The platform

What your vote fights for.

Six priorities. Each one costed. Each one built to keep the dollar in Scarborough.

Every promise below comes with a number and a timeline, because a promise you cannot check is not a promise worth voting for.

Homes for All

At the Golden Mile, roughly 35,000 new units are coming, and only 712 are called affordable. Many of those are 400 square feet selling for close to half a million dollars. That is not affordable, and it was not built for the people who already live here.

Meanwhile, more than a third of renter households in this ward spend over 30 percent of their income on housing, and TCHC residents are living with repairs that never come.

Development in Scarborough has to put community at the centre, or it does not get built.

See the full plan

Rent-to-own, guaranteed. A share of every new development has to be rent-to-own homes. We are fighting for more than 4,000 across the ward, so families can stay here and own here.
Hire local. On every build, 30 to 40 percent of the workforce in construction, security, and maintenance must come from within 3 to 5 kilometres of the site. The dollar stays in Scarborough.
Train our future. Every development mentors 5 to 10 high school co-op students each semester.
Build for the community. Every project delivers a real community benefit: a park, a pool, a playground, a gathering space. Meet every condition, or the answer is no.
A published TCHC audit in year one. Every TCHC building in Ward 21 gets inspected and the findings get published. No more repairs that live in a file nobody reads. Routine inspections and follow-up assessments, on a public schedule, so residents can hold the city to a date.
Real standards for approvals. The city currently signs off on towers that leave neighbours five hours of sunlight. That standard was written for a different Toronto. We will push council to revisit it before the next round of approvals lands on Scarborough.

First 100 days: the TCHC audit begins.

Jobs in Scarborough

Scarborough is a quarter of this city and does not get its fair share. Projects get approved everywhere but here, and our people commute out for work that should exist at home.

This is about more than a paycheque. Get paid, get skilled, and get ahead — in Scarborough.

See the full plan

150 youth hired in the first 100 days. Not a job fair that ends when the tables come down. We track where every participant lands afterward and publish the result.
1,000 youth jobs every summer in office. A costed plan, about $1.16 million a year, modelled on Chicago’s successful youth employment program. It subsidizes wages so local employers can hire local Scarborough residents. Employers here have told us plainly that they want to hire young people and have no pipeline to train them. This builds the pipeline.
Protect the land the jobs sit on. The city’s 2030 Official Plan review is the moment employment lands get redrawn. Right now Scarborough Centre’s designations are blurred, and every year we lose jobs to Ajax, Whitby, and Durham. We will push a council motion to protect and expand employment lands here specifically, before that review closes.
Local hiring in every development. Through Homes for All, Scarborough residents get priority for every role: security, construction, and maintenance.
Stop the leak. Organizations from outside Scarborough book our city-owned facilities with no requirement to hire locally or return anything to the community. Public facilities should carry a public benefit for the people who paid for them.

First 100 days: 150 youth hired.

Bring Back the Lane

After losing our transit line, Scarborough got painted red lanes as a replacement. That is a slap in the face. A trip of less than five kilometres, Eglinton to Ellesmere, can now take half an hour while the red lane sits empty beside you.

See the full plan

Remove the Kennedy Road red bus lane. It is Ward 21’s main artery to the 401, and it is creating gridlock for drivers and riders alike.
Smarter existing lanes. The remaining bus lanes convert to carpool lanes during rush hours, 6 to 10 in the morning and 3 to 6 in the evening, and open to everyone the rest of the day.
Express buses stay fast. They already skip stops. They do not need their own painted lane to keep moving.
Real replacement for what we lost. The RT ran from Kennedy Station to Scarborough Town Centre in roughly 14 minutes with stops along the way. A single-stop extension is not a replacement for a line that served the middle of this ward. We will fight for service that matches what Scarborough actually had.
Consultation before construction, not after. Eglinton showed what happens when a corridor gets torn up for years without a plan for the businesses along it. Storefronts that survived a pandemic did not survive the construction. Before the next shovel goes in the ground here, the people who live and work on that street get consulted first.

