Olivia Chow has been elected the 66th mayor of Toronto after a whirlwind two-month campaign.

Chow edged out runner-up Ana Bailao, who surged in polls during the final days of the campaign, but failed to stack up to the front-runner in a chaotic race where votes were split among more than 100 candidates.

In the end, it was a wild back and forth in the vote count, in what might be the most entertaining live tally in the history of Toronto municipal politics.

Chow now adds the badge of Toronto Mayor to an illustrious political career that included a stint as a Toronto city councillor from 1992 to 2005, NDP MP for Trinity—Spadina from 2006 to 2014, and third-place mayoral candidate in the 2014 election that kicked off John Tory's multiple terms at the city's top job.

She got her political start working as a staffer under NDP MP Dan Heap in the early 1980s, taking the next steps in 1985 with a successful bid to become a school board trustee, and moving into municipal politics a few years later.

After her failed 2014 mayoral bid, Chow made an attempt to return to politics in the run-up to the 2015 federal election, when she announced that she was seeking the federal NDP nomination in Spadina—Fort York.

Chow would lose that race to then-Liberal MP Adam Vaughan, who had been elected to represent the riding the year before.

Following several years out of the political spotlight, Chow announced her return to politics on April 17, when she launched her bid to become the city's next mayor in the 2023 by-election.

In addition to her own work in politics, Chow is part of a political dynasty, formerly married to the late NDP leader Jack Layton (himself a third-generation politician), and the stepmother of former Toronto city councillor Mike Layton.

Things could have played out very differently for Chow, who benefitted from a bickering pool of right- and centre-right-wing candidates, keeping the suburban vote split among names like Anthony Furey, Mark Saunders, and Brad Bradford.

In what might be the ultimate in political comedy, strong mayor powers created by Doug Ford for political ally John Tory will instead be wielded by someone at the complete opposite end of the spectrum in Chow.

Chow choosing to use these strong mayor powers could effectively cancel out Ford's earlier slashing of Toronto City Council size, a move that critics argued would increase the sway of the politically-conservative suburban wards.

Olivia Chow breaks several barriers in Toronto politics, including becoming the first mayor of a visible minority and the first female mayor in the post-amalgamation era.