uniteTOlove.ca

Ward 06 — York Centre

Start here. The quickest ways into this page:

Reading this in real time: every registrant figure below — who’s filed, incumbency, candidate counts — is a snapshot as of 2026-08-14, from the City Clerk’s candidate feeds. Nominations close Friday, August 21, 2026, at 2:00 p.m. — this page re-pulls and re-stamps every registrant figure after that date. Geography, transit, development and census figures are structural facts that don’t move at nomination close and are dated separately, section by section.

York Centre sits in Toronto's north end, in the former City of North York, roughly bounded by Steeles Avenue West, Bathurst Street, Highway 401, and Jane/Keele Streets — a largely residential ward built out through the postwar Bathurst Manor and Clanton Park subdivisions, with two Line 1 subway stations (Wilson and Sheppard West) at its core. Its biggest current civic story is the former Downsview Airport: closed to aviation in 2024 after decades as a Bombardier aircraft plant, the 370-acre site (now branded "YZD" by owner Northcrest Developments) is planned as the largest urban redevelopment in North America, with more than 35,000 homes envisioned over roughly 30 years. Part of those same lands opened in 2025 as Rogers Stadium, a large outdoor concert venue whose traffic and noise impacts are an active file for the ward's councillor's office. The ward is also home to Earl Bales Park's ski hill and Holocaust memorial, and to a significant concentration of Jewish community institutions along the Bathurst Street corridor.

The race & the 2022 baseline

2022 result: James Pasternak won by 62.0 percentage points over the runner-up — a landslide, not a close call. Source: City of Toronto official 2022 election results, as_of 2026-08-16.

This ward’s own 2022 turnout was 25.07% (17,124 of 68,296 eligible electors cast a ballot) — compared to a citywide 2022 turnout of 29.7% that year. Source: City of Toronto, City Clerk’s Office, “Elections – Voter Statistics” (2022 dataset), cross-checked against the Clerk’s own 2022 Municipal Election Report.

Who’s running here in 2026 (2)

Every candidate filed in this ward as of 2026-08-16, alphabetical by surname, identical fields for every name. Bios are synthesized only from each candidate’s own published campaign material and registry facts — never from news coverage, opposition material, or this project’s own judgment (see Receipts below).

Conroy Irving

Registered 2026-06-08 · Website: https://www.voteconroyirving.ca

Conroy Irving is a candidate for Toronto City Council, Ward 6 (York Centre), in the 2026 municipal election, registered on June 8, 2026. His campaign site describes him as a second-generation Canadian of Jamaican heritage, a father of four, an entrepreneur, and founder of Irving Security Corps, citing personal experience with housing insecurity and financial hardship. His 10-point plan lists tax affordability and fiscal responsibility, support for small businesses and youth employment, affordable housing, infrastructure and parks, community safety and mental-health supports, protections during major events, and support for faith communities.

James Pasternak (incumbent)

Registered 2026-05-25 · Website: https://www.jamespasternak.com/

James Pasternak is the incumbent candidate for Toronto City Council, Ward 6 (York Centre), in the 2026 municipal election, registered on May 25, 2026. His campaign site describes him as a Ward 6 resident of more than 35 years, first elected in 2010 and re-elected in 2014, 2018, and 2022, and a former Toronto District School Board trustee. Listed priorities are fiscal responsibility and affordable housing, infrastructure and public-realm investment, parks, seniors, and recreation, social cohesion, community safety and youth programs, and business and economic growth in the ward's business improvement areas.

Absence of a website, a bio, or any campaign material on this page is a fact about the public record and this project’s search on 2026-08-14 — not a judgment about any candidate’s effort, seriousness, or worth. Every candidate below gets the identical fields, the identical format, and the identical treatment, alphabetically by surname, whether incumbent or first-time, well-resourced or not.

Geography & boundaries

Civic texture — what’s live here

Transit & development

Local commons

Toronto Public Library branches and Parks, Forestry & Recreation community/recreation centres located inside this ward’s boundary, joined by geographic coordinates (see Receipts) — complete citywide datasets for both layers, every ward covered.

Public libraries (2)

Community & recreation centres (12)

Parks aren’t listed here: parks joining is partial citywide — not shown rather than shown unevenly. The citywide parks join has fetched and joined 400 of the dataset’s 1,511 Park-type rows so far; that 400-row sample isn’t evenly distributed enough per ward to publish per-ward park lists or counts responsibly yet.

