Ward 12 — Toronto-St. Paul’s

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The race & the 2022 baseline

• Office: Councillor, Ward 12 - Toronto-St. Paul's
• Seats: 1
• Incumbent: Josh Matlow — running in 2026: yes — open seat: no

2022 result: Josh Matlow won by 77.0 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 33.56% (28,153 of 83,877 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 (6)

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).

Geography & boundaries

Legally defined (per Wikipedia, reproducing the Elections Ontario boundary text — partial, the full description continues past what search results captured): commences at Eglinton Avenue West & Dufferin Street, south along Dufferin to Rogers Road, east along Rogers Road to Oakwood Avenue, south along Oakwood to Holland Park Avenue, east along Holland Park to Winona Drive, generally south along Winona to Davenport Road, west along Davenport to Ossington Avenue, south along Ossington to the CPR line, generally east along the railway to Yonge Street, north along Yonge to Jackes Avenue, east along Jackes to the Rosehill Reservoir's westerly boundary, north along that boundary to Rosehill Avenue, then continuing east (full remainder of the legal description not captured — see source for the complete text). Named areas commonly associated with the ward, per search results: Forest Hill (part), Chaplin Estates, Yonge-Eglinton (part), Humewood-Cedarvale, Wychwood Park, Hillcrest- Bracondale, Fairbank (part), Oakwood Village (part). [Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_12_Toronto%E2%80%94St._Paul's, accessed 2026-08-14]

Civic texture — what’s live here

• Eglinton Crosstown (Line 5) opening and Forest Hill station. The Eglinton Crosstown LRT opened February 8, 2026, including an underground Forest Hill station at 842 Eglinton Ave. W. (at Bathurst Street). The new station has already drawn transit-oriented development to that corner, including a 14-storey condo (completed 2024, ahead of the line's opening) built with a lobby directly connected to the station. [Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_Hill_station_(Toronto), accessed 2026-08-14] [Source: https://www.reminetwork.com/articles/forest-hill-condo-promises-direct-lrt-access/, accessed 2026-08-14]
• Active City capital works, 2026. The City's own Ward 12 profile page lists a large, sustained set of live or recent construction notices — the multi-phase Basement Flooding Protection Program for the Fairbank- Silverthorn storm system (storm tunnel and local collector sewers, with construction notices spanning Blandford/Glenholme, Keywest/Northcliffe/Allenvale, Oakwood Avenue, and Westmount Avenue through 2025); watermain replacement and road resurfacing on Balmoral Avenue, Dunloe Road, Duplex/Berwick Avenue, Oriole Parkway, Penrose Road, and Yonge Street; road reconstruction on Clovelly Avenue, Gibson Street, and Rathnelly Avenue; and a Boulton Drive transmission-watermain abandonment through Roycroft Park. A general 2026 local road-resurfacing notice for the ward was issued in March 2026. [Source: https://www.toronto.ca/city-government/data-research-maps/neighbourhoods-communities/ward-profiles/ward-12-toronto-st-pauls/, accessed 2026-08-14, page dated "modified June 9, 2026"]

Transit & development

TTC: the ward is served by Line 1 (Yonge-University) at Eglinton and (per boundary) potentially St. Clair-area stations along its eastern Yonge Street edge, and now Line 5 (Eglinton Crosstown) at Forest Hill and Eglinton West/Cedarvale stations along Eglinton Avenue West; exact station-to-ward assignment not independently verified against the boundary polygon — named as general context, not a formal join. Major transit project: the Eglinton Crosstown's February 2026 opening (§3) is the single largest transit change affecting this ward. Development: the clearest transit-oriented development signal found this research is the Forest Hill/Bathurst- Eglinton condo activity tied to the new LRT station (§3); broader ward-wide development-application data was not pulled. [Source: https://www.metrolinx.com/en/projects-and-programs/eglinton-crosstown-lrt, accessed 2026-08-14]

