Toronto residents will cast their ballots for the city’s next mayor on Monday and while Olivia Chow is the overall frontrunner, she could face some tough competition in two of the city’s former boroughs: North York and Scarborough.
According to the latest Mainstreet Research poll, Chow and Bailao are essentially in a statistical tie with 27.5 and 26.8 per cent each respectively among decided voters in North York. CP24.com’s Bryann Aguilar took a closer look at some of the key issues in communities in that part of the city in this piece.
Over in Scarborough, Chow has 30.2 per cent support among decided voters, while Bailão has 28 per cent.
CP24.com recently spoke with four local leaders from the former east-end borough, which is home to roughly a quarter of Toronto’s residents and is seen by many as a key mayoral byelection battleground, despite have traditionally lower voter turnout.
Here is what they said:
PUBLIC TRANSIT
Jim Faught, a retired environmental consultant who says he’s worked on almost every transit project in the GTA, spoke with CP24.com about Scarborough’s immediate need for more and better public transit.
Faught, who is a member of Scarborough Community Renewal Organization, noted of Toronto’s 52 subway stops, just two are in Scarborough. He also said that while the Scarborough subway extension is expected to bring three more to the community, that won’t happen until at least 2030.
In the meantime, the line 3 Scarborough RT, which will eventually be replaced by the subway extension, is expected to shut down on Nov. 19.
Until those new stations are ready, transit users in Scarborough will be getting around on bus along Midland Avenue and Kennedy Road between Scarborough Centre and Kennedy stations.
“We still have seven or eight years of hell head of us,” he said, adding it's his hope that old LRT line will one day be adaptively re-used as a unique public green space.
“By the end of this mayor’s term there should be shovels in the ground. There’s no excuse,” Faught said.
The Eglinton Crosstown LRT has seven stops in Scarborough, but that project has also seen a series of costly delays and according to Metrolinx may open sometime in 2024 at the earliest.
“We need to learn lessons from went wrong with the Crosstown and apply them to the next project,” he said, adding Toronto’s next mayor will need to strongly advocate for the provincial and the federal governments to do their part to fund public transit throughout the city.
“Scarborough has the longest commute in the city. People’s lives are affected.”
AFFORDABLE HOUSING
Rev. Alexander Wilson, of St. Stephen’s Presbyterian Church, has been spent the better part of a decade working to construct an affordable 10-storey apartment building at the site of his church at 3817 Lawrence Ave. E., just east of Markham Road.
After several obstacles and delays, the project is now underway and Wilson said they hope it will be 80 per cent ready by the end of 2025.
He said there are many non-profit groups and organizations, and even developers who want to build affordable housing in the community, but there’s often so much red tape and financial challenges that many end up pausing or even cancelling their project all together.
“I think whoever is mayor needs to advocate for funding from the provincial and federal governments. … The cost of everything is way too high and there’s not enough government money to make them happen,” said Wilson, who wants to see more funding dedicated to the city’s Open Door Affordable Housing Program, which accelerates affordable housing construction by providing City financial contributions including capital funding and fees and property tax relief, fast-tracking planning approvals, and activating surplus public land. This initiative aims to help the City of Toronto further the goals of its Housing TO 2020-2030 Action Plan, which has the goal of approving 40,000 new affordable rental homes and 4,000 new affordable ownership homes by 2030.
“There are many opportunities to do innovative things, but we need to think outside of the box to build affordable housing,” he said.
“If churches and other spaces are lost, it’s a real loss for the community. No one wants to be forced to sell off their site to the highest bigger, but there’s no concerted strategy.”
Wilson said a lot of these hurdles can be overcome if the city streamlined and simplified its zoning and planning policies.
FOOD SECURITY
The high cost of living coupled with challenges accessing food is hitting Scarborough especially hard, says Suman Roy, the founder and executive director of Feed Scarborough, an organization that began small in 2018 and has since grown to serve more than 7,500 people a week in the former borough’s south end through six food banks, a mobile healthy meal program, and community gardens, among other things.
“It’s heartbreaking,” he said, noting 38 per cent of his clients have at least one full-time job.
Roy said rent and bills quickly eat up wages earned, leaving many of his clients with almost nothing to feed their families. Roughly 30 per cent of Feed Scarborough’s clients are children, he noted.
Accessing good, affordable food is another big challenge Scarborough residents face, he added.
“We have a huge amount of food deserts and it’s growing,” Roy told CP24.com, pointing to the recent closure of Sun Valley Markey on Victoria Park, just south of Eglinton.
“It’s a problem with our planning. We’re losing lots of grocery and food stores to development and they’re not being replaced, especially in south Scarborough.”
He said the loss of employment lands in Scarborough is also resulting in precarious employment for many of its residents, many of whom are newcomers to Canada.
“We are failing our future generations,” he said, adding tangible solutions are needed at the city level to address these challenges and get people out of poverty.
“We have to stop blaming the province and the federal government.”
Roy, who previously served as a member of the Toronto Board of Health and helped write the city’s first food strategy in 2018, said creating more “truly” affordable housing along with reinstating the Toronto Food Policy Council, which was abolished in 2020 due to the reallocation of resources, are key first steps.
“We need to come up with active ideas. We also need to figure out the taxation piece,” said Roy, who also chairs Food Share Toronto and Scarborough Arts.
Lastly, Roy said Toronto’s mayor needs to serve all of its residents, including those in parts of the city with low voter turnout, like Scarborough.
“The number of votes aren’t there, but people shouldn’t feel forgotten in Scarborough,” he said.
“I think the next mayor has a lot of work to do.”
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT/LEADERSHIP
People in Scarborough need and want a strong mayor who can address challenges and maximize opportunities in communities, while effectively leading the city as a whole, says the organizer of a mayoral byelection debate in the former borough.
Dave Hardy, a long-time land-use and environmental planner who helped found the Scarborough Community Renewal Organization, said all he’s heard from mayoral candidates are ways to deal with symptoms, not root causes.
“We need vision and leadership,” he told CP24.com during a recent interview.
Hardy, who is the executive director of the Institute for New Urbanism, said one example of that is city’s Official Plan, which he called a “re-hash” of the previous one that emphasizes housing, instead of focusing on making Toronto a world class city.
“(It) could almost be called a plan for managing decline,” he said, adding good cities make efforts to foster culture, recreation, and tourism, build effective public transit, and undertake thoughtful planning, among other things.
Hardy also said that Toronto needs a leader who will focus on improving the economy through investment and good jobs - throughout the city.
“The core of the city is traditionally the major commercial powerhouse, but post-COVID people don’t want to return to work,” Hardy said, adding Scarborough, where he lived for 50 years, is in dire need of a dedicated economic development team to attract and retain business and create good jobs.
“Suburbs have a significant portion of the population and are a place for home and work, more than ever. What we need is a view for improving the economy and jobs across the city,” he said.
Thirdly, Hardy pointed to the need for “better governance,” which he said would lead to stronger partnerships between politicians and “highly competent and professional” city staff so that everyone is “moving in the same direction.”
He said Toronto need only to look to regions in the GTHA, like Peel, York and Durham, to achieve that.
“Toronto has a lot of sleepy politicians. They get elected and stay elected,” Hardy said, adding while overall the city’s elected officials do a good job, their focus tends to be solely on the ward they represent.
“Good staff help advance a good government’s vision. … We need to look at Toronto as being part of a bigger picture. There needs to be constant renewal.”
For a closer look at the issues in Scarborough and what the candidates are promising check out CP24.com's PROMISE TRACKER.
