Today We Vote. I Know What Is at Stake.
By Susan Chapelle | Independent Candidate for Ward 14, Toronto-Danforth
Today is election day. Before polls open, I want to reflect on Saturday night, the experiences that brought me here, and how grateful I am. I’m also disappointed by how few people vote in municipal elections, when this is the level of government closest to our daily lives. Whether you’re reading this before you vote or after the results are in, I hope it makes you think about who represents you, and why it matters.
I was 16 and briefly homeless when social housing in Regent Park gave me a chance. I have thought about that throughout this campaign, listening to people discuss housing as though we have unlimited time to get it right.
Having a home gave me the stability to work and build a career. Eventually I bought my first place on Craven Road, a few streets from where I spent so much of my teenage years. I know what public investment can accomplish because it changed my life.
That is why Saturday’s debate mattered so much to me. Thank you to Tommy Joshua Taylor for organizing it and for sharing his play about frontline shelter work, homelessness, addiction and the struggle to keep people alive. He laid it all bare: the suffering, the exhaustion, the deaths, and the people trying to hold together a system that keeps failing them. He was accompanied by Abigail Lapelle.
It was one of my favourite discussions or debate of my four campaigns. I brought examples, statistics and my own experience to a conversation about why people cannot reach services and what we could do differently. I explained how housing and healthcare could work together, what Houston accomplished by coordinating its services, and how we could secure homes without waiting years for every new development. Unfortunately, the livestream audio failed, so people watching from home missed one of the only debates Ward 14 candidates have had.
Sara Ehrhardt’s contribution was that Paula Fletcher “fought so hard” for co-operative housing and that we should build co-ops in the Port Lands. I support co-ops. But Tommy had just shown us people dying in a system that keeps failing them. I wanted an answer that matched the urgency of what we witnessed, and I didn't hear one.
Paula Fletcher was a loud voice for this ward, and often correct, fighting for projects. But being right at council is not the same as winning. Ward 14 still waits on the schools, community centres, healthcare, and infrastructure it has asked for because the other 25 councillors didn't give those needs enough votes.
Fighting hard is not the measure. Delivering is. Sara Ehrhardt is running with Paula’s endorsement and her party. I am offering something different: a councillor who will work with anyone at council, whatever their political leaning, to get this ward what it needs. I have gone to other levels of government for my community.
What happens to someone who needs a home tonight? How do they get treatment or mental health care? What do we change about a system that keeps passing them between services while their health deteriorates? Close to 10,000 neighbours sleep in Toronto’s shelters every night, and they stay longer because there is nowhere to move them. Building co-ops in the Port Lands may be part of a long-term housing plan, but it does not answer those questions. Neither does telling us how hard the previous councillor fought. Housing groups are already working on co-ops on former industrial employment land there. It is not a new idea, and it didn't answer a debate about housing and addiction.
I left that debate concerned about Sara’s readiness for this job. Paula Fletcher has endorsed her and emailed residents asking for their support, and an endorsement from a 23-year incumbent carries real weight. But an endorsement is not a record. We are electing someone who will make decisions about a multibillion-dollar budget, negotiate with other governments, and challenge established ways of doing things. I wanted to hear Sara’s own judgment about what needs to change. Instead, I heard a defence of the previous administration on a night that demanded a serious examination of its results. She has a party machine and the outgoing councillor behind her, but on that stage she had to answer for herself, and I did not hear the leadership this community needs.
My understanding of municipal work began long before I entered politics. After Regent Park, I built a career with IATSE Local 58 as the first woman working in audio and rigging in Toronto’s arts industry. Women were not always welcome there, and I spent years helping challenge those barriers and change workplace policy. For five years I worked as an audio technician on Les Misérables with the Mirvishes. Having a home made that working life possible, and that work gave me the foundation for everything that followed.
I went on to build businesses, work in healthcare and clinical research, manage organizations and budgets, and serve two terms on municipal council. Through it all, I learned to look past what an organization says it does and examine what actually happens when someone needs it. A service can have funding, staff and a mandate and still be out of reach for the community it was created to help.