Local commons

• Forest Hill Branch, Toronto Public Library — 700 Eglinton Ave. W. (at Vesta Drive), adjacent to Forest Hill Collegiate, roughly midway between the Eglinton and Eglinton West subway stations. [Source: https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/foresthill/, accessed 2026-08-14]
• Oakwood Village — a Business Improvement Area within/adjacent to the ward, home to an annual arts festival and a public library built in 1997. [Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakwood_Village, accessed 2026-08-14]
• Light research pass only — a fuller branch/CRC/park list needs the formal geospatial join named in the plan (§6), not this brief.

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 (5)

• Davenport — 1246 Shaw Street, Toronto, On, M6G 3P1
• Deer Park — 40 St. Clair Avenue East, Toronto, On, M4T 1M9
• Maria A. Shchuka — 1745 Eglinton Avenue W, Toronto, On, M6E 2H4
• Oakwood Village Library And Arts Centre — 341 Oakwood Avenue, Toronto, On, M6E 2W1
• Wychwood — 1431 Bathurst Street, Toronto, On, M5R 3J2

Community & recreation centres (7)

• Brown Community Centre — 454 Avenue Rd
• Davisville Junior Public School — 50 Davisville Ave
• Fairbank Memorial Community Centre — 2213 Dufferin St
• Hillcrest Community Centre — 1339 Bathurst St
• Mcmurrich Junior Public School — 115 Winona Dr
• Phil White Arena — 443 Arlington Ave
• Vaughan Road Academy — 529 Vaughan Rd

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

• No ward-specific community newspaper or dedicated local-news outlet was confirmed for this ward beyond general neighbourhood Wikipedia entries (Fairbank, Oakwood Village, Yonge-Eglinton) — stated plainly as a gap, not padded; see §8.

Networks & local commons

As of August 18, 2026, this project's public organization registry maps 106 organizations directly to Ward 12 (Toronto-St. Paul's), via the registry's own geography join (`org_placements.csv`). Most of that count is bulk City/CRA register rows — early-years childcare centres (54) and K-12 parent-council entries (20) foremost among them — captured registry-wide rather than through a ward-level search; a smaller share carries `verified-live` status with an independently direct-fetched confirmation, and the rest are `seed-web-verified` — real organizations, not yet independently confirmed live.

A dedicated ward sweep run this same day searched the ward's own neighbourhoods (Forest Hill, Chaplin Estates, Yonge-Eglinton, Humewood-Cedarvale, Wychwood Park, Hillcrest-Bracondale, Fairbank, Oakwood Village) and its top five home languages besides English and French (Spanish, Portuguese, Tagalog, Mandarin and Iranian Persian), newly registering 13 organizations and groups — residents' associations, faith congregations, an ethnocultural association, a heritage society, a community garden, a tennis club and a mutual-aid gift-economy group among them.

• The Eglinton Way BIA and Forest Hill Village BIA — two of the ward's business improvement areas anchoring its commercial strips; The Eglinton Way hosts the annual Dream Wheels on Eglinton vintage car festival, newly registered. https://www.theeglintonway.com/ · https://foresthillvillage.ca/
• Artscape Wychwood Barns — a converted 1913 streetcar-repair facility at 601 Christie Street, now a year-round community cultural hub; the Wychwood Barns Community Association, its resident-led governance conduit to the surrounding community, is newly registered alongside it. https://artscapewychwoodbarns.ca/
• Holy Blossom Temple — Toronto's oldest Jewish congregation (founded 1849), on Bathurst Street in Forest Hill since 1938. https://holyblossom.org/
• Centre for Spanish Speaking Peoples — incorporated in 1974, providing settlement, legal and anti-violence services to Toronto's Spanish-speaking community, the ward's largest non-official home language. https://spanishservices.org/en/

This brief's Local Commons section above already names Ward 12's civic-infrastructure anchors — the Forest Hill library branch and Oakwood Village 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 Iranian Persian cultural association or centre was found sited inside the ward itself — the city's main Persian cultural district sits well north, on Yonge Street in North York — a genuine zero for the ward's fifth-ranked home language. Labour-union locals, a dedicated tool library or repair café, and a formally organized youth council were all searched for and not found rooted specifically in this ward.