Safe Streets, Done Right

Scarborough deserves a councillor who is able to bring residents, community organizations, and Toronto Police to the table and achieve real results.

Officers working in this ward have told us directly that the zones they patrol were drawn roughly 30 years ago and no longer match where anything is actually happening. Budgets keep growing and nobody can produce a public accounting of what the increases bought.

See the full plan

Increase Neighbourhood Community Officer Program. The community officer model puts trained, embedded officers in one area long enough for residents to know their names. It works, officers themselves support it, and it is chronically underfunded compared to standard patrol. We will push to grow it, starting with a pilot in the neighbourhoods that need it most.
Show us the money. Every budget increase gets a public accounting of where it went and what changed. If we cannot measure it, we should not be voting for it.
Update the zones. Redraw patrol boundaries to match where people actually live and where problems actually are, instead of a map from the 1990s.
Fund what prevents. Youth programming, recreation, and jobs are safety spending. The 1,000 summer jobs in priority two are a public safety commitment as much as an economic one.

Food in Every Home

Food banks in this ward are running on volunteers, donations, and people’s own money. They are doing the work the city should be resourcing, and they are doing it without a single point of contact at city hall who can help.

See the full plan

A standing ward food table. One table, meeting regularly, bringing together every food bank, meal program, and community kitchen in Ward 21. Not a consultation that produces a report. A working group with a phone number.
Publish what we actually need. A public accounting of the gap between what these programs can provide and what residents are asking for, updated and visible, so funding conversations start from evidence.
Use what already exists. The Scarborough Ontario Health Team is already doing grassroots outreach here. We connect the food network to it rather than building a parallel structure and calling it new.
Community kitchens that open. Several TCHC buildings in this ward have community kitchens that residents cannot use. Getting those working again costs very little and feeds people immediately.

Parks, Public Space, and the Life of the Ward

Replace the blank spaces that exist in most neighbourhoods in Scarborough with art that reflects community values. We will have communities lead the discussion and partake in painting process.

Public space is where a neighbourhood becomes a community. Ours has been treated as an afterthought.

See the full plan

Restore the mural. Start with that wall. Fund the restoration and let the community that is in the painting decide how it gets brought back.
A community-nominated beautification fund. A small annual fund where residents nominate the projects: a mural, a park bench, a basketball court resurfacing, a garden. Decisions made through community institutions, not handed down.
Public space that gets used. Community benefits negotiated through Homes for All go toward parks, playgrounds, pools, and gathering spaces that this ward is missing.
Show up. A city official once suggested that barbecues in one of our neighbourhoods invite trouble. We ran one anyway, with a basketball tournament and a mural the community painted themselves. Hundreds of people came. Nothing happened except a good day. That is the answer to that argument, and we will keep making it happen.
Convert underused baseball diamonds into soccer pitches and cricket pitches.

The money

How we pay for this

Every candidate makes promises. Fewer will tell you where the money comes from, so here is our answer.

We are not funding this with a property tax increase. Raising taxes in Scarborough pushes more families out to Durham, and the families who leave are exactly the ones this ward cannot afford to lose.

There is a more honest problem underneath it. Scarborough already sends more property tax revenue downtown than it gets back in service and capital spending. New city revenue has a long history of funding projects in other parts of Toronto. Voting for a tax increase without first fixing that math means Scarborough pays twice.

So the commitments on this page are built to be funded three ways: through the city’s existing capital and program budgets, redirected toward a ward that has been underserved for twenty years; through conditions attached to development that is happening here anyway, at no cost to taxpayers; and through a costed program of about $1.16 million a year for youth employment, which is a small fraction of what this city already spends and one of the highest-return investments available to it.

Getting Scarborough its fair share is not a slogan. It is the job so many Ward 21 residents have asked Uthish Ganesh to take on.

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