🎓 Brandon Tozzo Came for School, Stayed for Kingston and the City Got a Councillor

In 2007, Brandon Tozzo was working in investment banking when he watched the markets, in his words, "go poof." He'd applied to law school and to a PhD program. It was, as he puts it, "one of those crossroads in life." Watching the crash, he decided there was something in finance and the housing market he wanted to understand.

He chose a PhD. The program was at Queen's University, he met his wife there, and he's been in Kingston ever since.

Brandon Tozzo is the city councillor for Kingscourt-Rideau, a professor at Loyalist College and a dad of two, and he's running for a second term in the October 26 municipal election.

Brandon was born in Sudbury, where his grandparents settled after emigrating in the years following the Second World War. He grew up in London, Ontario, in a family he describes as "very working class."

Brandon did his undergraduate and master's degrees at Western University in London. It was close to home, and staying close helped keep the cost down.

When the 2007 market crash, the start of the global financial crisis, pulled him back to school, he picked Queen's University for his doctorate. "I loved my time here," he says.

The surname is Italian, and most of his students have a hard time saying it. "Just Brandon's fine," he says. For the record, it's pronounced TOE-zoh.

Plenty of students come to Kingston for school and leave when they're done. Brandon stayed, and meeting Jenna had a lot to do with it.

They met around 2009, early in his PhD. Jenna, who's from Smiths Falls, was at Queen's for Teachers College. They hit it off, and the relationship grew from there. She's a teacher, he found work close by, and they set down roots.

They first rented near McBurney Park. After they married, they looked at houses in Williamsville and around McBurney Park before landing in Kingscourt-Rideau, the district he now represents. They liked it for the parks, since they wanted to start a family. That was about 12 years ago.

Brandon kept his phone within reach through our whole interview. He has two kids in school, and he wanted to be there if the school called. "I'm a dad first before I'm anything else," he says.

He and Jenna have a four-year-old and an eight-year-old. Getting to two took some negotiating. "I didn't want any, my wife wanted two, so we compromised at two," he jokes.

Brandon says his work during the pandemic is what got him into politics in 2022. His kids are what keep him in it. "When you're a parent, it's not about you. It's about what you leave behind, and it's about the community you're creating," he says. "I look at Isla and Colson, and I'm like, 'I'm trying to make a better community for them.'"

Brandon took up cooking in grad school, and one reason was feedback. A research paper could take a year and earn a few comments. A dinner tells you in an hour or two whether it worked. Even finishing his PhD felt oddly quiet after five years of work. "Five profs are like, 'Congratulations, you've passed,' and then you leave the room, and that's it," he says.

He says there are two kinds of cooks: the ones who follow a recipe like a list, and the ones who taste a little and add a little as they go. He's the second kind. "There's a creativity to cooking that I really enjoy."

Barbecue is a favourite, and he has his own barbecue sauce recipe. It isn't going in this article. "Some secrets are worth keeping," he says. His love of Southern food goes back to work trips to Louisiana with the U.S. State Department, which he says sent him home about five pounds heavier.

Brandon used to be a long-distance runner, training for a half-marathon along the waterfront and through the Royal Military College grounds. His knees ended that, and he switched to speed walking. "Ever since then my body has thanked me." These days most of his walking happens door to door.

He started knocking on doors for the 2022 election and kept going after he won. He took about six months off, missed it, and has been back at it pretty much nonstop since 2024. "It's not that I've started canvassing," he says. "It's that I've never stopped canvassing."

That means he gets to watch families grow. He'll knock on a door and meet a couple he first met in 2022, when they were expecting. Their child is now four. One woman told him recently, "Every year you come to my door."

He's also learned that every street in the district has a mayor: the neighbour who's been there for years and keeps an eye on things. He can rattle off their names, street by street.

The neighbourhood looks after him, too. On his walk to our interview, a neighbour who'd just moved in invited him in to see the renovations. People offer him beer, send him home with tomatoes, and one woman gave him her old records. "I think I've gained weight," he says. When he tells councillors from the west end about it, they're surprised. "Why do you get produce?" they ask. Brandon thinks older, established neighbourhoods like his have held on to a sense of belonging.

