Sean Marshall

Category: Election

  • Mapping the results of the 2014 election: Ward 17

    2014 Election - WARD 17 mayorPoll results of the mayoral race in Ward 17

    Ward 17 Davenport was the first set of ward-level election results maps I posted to Twitter. With a resurrected rivalry between a right-leaning incumbent and a left-leaning challenger, Ward 17 was one of the closest council races in 2014; indeed, it was one that several news outlets declared ‘one to watch’ (even if most political observers were focused on the mayoral race). Unfortunately, change did not come to this part of Toronto. (As it turns out, only one incumbent councillor seeking re-election, John Parker in Ward 26, lost his seat.)

    Ward 17 is relatively compact as far as Toronto’s wards go. It is bounded by the Canadian Pacific Railway to the south and Eglinton Avenue to the north, it extends east to Oakwood and St. Clair, and bounded by more railways to the west. It where the old City of Toronto meets the former City of York; it’s a transitional area where the pre-war inner city meets the inner-ring suburbs. Ward 17 has been represented by right-leaning councillor Cesar Palacio since 2000, though it has been contested by candidates in every election since.

    I’ll start off by admitting my personal bias. While the maps that I produce are completely objective (they only show which candidate placed first in each poll and by what margin), I am not afraid to acknowledge my left-leaning political views. I found myself disappointed by how Ward 17 voted. The incumbent, Cesar Palacio, was one of Mayor Rob Ford’s most loyal councillors. He voted with the mayor over 70 percent of the time in 2011, 2012, and 2013 and failed to make much of an impression over his fourteen years in office. On the other hand, hard-working Alejandra Bravo promised to be a more responsive representative for the community; she’s in tune with local issues such as transit, local infrastructure, and high unemployment. Torontoist’s endorsement of Bravo published on October 16 expresses these thoughts much more eloquently than I can.

    Interestingly, Ward 17 is one of only two polls in which the newly elected mayor, John Tory, came in third place (the other was Ward 8, which I will discuss later). Doug Ford came in first place, with 40.6% of all votes cast for mayor, while Olivia Chow came in second with 31.6%. John Tory came in third, at 24.6%. Chow and Tory were able to place first in several polls south of St. Clair Avenue and east of Dufferin Street, but polls in the northwest quadrant of the ward came out (relatively strongly) in favour of Doug Ford.

    2014 Election - WARD 17 cllrPoll results of the councillor race in Ward 17

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  • Mapping the results of the 2014 Toronto municipal election: Part I

    2014 Election - Mayor Votes by Ward Solid Colours
    Immediately after John Tory was elected as the 65th mayor of Toronto*, maps were produced in the media, similar to the one above, that advanced a narrative of a divided city. A city divided between the downtown and suburbs, divided by class and income, and by political leanings. The wisdom was that Ford Nation retreated to the northeast and northwest corners of the city, but remains still a potent political force. But mapping which mayoral candidate (John Tory, Doug Ford, or Olivia Chow) ‘won’ which ward completely misses the bigger picture.

    I started this website after I began producing maps of the local council races and ward-level results of the 2014 municipal election and sharing them on Twitter. This was something that I was doing entirely for my own interest, but was related to work I have done with Ryerson Professor Myer Siematycki for the Maytree Foundation studying voter turnouts in the last three municipal elections.

    Once the full official results were released by the City of Toronto, along with geographic files of poll locations and boundaries (as part of the city’s wonderful Open Data Initiative), it became possible to dig deeper than just looking at ward-level maps. I was pleased — and a bit surprised — by how popular my maps were.

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