From its outset, Toronto’s mayoral election has been full of surprises — the first of them being that it happened at all. Last October, as turnout plummeted to a record low, incumbent mayor John Tory was reelected with a whopping 62 percent of the vote. An ally of conservative premier Doug Ford, who had just gifted him with tailor-made strong mayor powers, Tory looked poised to govern the city for as long as he wanted, effectively consolidating a right-wing stranglehold on Canada’s largest city for the foreseeable future.

When Tory suddenly resigned after admitting to an affair with a younger staffer just four months later, there was no particular reason to think that the underlying dynamic would shift. Both former police chief Mark Saunders and Tory ally Ana Bailão evidently assumed as much and undertook developer-friendly, anti-tax campaigns firmly anchored on the Right. For all the spin that former New Democratic Party MP Olivia Chow’s polling amounted to name recognition and little else, her victory last night represented the triumph of municipal progressivism over these assumptions.

Having finished third in the 2014 mayoral race, Chow began the campaign with numbers in the low twenties and finished with a vote share in the high thirties. Chow’s message, reinforced by personal authenticity and disciplined debate performances, successfully punched through despite a near ceaseless pile-on from virtually every other major candidate. On housing, homelessness, transit, taxes, and crime, right-wing candidates mounted all of the familiar arguments and lost. Even as the local Liberal and Conservative machines went into overdrive with the singular goal of preventing such an outcome, the alternative won.