City-wide organization mapping is underway ward by ward. If you lead, work with, or simply know of a congregation, resident or tenant association, cultural group, or service 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.

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.

• Mayor (citywide — the same race for every ward) — 42 candidates registered as of 2026-08-14, identical treatment: the mayoral race card.
• School trustee — one seat, for whichever of Toronto’s four school boards matches your school-support designation. Trustee-district boundaries do not in general line up with the 25 council wards; here is what this project has established for THIS ward, tiered by how confidently each is sourced:
  • Conseil scolaire Viamonde (French public) — Toronto-Centre (Secteur 2, Annexe CENTRAL) (race card) — confirmed exact from the board’s own official regulatory determination document (Détermination et répartition des conseillers scolaires, Conseil scolaire Viamonde, March 2026, Annexe C).
  • TCDSB — not established for this ward: no reliable source pairs it to a specific TCDSB ward (a named gap, not a guess).
  • CSC MonAvenir (French Catholic) — this ward falls in one of MonAvenir’s two Toronto régions (Toronto-Est or Toronto-Ouest); the board has not published a ward-level boundary document, so which région applies here is not resolved — a region-level statement, not a guess at which one.
  • Toronto District School Board (TDSB) — local reporting places this ward in TDSB Ward 7 — not yet verified against an official board document (race card); see this ward’s precision note below.
  39 TDSB and 21 TCDSB trustee candidates are registered citywide as of 2026-08-14. Whatever the tiers above show, MyVote is the authoritative resolver for your own address — check it before you vote: MyVote.

This ward’s trustee-crosswalk precision note: TDSB confirmed (CP24/CTV News, same citation as ward 11). TCDSB: NOT ESTABLISHED. Viamonde exact. 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.

• The ladder — what you can do today: thirty seconds, an hour, an evening, a week, a season, a year. Every rung a real door, every rung optional.
• The Harvest — add three lines to one public record: a vision for 2030, a complaint about what is broken, or a neighbour worth naming.
• Add your name to the count — a name and a way to reach you is the whole first ask; everything after that is optional.
• The mobilization framework — for anyone who already leads a room and wants that room, and every room like it, to act together. Free, forkable, evidence-based, nothing to join.
• The plan — one year, all-out — what this city could do in a single year, month by month, with every number labelled as a target rather than a promise.
• The conversation kits — free, open kits for running your own conversation about Toronto’s future, at a kitchen table or in a hall.
• Mutual aid — how neighbours already help each other across Toronto, what a block circle is, and how to start one where you live.
• The letters — written to the people this city keeps writing about instead of to. Read one; pass it to someone it is about.

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:

• The ward's full legal boundary description (§2) was only partially captured from search results — the Wikipedia source continues past the point captured here; should be re-fetched in full before public use.
• Exact subway/LRT-station-to-ward assignment (§4) stated from general geography, not a verified point-in-polygon check — flagged, not asserted as precise.
• No current-year (2026) comprehensive development-application count was pulled beyond the Forest Hill station-area item named in §3 — a full pipeline needs the City's Application Information Centre, not attempted.
• Local media landscape (§6) — no ward-specific outlet confirmed; a targeted search for BIA newsletters (Eglinton Way BIA, Oakwood Village BIA) was not attempted and should be a next step.
• Trustee-ward crosswalk not attempted here — out of this brief's scope (per plan §0/§6, only 3 wards have a positive trustee match on file; W12 not stated as one in material read for this brief).

