For residents of Toronto’s easternmost ward, City Hall—and the people making essential decisions about how the city is run—can feel a million miles away. In Scarborough–Rouge Park, a riding where some residents feel closer to their neighbours in Markham or Pickering than to decision-makers on Queen Street West, it’s sometimes hard to feel connected to what happens at city council. Choosing someone to represent the ward is a matter of bridging that gap—of deciding who could best live up to the promise of prioritizing Scarborough while also shaping Toronto’s future from City Hall.

That’s the promise that many candidates are running on in the Scarborough–Rouge Park by-election this month. On Sept. 29, residents of the ward will go to the polls in a vote triggered by the departure of former councillor Jennifer McKelvie, who resigned after winning a seat as a Liberal member of parliament for Ajax. There are 20 candidates vying for the job. And while the winner will only be in office for a year, until the municipal elections in October 2026, whoever wins the seat will have a leg up in next year’s race given the disproportionate advantage incumbents have in Toronto.

Nithursan Elamuhilan, a data analyst who lives in the Scarborough–Rouge Park neighbourhood of Highland Creek, says that people in his community struggle to make the connection between what goes on at City Hall and how it impacts their day-to-day lives, largely because of how left behind they feel. Other parts of the city are getting shiny new subway and LRT lines, for example, but the future Line 2 extension into Scarborough terminates west of the ward’s border. When decision-makers constantly leave a ward out of major projects, “it’s pretty natural for people to see themselves as an outsider to the rest of the city…and feel left out in the progress you see elsewhere,” Elamuhilan says.

There is an inherent tension in the role of city councillor. Local constituent work, as unsexy as it can be, often touches peoples’ lives the most. At the same time, a good councillor needs to rally their fellow councillors to get big, city-wide projects off the ground. You need to be able to both fix that specific garbage can in the park and get millions of dollars approved for a new transit project. But in Scarborough–Rouge Park, residents have felt for years that those big banner projects aren’t serving them, and local projects aren’t getting off the ground either. That leaves them looking for a candidate who, while balancing obligations to the ward and city as a whole, can finally put Scarborough first.

When Zakir Patel’s friends who live outside the area describe residents of Scarborough, they call them perpetual complainers. That’s never sat right with him. “It’s not complaining,” says Patel. “It’s reality.”

Patel is a candidate in the September by-election, and one of three Toronto District School Board (TDSB) trustees in the race. Up until the province took over the TDSB and locked trustees out of their roles last month, Patel represented the neighbouring ward of Guildwood, and was also vice-chair of the board.

He isn’t alone in framing Scarborough as a land of “have nots” compared to the rest of the city. Scarborough residents wanting their fair share of city services is the sentiment that candidates hear over and over again on the campaign trail.

Geographically, Scarborough–Rouge Park is the largest ward in Toronto. Stretching all the way from Steeles Avenue in the north to Lake Ontario in the south, it borders both Markham and Pickering. In between those borders are the Toronto Zoo, the University of Toronto’s Scarborough Campus, and Rouge National Urban Park.

It’s also an extremely diverse ward: 75.6 percent of residents here identify as visible minorities, mostly South Asian and Black, compared to 55.7 percent of Torontonians. Notably, Scarborough–Rouge Park is home to one of the largest Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora communities outside of Asia. The ward is also decidedly working-class, with an average income of $47,840 compared to the city’s $62,050. It’s easy to imagine why Ward 25 residents feel disconnected from what politicians are deciding downtown: geographic distance is one thing, but when city councillors also make nearly $130,000 more than the average person living here, it can feel like they live on a different planet altogether.

For candidate Reza Khoshdel, who works as a community organizer and the executive director of non-profit Community Centre 55 in East York, the election is all about community programming. Khoshdel says that compared with other areas, community centres in the ward “are offering a third of the programming here with probably three times the physical footprint—it makes me shake my head.”

Investment in community is the bedrock of Khoshdel’s platform. He wants to invest in programs for seniors—a passion he’s built in his work as a community centre leader in a ward that has a higher concentration of senior citizens than the city average. Khoshdel also wants to stimulate the local economy, pointing to some of the ward’s less-inhabited strip malls as a prime opportunity for redevelopment in order to bring more businesses to the area. “If we had a stronger and more vocal business community, I think it would benefit not only our local economy but our residents as well,” he says. “The truth is, a lot of Scarborough folks work outside of Scarborough and commute everyday. If we could keep people here, it would lead to a better quality of life.”

Khoshdel agrees that Scarborough voters have been left out by the rest of the city. He feels the frustration especially when he’s door-knocking, likening himself to a punching bag for constituents’ anger. People are mad that their streets aren’t cleared of snow when they need to go to work, they’re upset that the bus takes forever, they hate that there’s so much litter in their local parks, and they’re concerned about food insecurity in their neighbourhoods.

He describes how many residents bring up Rob Ford’s personal approach while mayor, despite not necessarily agreeing with his politics: the late Ford famously handed out his personal phone number and made house visits to fix whatever problem a constituent called him about. “That’s probably the only thing at City Hall that people want. They just want to feel like their elected officials care.”

For Walter Alvarez-Bardales, that care has taken the form of health care advocacy, something he’s fought for much of his political life. Alvarez-Bardales is Afro-Indigenous and grew up in Guatemala, coming to Canada as a refugee and subsequently working for the federal government. During the provincial election earlier this year, he ran as a Liberal candidate in Simcoe North near Orillia, though he lives in Scarborough (which was a “talking point” during the campaign, his campaign manager told Orillia Matters). Notably, he advocated for a Guatemalan refugee claimant who was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer and who didn’t have health coverage. Alvarez-Bardales asked the Stephen Harper government to allow him to receive care, despite waiting for his refugee claim to be approved, and was denied. He died untreated.

While he’s not as well-known as some of his competitors, Alvarez-Bardales says he hopes voters will want someone different, like him. Unlike other candidates, he’s not taking donations, instead using whatever resources he has to run a campaign that’s based on his advocacy work. “I don’t believe in strategy,” he says, adding that his only strategy is fact-based decision-making. “I could portray myself as a disruptor, but in reality, how much can I really disrupt in 12 months? But I would say that I am a ceiling-breaker who is committed to being truthful to voters.”