Not every complaint is one he can fix. When we teased him that the city still hadn't done anything about this year's yellow jacket invasion, he had an answer ready. "I did not vote for the wasps. I was anti-wasp," he says. Bylaw is on it, he adds, and the search for the queen continues.

Brandon is an academic at heart, and he knows it shows. Partway through an answer about food security, he caught himself. "Sorry, I go flip into policy wonk mode way too quickly."

A lot of his life comes down to explaining complicated things to people who didn't ask for a lecture. He teaches at Loyalist College and has been a regular political analyst on CBC and TVO.

He also writes a monthly newsletter for constituents, by himself. Through the month he saves snippets from city staff updates and engagement notices, then pulls them together at the end. With less local news coverage than there used to be, people tell him they use it as their local news.

During council meetings, he posts a play-by-play of the major decisions on social media, good and bad. Residents regularly repost those notes to Reddit's r/KingstonOntario, where they draw thanks. That surprised him, since Reddit is the one platform he's been reluctant to spend time on.

In the classroom, he has what he calls "a very angry relationship with AI." He's read hundreds of undergraduate papers and can spot machine writing on sight. He uses it as a spellchecker, then rewrites anything that doesn't sound like him. He loves a good semicolon, and he's even come around on typos. "It shows me a person wrote that," he says. He's also assigning more presentations, "which they hate, but I love."

Brandon first ran for council in 2022, after two pandemic-era jobs. Through Trent University, he worked on the City of Oshawa's pandemic recovery. As president of OPSEU Local 468 from 2020 to 2024, he spent those years defending frontline workers. "I thought I could be good in politics," he says.

The job humbled him quickly. "When you first get elected, you think you're gonna fix the world, and then you learn very quickly you can't even get a stop sign a block from your house," he says. Every two weeks, councillors get between 500 and 1,100 pages of reports to read. "This job is fundamentally about reading public policy."

Food security is where he'd like to push harder in a second term. He sees the city as a coordinator, helping community partners collect the kind of numbers that win funding from the province and Ottawa. He admits it "might sound boring and bureaucratic," but in his experience, data and evidence are what bring in the money.

He's generous about the other candidates in this year's race. "You can look at the other people and say they're in it for the right reasons," he says. After the 2022 election, he sat down with most of the people who ran against him to hear their ideas, and he worked some of them into his own. Even if you don't win, he says, your ideas still get heard.

Being in front of a camera took longer to get used to. Brandon grew up in what he calls a humble, Catholic Italian family, and putting himself forward didn't come naturally. It took him about two years in office to get comfortable.

Asked for a local favourite, Brandon didn't hesitate. "I will fight on any hill. Coffee Way Donuts."

The shop sits in an unassuming strip mall at Division Street and Concession Street, and the donuts are made fresh every night. He can't explain the apple fritter. "They somehow manage to capture a little piece of heaven in a deep-fried apple donut," he says. The chocolate walnut cruller is "sublime," a word he says he doesn't use casually.

Coffee Way is right where his district meets two others, and the councillors have a running joke about whose it is. If the city ever redraws the boundaries, he says, who gets Coffee Way will be council's biggest fight.

His second shout-out is the Jumpstart Inclusive Playground in Shannon Park, built through the Inclusive Play Project and opened this summer. It's designed so kids of all abilities can play together, and Brandon says other municipalities in Eastern Ontario have been coming to see how it was done. He counts it among the things he's proudest of from this term.

Brandon came to Kingston for a PhD in 2007 and never really stopped being a student of how things work. He still reads hundreds of pages every two weeks and turns them into plain-language notes for anyone who wants them. What stayed with me, though, was how much of his job happens on doorsteps, where he often leaves with a gift of fresh produce or some kind of “goodie”.

Not every message is that kind. "It is long nights. It's thankless," Brandon says of politics, and social media has made it harder, with angry messages landing late at night and on weekends, often about things a councillor can't fix. Anyone who runs for office, or holds it, hears far more complaints than thanks.

So here's a small ask from Kingston Spotlight. Whoever gets your vote, when someone who has put their name forward to serve our community does something you appreciate, tell them. A kind note or a thank-you at the door goes a long way. Gold stars if you share a few tomatoes or goodies, too.

Whoever you vote for on October 26, it helps to know who's running. We've also profiled the other two Kingscourt-Rideau candidates, Michael Judd and Kevin Smith.