raising of the Toronto sign.
Mel Lastman: the first post-amalgamation mayor
Mel Lastman, previously mayor of the suburban city of North York for 25 years, became Toronto's first mayor under the new amalgamated system in 1998, serving until 2003 — a genuinely awkward transition period stitching six formerly independent city bureaucracies into one.
Rob Ford (2010–2014)
Toronto's best-known mayor internationally, for reasons the city would probably prefer otherwise. Rob Ford's single term became a global media story after a 2013 video surfaced showing him smoking crack cocaine, part of a wider substance-abuse scandal that led city council to strip most of his mayoral powers while he remained formally in office. It's a genuinely unusual chapter in Canadian municipal politics, and remains the single most-referenced fact about Toronto city government outside Canada.
Since then
John Tory served as mayor from 2014 to 2023, followed by Olivia Chow, elected in a 2023 by-election after Tory's resignation — a far lower-drama stretch of the office than the Ford years, focused mostly on transit funding and the housing pressures covered in our housing guide.
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