They cut a slice off Scarborough and gave it to North York, but Scarborough is fighting back. Will it be enough?

Why the redrawing of electoral boundaries means more than an identity crisis for a suburban neighbourhood

Thestar.com
Jan. 24, 2023
Katie Daubs

In the fall of 2017, at her first university party, Julia D’Silva made small talk in a room of strangers. One guy asked where she was from. She told him Scarborough. “Aren’t you afraid to walk home at night?” he asked.

Nobody would ask that if she had said Etobicoke -- or Mississauga, where he was from. But to be from Scarborough is to go to bat for Scarborough every day against those who would seek to underfund, overlook and undermine it.

It’s part of Scarborough’s identity, and she’s talking about it because it’s in peril. Because of the way Ontario is growing, the northwestern borderlands of Scarborough -- slices of the Scarborough-Agincourt and Scarborough Centre ridings -- might be annexed into two North York ridings in a redrawing of the federal electoral map. The final report from the Ontario commission -- which has had a few months to mull over feedback -- is expected in February.

D’Silva was born after amalgamation, when Scarborough was no longer its own city. But the old borders still mean something. She grew up in Agincourt, with kids who lived in subsidized housing, apartments and postwar bungalows. Kids with different cultures and backgrounds. Kids who understood that

Scarborough wasn’t a scary street at night. Now, her childhood home is slated to join a North York riding: “It almost feels like a slap in the face when for so long we’ve had to prove ourselves as worthy,” says D’Silva, who is now a second-year law student at the University of Ottawa.

“The reality is that the residents of North York do not understand, do not care about, and cannot be expected to vote in Scarborough’s best interest,” she wrote in a letter to the electoral boundary commission for Ontario. “To reduce the representation of the area of Toronto which needs it the most is a gross oversight and a perpetuation of long-standing governmental neglect of Canada’s racialized and working-class communities.”

Every 10 years, Elections Canada looks at how the population has shifted to ensure representation is effective and fair. Based on the 2021 census, Ontario was given one extra seat, bringing the total to 122. That means that the average riding population -- or electoral quota -- has increased to 116,590. By law, the commission has to make “every effort” to ensure each riding is within 25 per cent of the quota. The appointed Ontario commission, chaired by Justice Lynne C. Leitch and including professors Karen Bird and Peter Loewen, aimed to keep each riding in the province within 10 per cent of that number.

Sitting in their office in London, they had a puzzle to solve. In the last decade, Toronto’s population had grown by 6.9 per cent. That sounds like progress until you look at the rest of the province, which had grown by 11.7 per cent since 2011. In Halton, Guelph and Wellington the growth was closer to 20 per cent. The city of Brampton exploded with a 25 per cent population increase.

Pedestrians cross at Victoria Park Avenue and Sheppard Avenue East. On the west side is North York, on the east is Scarborough. A redrawing of the federal electoral map shifts a chunk of Scarborough, including this area, to North York ? a proposal that has sparked a backlash.

In Toronto, the average riding held close to 112,000 people. Parts of downtown and Etobicoke were booming, while some midtown, North York and Scarborough ridings were growing modestly, stagnant or declining. The commissioners tinkered with the map. Using the census data and population projections, they redrew Scarborough and the rest of Toronto until the average riding held a population of 116,000. When the proposal was done, Scarborough had lost a seat, and a crucial piece of its identity.

Victoria Park Avenue -- Vic Park, V.P. -- has long been Scarborough’s western boundary, an asphalt welcome mat on the way home from Toronto and North York. The road starts with a steep rise from the R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant and grows wider as it passes the malls of Golden Mile, the midrise apartments of Wexford, and the bright orange facade of Johnny’s Hamburgers in Agincourt, where the regulars know you don’t ask for lettuce (they don’t have it). On the west side is North York, on the east is Scarborough. That’s how it’s been since 1850. But now, this whole artery north of Eglinton Avenue would run through the ridings of Don Valley North and Don Valley East.

