Ward 20 — Scarborough Southwest

Scarborough Southwest sits at the boundary between old Toronto and the former city of Scarborough, with Victoria Park Avenue marking the historic dividing line along the ward's western edge. The ward stretches east to Midland Avenue and from Lake Ontario north to Eglinton Avenue, taking in Birch Cliff, Cliffside, Cliffcrest, the Scarborough Bluffs waterfront, Oakridge, and the Golden Mile — a postwar industrial corridor along Eglinton Avenue that is being reimagined as a mixed-use neighbourhood. With a population of roughly 110,000, the ward is ethnically diverse, with established South Asian, Black, Filipino, and Chinese communities alongside long-time residents whose families have lived in the area for generations. The housing stock is predominantly postwar single-family homes and townhouses, with rental apartment clusters along Kingston Road and the Eglinton corridor.

Chow won Scarborough Southwest with 35.7 percent (9,981 votes) to Bailão's 30.6 percent (8,559), a margin of 1,422 — making it one of the more competitive wards in Scarborough. Saunders took 9.9 percent, Furey 6.5 percent, and Mitzie Hunter earned a notable 4.0 percent, above her city-wide average, drawing on connections to the broader Scarborough community. Chow dominated advance voting with 1,428 ballots to Bailão's 470, but the election-day result was nearly tied: Chow took roughly 8,000 election-day votes to Bailão's roughly 8,000. Councillor Gary Crawford, who had represented the area for more than a decade, was a veteran presence at City Hall.

Municipal Issues

The Golden Mile redevelopment was the ward's most transformative planning initiative. The 1.6-kilometre stretch of Eglinton Avenue, once home to factories and big-box retail, was being replanned as a dense, mixed-use community with thousands of residential units built around the future Eglinton Crosstown LRT stations at Birchmount, Ionview, and Kennedy. But with the Eglinton LRT still unfinished, residents questioned whether the infrastructure would arrive before the development — a pattern they had seen elsewhere in the city.

The Scarborough Bluffs, which provide the ward's lakefront identity, were both a community asset and a planning challenge. Erosion threatened the cliff face, and public access to the waterfront remained limited compared to the beaches farther west. The ward's position straddling the old Toronto-Scarborough boundary gave residents a particular sensitivity to transit equity arguments: west of Victoria Park, the subway and streetcar network provided frequent service, while Scarborough residents east of the line depended on bus routes that had been reduced in the 2023 service cuts.