David Soknacki quits Toronto mayoral race

David Soknacki has announced he's dropping out of Toronto mayoral race, saying his support "wasn't growing enough" to continue.

He will officially withdraw his name from the ballot for the Oct. 27 municipal election on Wednesday, he said in a statement released Tuesday evening.

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Soknacki, a former Scarborough councillor who served as budget chief under now-former mayor David Miller, was polling a distant fourth in the race, behind John Tory, Olivia Chow and Rob Ford.

"Everyone who has been involved in my campaign over the last eight months can take pride that together, we have set a strong example for our city," Soknacki said in his statement. "Ours has been one of the most positive, the most idea-driven and the most idealistic Toronto mayoral campaigns in recent memory.

"However, today, I received confirmation of what I suspected for days: while my support is growing, it simply is not growing quickly enough to make any positive difference to the outcome on Election Day, especially given the challenges I've faced as a candidate. While we fought this as a campaign of ideas, we've also heard from voters who've told us that removing Mayor Ford is their top priority."

He said these challenges led him to make a "tough decision," but one he felt he had to make, because it "just isn't right" to ask his supporters to "sacrifice more time, more energy and more commitment under these circumstances."

Soknacki has spent the last seven years in the private sector running his food flavourings company.

He had promised that if elected, he would cancel the Scarborough subway extension in favour of cheaper light rail and divert the difference toward the downtown relief line (DRL).

Soknacki also said he wanted the city to take aim at what he calls an "unsustainable surge in costs" in the police budget, vowing to pare back police spending by $65 million a year.