Local media landscape

Networks & local commons

As of August 17, 2026, this project's public organization registry maps 101 organizations directly to Ward 6 (York Centre) -- up from 7 before this same day's ward sweep and its own 12 mints + 8 corrections into the canonical tag, and revised DOWN from the 254 this brief stated for a few hours the same day. That 254 figure came from an ad-hoc registry-wide tag-normalization pass whose own logic was never committed to the repo and could not be reproduced or audited; re-deriving the same join from this project's own checked-in, already-audited geography classifier gives 101, not 254, for this ward -- and the same correction, real but roughly 5x smaller than first claimed, applies registry-wide, not just here (the earlier "3x to 43x" figure is itself superseded by this same finding). This is still a real fix over the 27 canonical-tag-only count: the 101 recognizes this same-day sweep's rows tagged bare "Ward 6", bare "York Centre", and other alternate spellings the registry's own geography join (`org_placements.csv`) already resolves, deliberately conservative (a bare riding name alone, with no "Ward 6" token, is not inferred to this ward without one). 19 of the 101 carry `verified-live` status with an independently direct-fetched confirmation; the rest are `seed-web-verified`. The sweep also ran a full category-by-category search across the ward's own areas (Bathurst Manor, Clanton Park, Downsview, Stanley Greene) and against its top five home languages besides English and French (Tagalog, Russian, Spanish, Italian and Vietnamese). Nineteen further organizations and groups were newly found -- residents' advocacy groups, faith and ethnocultural institutions, a business improvement area, a festival, a market, martial-arts schools and neighbourhood Facebook groups among them -- and seven more already-registered Ward 6 organizations, found again independently by this same sweep, had a missing, vague or non-standard-format location tag flagged for correction.

This brief's Local Commons section above already names Ward 6's civic-infrastructure anchors -- Earl Bales Park, Downsview Park, the Downsview library branch and the Prosserman JCC among them; those, plus the organizations above, are the backbone the city-wide network map builds outward from.

This sweep also found real gaps worth stating plainly rather than papering over: no dedicated Italian cultural association (despite a documented Italian population along the Keele Street corridor), no dues-membership recreation club rooted in the ward (the two candidates found this sweep both sit just east of the ward's own Bathurst Street boundary), no confirmed community health centre, no secular or humanist body, and no neighbourhood-specific Reddit, Discord, Nextdoor, WhatsApp or Substack presence turned up rooted in this ward. A ward this size, this diverse in its languages and faiths, and this reshaped by the Downsview lands redevelopment is almost certainly more organized than any single search pass can find -- these are the honest limits of one day's search, not a claim that the gaps are real.

City-wide organization mapping is underway ward by ward. If you lead, work with, or simply know of an organization rooted in this ward, this project's tribes directory at https://unitetolove.ca/tribes/directory.html is where to add it or correct what's already there -- every addition is checked against a public source before it's published.

The ward in numbers (2021 Census)

Source: City of Toronto Ward Profiles (25-Ward Model), Statistics Canada 2021 Census custom tabulations, City Planning Division, published December 2023. Household income reflects the 2020 reference year.

Population107,355
Median age41.6
Median household income (2020)$82,000
Renter / owner household split50.2% / 49.8%
Top home languages (excl. English/French)Tagalog (Pilipino, Filipino) (7,770), Russian (5,585), Spanish (3,375)
Land area35.4 km²

See the citywide summary table for the same census columns, all 25 wards, one page.

What else is on your ballot

Every Toronto voter marks three races on October 26, 2026: this ward’s councillor (above), the citywide mayor, and one school trustee.

This ward’s trustee-crosswalk precision note: TDSB: NOT ESTABLISHED. TCDSB: see ward 05 note - UNRESOLVED. Viamonde exact (this ward falls in the Annexe's NORD-EST zone, which is the board's own webpage's 'Toronto-Est' sous-secteur - a naming discrepancy the registry already carried as unverified, now resolved by this official Annexe C document). MonAvenir not disambiguated.

Get involved — from thirty seconds to a year

Everything on this page is published so that anyone who lives here can use it: there is no membership, no gate and nothing to belong to. If you want to do something with it, the doors below start at thirty seconds and stop wherever you like — every one of them is optional, every one of them is free to copy or fork, and none of them asks who you vote for.

This is a neighbours’ project rather than a campaign or an organization: it publishes tools, data and evidence, and leaves every decision to the person reading. Nothing here endorses a candidate or a party, and nothing here needs our permission to be used.

What this page doesn’t cover yet

This ward’s research brief names these additional gaps, plainly, rather than guessing over them:

Receipts — where every figure on this page comes from

This ward’s research-brief sources:

Per-candidate research notes, QA flags, and source-capture logs are kept in this project’s internal working files, not published here; every bio and every fact on this page is drawn from that work but the page itself states the fact, not the working notes behind it.

Found a mistake?

That’s the system working. Every figure on this page traces to a public source or a candidate’s own published material, cited in the Receipts section above; if one is wrong, out of date, or reads differently than the source supports, we want to know before anyone else repeats it. Send it to the corrections page — it takes thirty seconds, and every correction is published, dated, and left visible.