• A full address-to-trustee-district crosswalk is not complete for every board (school board trustee races do not share the 25-ward boundary map): for this ward, TDSB carries a news-reported mapping, not yet verified against an official board document and TCDSB is not established; CSC MonAvenir is resolved only to a region (Toronto-Est or Toronto-Ouest), never a ward, for every ward citywide. Conseil scolaire Viamonde is the one board fully resolved, exact, for every ward. See the tiered breakdown and this ward’s precision note in “What else is on your ballot” above.
• Libraries and community/recreation centres are now geospatially joined to this ward’s boundary (see “What’s live here, by the numbers” under Local commons above — complete citywide datasets for both layers). Parks joining is partial citywide; not shown rather than shown unevenly (400 of 1,511 City-classified park-type rows fetched and joined so far).

Receipts — where every figure on this page comes from

• Council race and 2022 baseline: this project’s Toronto elections registry (race ON-toronto-council-w12), as_of 2026-08-16.
• Filed 2026 candidates: the same registry, 6 rows for this race, as_of 2026-08-16 — re-pulled from the City Clerk’s candidate feed and refreshed after nominations close 2026-08-21.
• Candidate bios: synthesized only from each candidate’s own published campaign material (their website, their own social accounts, their own platform document) and registry facts already on file — never from news coverage, opposition material, or inference beyond what the candidate has themself published. A candidate with no captured public material is stated plainly, never guessed over. As of 2026-08-14.
• 2021 Census figures: City of Toronto Ward Profiles (25-Ward Model), Statistics Canada 2021 Census custom tabulations, prepared by Strategic Initiatives, Policy & Analysis, City Planning Division, City of Toronto, December 2023 (`2023-wardprofiles-2011-2021-censusdata_rev0719.xlsx`, sheet "2021 One Variable"). Household income figures reflect the 2020 reference year used by the 2021 Census.
• Land area: City of Toronto Ward Profiles geographic-areas file, published December 2023 (`2023-WardProfiles-GeographicAreas.xlsx`).
• Geography, civic texture, transit/development, local commons, local media: this ward’s research brief, researched 2026-08-14 — full source list below.
• Dataset-wide registrant figures: the 2026-08-14 Toronto figures pull, from the City of Toronto Clerk’s official candidate feeds.
• This ward’s own 2022 turnout: City of Toronto, City Clerk’s Office, “Elections – Voter Statistics” (2022 dataset), cross-checked against the Clerk’s own 2022 Municipal Election Report. (per-ward figures joined 2026-08-15).
• Libraries and community/recreation centres: City of Toronto Open Data — Toronto Public Library branch list and the Parks, Forestry & Recreation “parks-and-recreation-facilities” dataset, joined to the 25-ward boundary layer by coordinates, 2026-08-15 (both layers complete citywide).
• School-board trustee crosswalk: Conseil scolaire Viamonde’s own official regulatory determination document (exact, all 25 wards); Toronto Catholic District School Board’s own published ward pages (exact where cited, one-of-two where noted unresolved); TDSB local news reporting (not yet verified against an official board document); CSC MonAvenir’s own election page (region-level only) — built 2026-08-15, see this ward’s precision note above.

This ward’s research-brief sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_12_Toronto%E2%80%94St._Paul's — accessed 2026-08-14
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_Hill_station_(Toronto) — accessed 2026-08-14
• https://www.reminetwork.com/articles/forest-hill-condo-promises-direct-lrt-access/ — accessed 2026-08-14
• https://www.toronto.ca/city-government/data-research-maps/neighbourhoods-communities/ward-profiles/ward-12-toronto-st-pauls/ — accessed 2026-08-14 (page dated "modified June 9, 2026")
• https://www.metrolinx.com/en/projects-and-programs/eglinton-crosstown-lrt — accessed 2026-08-14
• https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/foresthill/ — accessed 2026-08-14
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakwood_Village — accessed 2026-08-14
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairbank,_Toronto — accessed 2026-08-14

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.