The mayor of Toronto, the largest city in Canada, John Tory, submitted his resignation unexpectedly on Friday night after it was made public that he had an extramarital affair with an employee 37 years younger.
Tory announced her resignation at a press conference an hour after The Toronto Star newspaper revealed details of the relationship.
The 68-year-old mayor, who had been re-elected to office in October 2022, called the relationship "an error of judgement."
The politician has been married since 1978 and has four children and six grandchildren.
Tory, a prominent conservative businessman who first became mayor of Toronto in 2014, said he was resigning because he did not want the mayor's image to suffer from the scandal.
Precisely in 2014 Tory replaced another conservative politician, Rob Ford, who between 2010 and 2014 plunged the mayor's office into a chain of scandals.
Ford, who suffered from drug and alcohol addiction, appeared on several occasions drunk in public. In 2013, he was accused of sexually assaulting a woman and shortly afterward, a video was released showing the mayor of Toronto smoking "crack", a form of cocaine.