That’s not going over well. At the public consultation this fall, one man stood up and compared it to the partition of India. People were worried about having one less voice for the city’s most diverse neighbourhoods. Non-governmental organizations were concerned about their funding and ability to serve vulnerable residents. Many feared that the census data didn’t capture their reality -- the condos under construction, the transit projects in the pipeline, the undocumented workers, the people who were afraid to answer their door to a census taker during the worst of the pandemic.

Julia D'Silva grew up in the riding of Scarborough-Agincourt, part of which is slated to join a North York riding. She calls the proposal "a gross oversight and a perpetuation of long-standing governmental neglect of Canada's racialized and working-class communities."

“You’re going to bring a lot of folks anxiety and discomfort,” said Alvin Curling, a former Scarborough MPP. “The culture of Scarborough is what holds it together.”

Leighanne Woodstock watched the livestream of the meeting from her home near Warden and Finch avenues. She sells Scarborough T-shirts as a side gig, so she is familiar with Scarborough pride, but she’d never seen a collective display. Old people, young people, people from all over making speeches with the passion of Mel Gibson’s William Wallace in “Braveheart.” “Everyone was so gung ho and willing to speak up for where we live,” she says. “It was beautiful to watch.”

“Identifying as a resident of Scarborough means a lot more to people than you might know, sometimes even more so than identifying with the city of Toronto itself,” Mayor John Tory explained in his letter imploring the commission to reconsider. “For years and years the residents of Scarborough have voiced that they feel unfairly treated and overlooked by governments, and this decision would just reaffirm the idea in many people’s minds.”

Scarborough Health Network, Centennial College, Bridlewood Mall, residents, they all wrote to the commission: We are diverse, interconnected, still growing. Don’t break up our community. We need more representation, not less.

Many wrote that Scarborough was a “community of interest.” That was not a coincidence. In addition to looking at the cold hard numbers, commissioners take many things into account, including regions that share common attributes, whether they are racial, linguistic, religious or economic. It’s a loosely defined concept that acts as a “counterweight to unbridled application of the principle of population equality,” John C. Courtney, professor emeritus at the University of Saskatchewan, writes in his 2002 article in the now defunct Elections Canada magazine Electoral Insight.

Longtime Scarborough resident Leighanne Woodstock has been blown away by the collective fight to keep Scarborough whole. She is shown in front of iconic Scarborough restaurant Johnny's Hamburgers. The restaurant could soon be in a North York riding.

Every time boundaries are redrawn, cities and towns make the claim of “community of interest.” Sometimes it is “barely disguised political self-interest” from a politician who stands to lose his or her riding, or a “parochial understanding” from members of the public, Courtney writes. With only one additional seat for Ontario, and overstuffed ridings across the province, something has to give. It wouldn’t be fair to communities who had added tens of thousands of people.

The proposal calls for three new ridings in the Uxbridge, Milton and Brampton areas, all relieving population pressure around the GTA. Boundaries are shifting across the province. Both northern Ontario and Scarborough will lose a riding.

“There’s this idea of, ‘Shouldn’t you be happy to be in North York? Isn’t that better? Isn’t that more Toronto?’” Julia D’Silva says. But when that Scarborough culture is part of your life, taking it away -- even in the form of a riding boundary -- doesn’t sit right.

The four ridings that border each other in Scarborough and North York both have majority immigrant populations, but there are more newcomers in Scarborough. The median incomes are similar, but people make less money in the Scarborough ridings, according to the most recent census data.

In her constituency office, Scarborough-Agincourt MP Jean Yip has a map of food bank visits across Toronto. It shows the need in Scarborough is higher than anywhere else, including North York.

She is sitting at a table covered in donated canned goods, maps and piles of letters. One is handwritten from a woman in her 90s, pleading with Yip to do everything she can to stop this.

“A lot of people, they’re not fancy people, they simply wrote from the heart,” Yip says.

Scarborough-Agincourt MP Jean Yip says the battle to stop Scarborough from losing a riding isn’t about her job -- which would be in jeopardy if the riding is taken away -- but representation for her diverse constituents.

