Scarborough Southwest

Scarborough Southwest covers the western and southern edges of Scarborough in the City of Toronto, bounded by Victoria Park Avenue to the west, Lake Ontario and the Scarborough Bluffs to the south, Eglinton Avenue to the north, and Markham Road to the east. The riding takes in the neighbourhoods of Birch Cliff, Cliffside, Cliffcrest, Oakridge, Kennedy Park, Clairlea, and parts of the Golden Mile, combining established waterfront communities along the bluffs with denser urban areas further inland.

Candidates

Bill Blair (Liberal) — Born in Scarborough in 1954, Blair spent four decades with the Toronto Police Service, joining as a constable while attending university and rising through assignments in the drug squad, organized crime, and major criminal investigations. He was appointed Chief of Police in 2005 and served in the role for a decade before retiring in April 2015. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in economics and criminology from the University of Toronto. Recruited by the Liberal Party, he was first elected in 2015 and was seeking his second term.

Kimberly Fawcett Smith (Conservative) — A retired twenty-two-year veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces, Fawcett Smith served as a combat engineer with deployments to Afghanistan in 2002 and 2008. She held a Master of Architecture degree from the University of Manitoba and had earlier worked as a constituency assistant for an MP in the late 1980s.

Keith McCrady (NDP) — A resident of the Cliffside neighbourhood, McCrady had worked for a decade at Native Child and Family Services of Toronto and served as executive director of 2-Spirited People of the 1st Nations. He was an educator and advocate who had fostered over thirty children and received awards for his work with vulnerable youth.

Amanda Cain (Green Party) — Cain ran for the Green Party in Scarborough Southwest.

Italo Eratostene stood for the People's Party of Canada and Simon Luisi for the Animal Protection Party.

About the Riding

Scarborough Southwest's southern neighbourhoods—Birch Cliff, Cliffside, and Cliffcrest—are characterized by tree-lined streets and single-family homes perched above Lake Ontario, with access to waterfront parks and trails along the Scarborough Bluffs. Birch Cliff, one of Scarborough's oldest communities, dates to the 1920s, while Cliffside was developed as a large-scale subdivision during the postwar boom. The Golden Mile along Eglinton Avenue East originated as one of Canada's first model industrial parks, built on the site of a massive Second World War munitions plant that employed over five thousand workers producing munitions for the Allied war effort.

Further north and inland, the riding's character changes to a more urban landscape of apartment towers and commercial strips along Kingston Road and Lawrence Avenue East. Kennedy Park is home to one of Toronto's larger concentrations of Somali-Canadian residents, and successive waves of immigration from South Asia, the Caribbean, the Philippines, and the Middle East have shaped the commercial corridors. Bengali, Tagalog, and Tamil are among the most commonly spoken non-English languages.

Transit access was a recurring concern, with many residents relying on bus routes feeding into the Kennedy and Warden subway stations and facing long commutes to employment centres elsewhere in the city. Housing affordability had become an acute issue, with rising rents and property values squeezing a community where median incomes sat below the Toronto average. The 2019 contest drew particular attention because of Blair's high public profile as Toronto's former police chief and his role in the Liberal government's cannabis legalization file during the previous Parliament.