Council race turns bitter in York South-Weston
Residents face challenges, including flooding, crime, youth unemployment, expected development
The Star identified several “Wards to Watch” in a 47-ward election. Now that new legislation has made it a 25-ward election, we have determined all of the wards are worth watching. This is one in a series of articles. The election is on Oct. 22. Advance voting begins on Oct. 10.
There’s drama in the York SouthWeston election race.
The crowded 11-candidate contest includes two veteran incumbents: councillors Frances Nunziata and Frank Di Giorgio.
The new, larger Ward 5 — formed after the province recently slashed the number of councillors in Toronto — combines the former Ward 11, where Nunziata was councillor, and Ward 12, Di Giorgio’s turf.
The race has featured some nasty squabbles involving Nunziata, a feisty, street-savvy veteran politician and former City of York mayor, and Chiara Padovani, one of the other candidates running.
City council allies Paula Fletcher and Mary Fragedakis faced one another for the first time as opponents vying for the remaining council seat in Toronto-Danforth.
But although the councillors for the old wards 30 and 29 respectively will be asking voters in the newly merged wards to choose between them rather than support the both of them, the all-candidates’ debate at Centennial College’s East York campus was hardly a relatively bloodless affair.
Both councillors — and many of the other seven candidates who attended — spared much of their ire for Ontario Premier Doug Ford, whose legislation cutting Toronto Council from 47 members to 25 threw much of the 2018 municipal election season into chaos. “Sadly, Doug Ford has changed the rules of this election after it started,” Fragedakis said in her closing statement. “This is not the election we signed up for.”
Fletcher kicked things off at the beginning of the night with a similar lament about the election season, which began in July with the introduction of Bill 5 to cut Toronto Council to 25 members, then shifted with court challenges, appeals and the threatened invocation of the notwithstanding clause in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
“This is a very difficult election,” she said. “First we had 47 wards, then 25, then 47 and then 25 again because of terrible meddling by Doug Ford. I’m meeting voters who are very upset with making the choices they have to make.”
Through the meeting, Fletcher and Fragedakis highlighted their own accomplishments as councillors: Fragedakis touted her work on the Toronto Transit Commission, promoting the two-hour transit pass on the TTC while Fletcher spoke about her work managing planning and development around future transit stations on the downtown relief line. And both emphasized the need to take a strong stance against what were likely to be more interventions by Premier Ford and Queen’s Park.
“It’s going to be four difficult years because we’ve seen that Doug Ford has started off in a certain way and I believe he has more in store for the city,” Fletcher said. Other candidates at the meeting amplified that. Candidate Ryan Lindsay said that the new smaller council was an opportunity and that it would be up to the new councillor to go head to head with an aggressive and public-relations-conscious premier.
“If Doug Ford comes in with his terrible ideas we need to lean into the punch with our better ideas,” said Lindsay, who painted himself as a fiscally responsible alternative in the crowded race.
A total of nine council candidates showed up to the evening — one, Alexandro Pena, uninvited — tackling local issues that included bike lanes and cycling safety, development issues surrounding the eventual Pape interchange on the downtown relief line, strategies for dealing with people with psychiatric issues and the aftermath of the mass shooting on the Danforth this summer. There was broad support for Toronto council’s request that the federal government ban handguns in Toronto, and support for protected bike lanes — and for bike lanes on the Danforth.