Yip has just come from a citizenship ceremony, so she is patriotically accessorized with a maple leaf scarf. She bought it from a dollar store down the road. She loves a good deal. It’s the Scarborough in her, she laughs. Yip was born in Scarborough, and spent most of her life here, although she now lives just outside of the riding. Her husband, Arnold Chan, was the MP for Scarborough-Agincourt until he died of cancer in 2017. She didn’t want to disrupt the lives of her three sons by moving.

It’s a blustery day outside her office. The crane across the street is covered in snow. There are cranes all along Sheppard, she says, finding a document on the table that lists the two condos finished after the census, the five projects under construction, the 15 waiting to begin. Homes for thousands of families, another reason she thinks the plan is short-sighted. (The commission does consider future growth, using population projections from the province.)

Her constituents are friendly, hard-working, practical people. She reaches into a cardboard box on a window ledge and pulls out a small key chain she gives to constituents. Attached is a shopping cart coin so you don’t have to scramble for a quarter. In Scarborough, these things have to be useful.

Losing a riding comes with consequences. It signals diminishment and decline, says Myer Siemiatycki, professor emeritus at Toronto Metropolitan University. It gives the federal government more latitude to dismiss a region’s concerns, or not rank them as high on its agenda, he says: “It’s a real continuation of this pattern of under-representing and underappreciating Scarborough.”

Those effects could trickle down to other levels of government too. Since the Mike Harris era, the province has aligned with federal boundary changes (with the exception of northern Ontario, which has more ridings provincially). It’s up to the province to follow along, and many are curious to see what

Premier Doug Ford does. His family has a personal history with redistricting. When Ontario downsized its ridings in the “Fewer Politicians Act” of the late 1990s, the premier’s father, Doug Ford Sr., lost a bitter battle for the newly created riding of Etobicoke Centre. A spokesperson for Ford’s office says it would be too early to comment on their plans.

If the province goes ahead, Toronto’s ward boundaries would follow suit as per the City of Toronto Act, which would trigger a change to community council boundaries. Mailing addresses would stay the same, according to Canada Post, and so would Toronto police divisions. The Municipal Property Assessment Corp. says a home’s value in a “given market area” is independent of electoral boundaries.

Victoria Park Avenue has been a longstanding boundary between Scarborough and North York. In 1958, the corner that is now home to Johnny's Hamburgers was a sleepy rural intersection. Looking south at Sheppard Avenue intersection.

In Ontario, the Home and Community Care Support Services network (formerly known as Local Health Integration Networks) is divided regionally, and Victoria Park Avenue serves as a boundary between several districts. A spokesperson said they are not aware of any changes being made at this time.

Anna Wong, the executive director of Community Family Services of Ontario, a Scarborough organization that provides counselling and settlement services, says Scarborough has very specific needs. If parts of Scarborough become North York, “I think we will really lose out” on resource allocation, she says.

The Ontario commissioners were meant to file their report in December, but they asked for an extension. There is still time to make changes, and that makes Yip hopeful they’re taking Scarborough’s concerns to heart. But Ontario has grown -- and not grown -- in ways that need to be reckoned with. The report is expected around Feb. 9, and from there, the process grinds forward. The chief electoral officer of Canada will make an order, describing and naming the electoral districts of Canada, and seven months after that, the new boundaries can be used in an election.

If the western part of Yip’s riding becomes North York in the next election cycle, the rest will merge with Scarborough North to form a new riding called Scarborough Northwest. There will be room for only one MP where there are now two.

On a rainy Tuesday, she walks through the Bridlewood Mall, where Lunar New Year decorations are on sale. A constituent recognizes her and tries to convince her to share a savoury bun, which she politely declines. She stops at the library branch, asking them to remember seniors in their ongoing rebuild.

Outside, her pink scarf pops in the misty grey January day. TTC buses unload their passengers at the corner of Warden and Finch, which could be part of the new border in the years to come. Yip says this isn’t about her job. “At some point I’ll be gone,” she says.

It’s about losing the Agincourt name. It’s about Victoria Park Avenue, Pharmacy Avenue and Warden Avenue, streets that have been so central to Scarborough’s identity. It’s about the growth that’s happening already, the growth to come. It’s about funding and representation. Her riding, she says, is shaped like a loaf of bread: “We’re as multi-grain as they come.”