Ward 21 — Scarborough Centre

Scarborough Centre is a quintessentially suburban ward anchored by the Scarborough Town Centre — one of the largest shopping malls in the GTA and the commercial and civic hub of the former city of Scarborough. The ward stretches from Victoria Park Avenue east to Midland Avenue and from Highway 401 north to Steeles Avenue, taking in the Agincourt South–Malvern West neighbourhood, Scarborough City Centre, and parts of the Woburn area. With a population of roughly 115,000, the ward is heavily diverse with large South Asian, Chinese, Filipino, and Caribbean communities. The housing stock is primarily postwar single-family homes and townhouses interspersed with apartment towers, and the ward has a significant renter population.

Chow won Scarborough Centre with 34.6 percent (7,970 votes) to Bailão's 30.6 percent (7,062), a margin of 908 votes. Saunders placed third with a relatively strong 11.2 percent, Furey took 5.5 percent, and Mitzie Hunter earned 3.9 percent. Chow dominated advance voting with 1,091 ballots to Bailão's 357, but the election-day result was essentially tied — Bailão actually led on election day with roughly 6,600 votes to Chow's 6,500. The 23,061 total votes were modest for a ward of this size, reflecting Scarborough's generally lower by-election turnout compared to downtown wards. Councillor Michael Thompson, who had represented the area since 2003, was one of council's longest-serving members.

Municipal Issues

The looming closure of Line 3 (the Scarborough RT) — the line would be permanently shuttered after a derailment in late July 2023, just weeks after the by-election — was already hanging over the ward. The aging elevated rapid transit line, which had connected Kennedy station to Scarborough Town Centre and McCowan station since 1985, was being decommissioned with only bus replacement service to fill the gap until the planned Scarborough subway extension opened years later. The subway replacement, whose projected cost had ballooned through successive redesigns from roughly $2 billion to over $5 billion, had become a symbol of Scarborough's fraught relationship with transit planning: decades of debate, cancelled projects, and broken promises.

The ward's proximity to Scarborough Town Centre made it a focal point for the broader redevelopment of Scarborough's civic core. Plans to transform the mall-dominated district into a more mixed-use, transit-oriented centre had been discussed for years, but progress was slow. Meanwhile, the ward's residential neighbourhoods faced the familiar challenges of aging infrastructure, insufficient community services, and rising costs in a part of the city that felt consistently underserved relative to the taxes its residents paid.