With the old year quickly drawing to a close and the new one just around the corner, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on 2024. For RaBIT, this past year was about building in a number of different ways.

Building Momentum

While the next Toronto municipal election won’t happen until October 2026, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a lot of activity related to City Hall in 2024. This past fall, voters in Don Valley West (Ward 15) went to the polls for a by-election called to fill the seat left vacant by the untimely passing of Councillor Jaye Robinson. 

As is our practice, RaBIT ran a Candidate Pledge Campaign for the by-election. This campaign was designed to raise the profile of voting reform as an issue and to let voters know which candidates supported switching to a ranked ballot for Toronto’s municipal elections. The result was incredible with the winning candidate as well as 5 of the other 6 top candidates (and 8 candidates overall) taking the candidate pledge. In fact, 66.44 per cent of all the votes in the by-election were cast for candidates who supported ranked ballots!

With this positive result, a clear majority of Toronto City Council has now taken a public pledge to vote in favour of adopted ranked ballots as soon as it is again possible to do so. We also know that several other councillors have publicly stated they support this change, even though they haven’t officially taken the pledge yet.

Building a Coalition

RaBIT also added its voice in support of the Toronto chapter of another pro-democracy organization, namely Vote 16, in their effort to advance the democratic rights of 16 and 17 year olds. Specifically, RaBIT signed an open letter calling on Toronto City Council to task city staff to develop a report on how to allow 16 and 17 year olds to vote in neighbourhood polls on issues like permit parking. We’re happy to report that the vote passed 18-6 - a result which further demonstrates the existence of a strong pro-democracy majority on council. 

We were also very excited to partner with some other great organizations, namely Unlock Democracy Canada and Toronto Metropolitan University’s The Dais, when we co-hosted a screening of “Better Ballots” - episode 3 of the TVO docuseries Unrigged, which was based on RaBIT founder Dave Meslin’s best-selling book Teardown. The screening was followed by a panel discussion (which you can watch here) that featured our very own co-chair Rebecca Chesley, former co-chair Kevin Rupasinghe, and Dave Meslin, as well as a special virtual guest appearance by Arielle Kayabaga, Member of Parliament for London West and a long time supporter of ranked ballots.   

Building Capacity

While Ontario is not scheduled to hold an election until June, 2026, it is looking increasingly likely that an early election could be called this spring. RaBIT has spent a lot of time this year preparing so that we’ll be ready and able to make ranked ballots, and municipalities’ ability to use them, an important issue in the next provincial election campaign, whenever it happens. 

RaBIT runs primarily on people power, but the work we do does require some financial backing. With this provincial election looming just over the horizon, now would be a great time to support RaBIT’s preparations by making a donation if you are able. 

We’ve also been focused on building our internal capacity. To that end, we’ve added several new members (and welcomed one returning member back) to our board. We are always on the lookout for new members to join our team, so if you think you’d be a good fit for our volunteer board, please send us an email expressing your interest at [email protected] (please be sure to put “Board Membership Inquiry” in the subject line).

Finally, we’ve also been working on upping our social media game. Not only are we leveraging new tools to increase our activity on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, we’ve also added a new RaBIT BlueSky account. If you don’t already, please consider following us on all of these platforms. We’ve got big plans for 2025 and we’ll need your help to make sure our message reaches as many people as possible. 

What’s Next?

Looking forward to 2025 we are super excited to build on 2024’s significant progress. This coming year is going to be an important one and our aim is to be able to look back on it in a year’s time and celebrate all the progress we’ve made. 

As always, thank you for your ongoing support - we couldn’t have travelled half as far as we did this past year without you. Here’s to another year of the same!

Wishing you and yours all the best in 2025.