Is this a change election? Can Olivia Chow be beaten? Key election questions, answered

With just over a week to go until election day, Municipal Affairs Reporter Shawn Jeffords weighs in on some key questions about where the race to become Toronto's next mayor is going in the final days. 

What's the last week of this thing going to look like?

We'll see more campaign announcements and a shift to rallies where candidates can project confidence and a sense of momentum ahead of election day. Campaigns will make last ditch efforts to sway undecided voters.

Behind the scenes will be a different story as each team's get-out-the-vote operations gear up to motivate, and sometimes literally deliver, their supporters to the polls on election day. 

We keep hearing the phrase "change election." What does that mean and is that really what we're having? 

We might only know the answer to this question in retrospect.  This may well be a change election, but it probably doesn't fit the conventional sense of the term. 

Under normal circumstances, you'd have an incumbent running under a status quo banner and other candidates advocating for change. In this race, all of the top-tier candidates are positioning themselves as agents of change. Whether they are, in fact, is in the eye of the beholder.

Toronto Metropolitan University politics professor Myer Siemiatycki argues this is a change election. In his view, Ana Bailão and Mark Saunders to a degree, are the candidates that most represent that status quo because of their records as a close ally of Tory and as police chief, respectively.

"I think it is very much a change election," he said. "It's certainly a change from a mayor who was elected three times."

 "It was almost as if the personal appeal John Tory had papered over or supplanted any concern that Torontonians had about the state of the city, the issues we're now talking about like housing, the state of municipal services and transportation," he said.

Headlines like businesses having their CaféTO applications rejected hit the campaign trail this week. How much can a mayor really shake up that kind of bureaucratic process?

The mayor can have a big impact on programs like CaféTO. For evidence of that, you only need to look back at how Tory reacted to business complaints about the proposed CaféTO fee structure earlier this year. 

There also seems to be a real appetite from councillors to make changes to CaféTO. I expect a new mayor will make significant changes to the system since so many candidates have been talking about it on the campaign trail, including promises to waive fees for businesses.

The polling, whether it should be trusted or not, has been pretty stable for a while now with Olivia Chow in the lead. Advance voting has wrapped. Do you think there's anything coming that could shake things up?