Ward 16 — Don Valley East

Don Valley East is a mid-sized ward in north-central Toronto, stretching from the Don Valley Parkway east to Victoria Park Avenue and from the 401 south to Eglinton Avenue. The ward takes in Flemingdon Park, Don Mills, Victoria Village, and Graydon Hall — communities that together illustrate the profound economic divides within Toronto's inner suburbs. Don Mills, developed by E.P. Taylor in the 1950s as Canada's first planned postwar suburb, includes affluent single-family enclaves alongside aging apartment clusters. Flemingdon Park, developed in the 1960s as one of the city's first master-planned high-density communities, is now a predominantly immigrant neighbourhood with large South Asian, Somali, and Afghan populations and a median household income roughly one-third below the Ontario average. With a population of approximately 95,000, the ward is among the smaller wards by population.

Don Valley East produced the second-closest result in the city: Bailão won by exactly 15 votes, 7,373 to 7,358 — a margin of 0.07 percentage points. The knife-edge outcome reflected the ward's genuine demographic split. Chow dominated advance voting with 869 advance ballots to Bailão's 383, but Bailão overcame that deficit on election day with roughly 6,900 election-day votes to Chow's 6,100. Saunders placed third at 9.8 percent and Furey at 6.1 percent. At 21,958 ballots, turnout was among the lowest in the city — Flemingdon Park's traditionally low voter participation likely suppressed what could have been a stronger Chow showing. Councillor Jon Burnside, a former Toronto Police officer elected in 2022 to succeed long-serving Denzil Minnan-Wong, served as TTC chair.

Municipal Issues

The Ontario Line's planned Flemingdon Park station was the ward's most significant transit project. The station, to be located on Don Mills Road, promised rapid transit connections for a community where an estimated 28,900 daily TTC riders depended on the overcrowded 25 Don Mills bus. But construction timelines remained uncertain, and residents were wary of disruption to an already congested corridor.

The tension between the ward's affluent and low-income communities defined local politics. Don Mills and Banbury-Don Mills homeowners, with properties valued well above $1.5 million, faced a fundamentally different set of concerns from Flemingdon Park tenants, where over half of renter households spent more than 30 percent of their income on housing. Major development proposals — including the 5,000-unit Crosstown Place project — promised to reshape the Don Mills corridor, but raised questions about whether new development would serve existing residents or simply accelerate displacement.