Scarborough Centre--Don Valley East

Scarborough Centre--Don Valley East is a newly created riding under the 2022 redistribution, merging the former Scarborough Centre with parts of the old Don Valley East. Located in the eastern half of Toronto, the riding encompasses neighbourhoods including Woburn, Bendale, Ionview, and portions of the Don Mills corridor. It is among the most linguistically diverse ridings in Canada, with more than a dozen mother tongues spoken in significant numbers -- English leads at roughly 53 percent, followed by Tagalog, Arabic, Tamil, Mandarin, Greek, Farsi, Cantonese, and Spanish. Approximately half of residents are immigrants, drawn from South Asia, the Middle East, East Asia, the Caribbean, and Southern Europe.

Candidates

Salma Zahid (Liberal) is the incumbent, first elected in Scarborough Centre in 2015 and re-elected in 2019 and 2021. Born in Coventry, England, and raised in Pakistan, Zahid immigrated to Canada in the late 1990s and settled in Scarborough, where she has lived since 2000. She holds a master's degree in educational management from the University of London and an MBA from Quaid-i-Azam University. Before entering politics, she worked as a community organizer and held multiple positions with the Government of Ontario. In Parliament, she chaired the Standing Committee on Science and Research.

Belent Mathew (Conservative) is a legal consultant who left Kerala, India, nearly three decades ago and established a legal consultancy firm with his wife in the Greater Toronto Area. Active in the Malayali Canadian community, he has served in organizations including the Durham Malayalee Association, Toronto Malayalee Samajam, and the Canadian Cochin Club.

Alyson Koa (NDP) ran as the New Democratic Party candidate, bringing a focus on affordability and public services to the campaign.

Peter Koubakis (People's Party) also stood as a candidate.

About the Riding

Scarborough Centre--Don Valley East is a working- and middle-class riding where the service economy predominates. Retail, health care, social services, and small-scale manufacturing provide the bulk of employment. The Scarborough Town Centre, one of the largest shopping malls in eastern Toronto, anchors the riding's commercial core and serves as a transit hub. The area's housing stock is a mix of postwar bungalows, mid-rise apartment buildings from the 1960s and 1970s, and newer condominium towers.

The riding's extraordinary diversity was both a source of community pride and a complicating factor in the 2025 campaign, as candidates navigated a patchwork of immigrant communities with distinct concerns. Cost of living was the overarching theme: grocery prices, rent increases, and child-care costs burdened households with median incomes below the Toronto average. Many residents work in precarious or part-time employment, making affordability pressures especially acute.

Health-care access was another persistent concern. The riding lies within the catchment area of Scarborough Health Network, whose hospitals have struggled with overcrowding and emergency-room wait times for years. Advocates have long argued that Scarborough is underserved relative to its population, and the campaign for a new hospital or expanded facilities continued to resonate with voters in 2025.