Greetings, fellow Scarborough residents. The municipal election is getting closer.
Election day is October 26. Advance polls open on October 6. Are you ready?
Many of us who are engaged in Scarborough affairs pay close attention to our ward councillor elections. We may know some of the candidates personally or we know of them through their work in the community.
But the mayoral election can feel more remote. The media pays a lot of attention to it, of course, but their coverage doesn’t seem to have much of a Scarborough focus.
Well, we can help you with that.
A Scarborough-focused mayoral debate
Wednesday, October 7 from 7:00 – 8:00 pm
University of Toronto Scarborough
Attend in person by registering through Eventbrite at www.scro.ca.
Can’t attend in person? Watch it live on CityNews. It’s being moderated by Cynthia Mulligan.
Chris Alexander, Brad Bradford, and Olivia Chow will be attending.
I encourage all Scarborough residents to attend in person or tune in. And please attend in person if you can. We want our candidates to know that Scarborough is paying attention. A full house makes a powerful statement.
Note: if you plan to attend in person, you must register in advance. No walk-ins will be accepted.
SCRO is grateful to U of T Scarborough for hosting this signature Scarborough event and to CityNews for moderating the debate and broadcasting it live. SCRO has been working on this with UTSC and CityNews since early June. This is likely to be the highest profile debate of the campaign not being held in the downtown core.
What would you ask the candidates?
When you register to attend in person, Eventbrite will invite you to pose a question to the candidates. I expect we’ll get a few hundred of them! SCRO will review all of the questions received and prepare a few consolidated questions for the candidates that address the topics raised by a majority of the contributors.
This is your chance to bring a Scarborough lens to the discussion!
Not all questions will be unique to Scarborough, of course. Some will also resonate in North York and Etobicoke. Others may apply to Toronto as a whole. We are one city, after all. But our candidates need to recognize that suburban issues are sometimes different from downtown issues. We do that by bringing the candidates to Scarborough and to the attention of our 630,000 residents.
What are the issues that matter to you?
What issues would you like to bring to the attention of the candidates? Community safety, property crime, transit, roads & traffic, housing, land use planning, housing density, homelessness & its related issues, data centres, parks & recreation, arts & culture. There are undoubtedly others.
Scarborough isn’t a monolith. We’re more of a “community of communities”. We all have a shared passion for Scarborough, but we don’t all think the same. One person’s government waste can be another person’s essential service! But generally speaking, we often prioritize issues and public services differently than residents in the inner city. The candidates need to hear this.
No matter who you support … please vote!
SCRO is a non-partisan organization. We don’t promote individual candidates, nor do we provide endorsements.
But we are passionate about promoting the interests of Scarborough and our 630,000 residents. The more of us who vote, the more our politicians will pay attention to us. That’s human nature. So, if we want the candidates to pay attention to Scarborough’s collective priorities, we need to vote!
And SCRO needs to hear from you too. SCRO is a powerful advocate for Scarborough, to our politicians at all levels of government and to senior public officials. The more we know about the “hot button” issues of Scarborough’s many communities, the better we can advocate to address the major priorities for Scarborough, the place we have all chosen to call home.
Larry Whatmore
President
Scarborough Community Renewal Organization https://www.scro.ca
Scarborough Walk of Fame https://scarboroughwalkoffame.com
president@scro.ca