In Squamish, survivors of sexual assault in the Sea-to-Sky corridor often had to travel to Vancouver for forensic examinations. Working with the Howe Sound Women’s Centre and healthcare partners, we pushed for access closer to home. I later brought a resolution to the Union of BC Municipalities challenging the funding model, and it passed. Healthcare was a provincial responsibility, but our residents were the ones unable to reach it. Our job was to bring the people with the authority to change it together, and keep working until First Nations members and residents were no longer leaving their own community for care.
That experience shapes how I approach municipal government. Housing, healthcare, mental health and poverty meet in people’s daily lives whether our departments and budgets recognize those connections or not. We cannot keep treating the consequences as inevitable while refusing to examine how our own systems contribute to them.
At Saturday’s debate, I called for a radical consolidation of services. We have hospitals, housing organizations, co-ops, public health agencies and experienced community workers. Yet someone who needs housing and mental health care can still be passed between them without receiving either. We expect people to navigate those gaps at the worst moment of their lives, then spend enormous sums responding once their circumstances become an emergency.
Houston showed that substantial progress is possible. Through The Way Home, dozens of agencies came together around permanent housing with attached support services. Since 2012, its partners have housed more than 35,000 people, and around 95 percent of people in its housing programs have not returned to homelessness within two years. Much of that work used existing apartments.
Houston has not eliminated homelessness, and its housing market differs from ours because land is cheaper, but its experience offers something practical to learn from: a system organized around housing people, with organizations working together to make it happen.
Toronto already has a small version of this. Dunn House in Parkdale, built in partnership with UHN, houses 51 people with care connected. Emergency visits among residents dropped by about half, hospital bed days fell nearly 80 percent, and UHN estimates about $2 million in savings. A second phase of 54 homes for seniors is on the way. It is a start, and it should be the scaled model, not the exception.
I want Toronto to apply that determination to the institutions and resources we already have. Housing providers can work directly with hospitals like UHN, primary care, public health, and mental health and addiction services, so moving into a home also means being connected to care. I want public nursing back in seniors' homes so wound care, blood work, and prevention can save resources and keep seniors from trips to the hospital.
We don’t have to wait for new buildings. The City can buy and renovate existing buildings, lease long-term, and use its own land and modular construction to house people now, with care connected from day one. Residents should be able to see what it costs, whether people get help, and whether they stay housed.
That is what fiscal discipline means to me.
Public money is someone’s work. We already spend close to $800 million a year managing homelessness in emergency mode. Dunn House shows that housing people with care costs less. Every dollar should work harder.
Thank you to everyone who opened a door, volunteered, challenged me on my platform, or trusted me with something personal, and to the students, neighbours and friends who gave their time because this community deserved a choice. This is my fourth campaign. I knew how much work it would take. I didn’t know how much the many conversations would stay with me.
For four months, I have knocked on doors in the neighbourhoods where I grew up. People told me about keeping a business open through construction, worrying whether their children can afford to stay, and asking again and again for basic services without a clear answer. They deserve someone prepared to make hard choices, explain them, and take responsibility.
I am running as an independent because my only responsibility will be to this community. I will work with anyone who can help us deliver, and I will answer to the people who live here.
Today, I am asking for your vote.
Susan Chapelle for Ward 14.
Election Day: Monday, October 26, 2026
Polls open: 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Find your voting location at toronto.ca/Elections.onto.ca/Elections.
Toronto Statistics:
Food Insecurity in Toronto
1 in 10 Torontonians rely on food banks.
4.12 million food-bank visits were recorded between April 2024 and March 2025, an 18% increase over the previous year.
24.7% of Toronto households experienced food insecurity in 2024.
340% increase in food-bank visits between 2019 and 2024–25.
Homelessness and Shelters
12,196 people were experiencing homelessness in Toronto in October 2025.
1,446 people were sleeping outdoors, including in encampments, in October 2025.
9,026 people were staying in Toronto's base shelter system during the October 2025 count.
59 shelter residents died in Toronto in 2025.
Addiction and Opioid Deaths
464 people died from confirmed or probable opioid toxicity in Toronto in 2024.
601 opioid-toxicity deaths were recorded in Toronto in 2021, compared with 301 in 2019.
Additional Healthcare Statistic
75% of surveyed people experiencing homelessness reported needing assistance accessing general healthcare or a family doctor in Toronto's 2024 Street Needs Assessment.
Figures reflect their respective reporting periods, not necessarily current 2026 conditions.
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