In the run-up to this month’s municipal election, the Star is profiling several key battleground races, offering intimate portraits of the candidates and the issues moving voters. In today’s spotlight, Toronto Centre.
Nick Culverwell knows that the people living on the street near his home are suffering. But sometimes, he worries he’s becoming numb to their distress.
A 25-year resident of Toronto’s Garden District, Culverwell said that people, like him, who choose to live in east downtown are no strangers to the rough side of urban life. But in recent years, his neighbourhood has changed, in part due to the rise of dangerous drugs such as fentanyl.
Ambulances attending to overdoses in Moss Park across the street from his home are a regular occurrence. Residents complain about problems related to the high concentration of homeless and marginalized people in parts of the ward, including public drug use and dealing, harassment and violence.
“To be part of this community is also to care about the lives of those individuals,” said Culverwell, who is president of the Garden District Residents Association. Neighbours do what they can to help, including calling 911 when someone needs medical help.
Still, empathy can be elusive when residents fear for their safety, and intoxicated people become a daily sight. “The thing that worries me most is you become accustomed to it,” he said. “You become somewhat immune.”
Culverwell and others living in Toronto Centre say they’ve reached a breaking point over the social problems spilling into their parks and public spaces, and their demands for action have become the top issue as the ward gets set to elect a councillor this month.
It’s a microcosm of the wider debate about homelessness, drug use and public safety that is top of mind for voters across the city ahead of the Oct. 26 vote, and candidates in the ward are offering starkly different solutions, from police crackdowns to social supports and harm reduction. Those tensions are playing out against the backdrop of heightened political drama, with the incumbent councillor facing off against an activist who he’s previously sparred with over an ethics complaint. To win re-election, he’ll also have to overcome the loss of a key ally who has endorsed a rival.
Councillor says he’s made progress
On a late September morning, the grounds of Allan Gardens were peaceful. People walked their dogs along paths between the bright green grass, and the sun sparkled off the dome of the historic conservatory.
It was a much different scene than three years ago, when the park at Sherbourne and and Gerrard Streets was the site of one of Toronto’s largest encampments. Chris Moise, a former health-care worker and police officer, said its transformation is proof of the good work he’s done to address homelessness since he was elected Toronto Centre councillor in 2022.
Toronto councillor Chris Moise is running for re-election in Toronto Centre.
Andrew Francis Wallace Toronto Star
In 2023, he supported a resource-intensive strategy that involved the city setting up a help centre in Allan Gardens, and offering people living there mental and physical health care, harm reduction programs, income supports, and referrals to housing and shelter. Although some questioned the cost of the approach, the city reported that by May 2024, 97 people had been housed and 314 referred to shelters.
Moise said he has also increased cleaning in local parks, and backed a downtown outreach team that pairs public health nurses with police to distribute food, clothing and harm-reduction supplies, and connect homeless people to shelters.
“We are using a compassionate, humanistic approach,” said Moise, who Mayor Olivia Chow tapped as health board chair this term.
Despite what Moise sees as progress, while door-knocking at a condo building near Allan Gardens last month, some residents still had complaints about the state of the ward’s green spaces. One woman, a former TTC worker, said she planned to vote for him. But another accused him of providing “unsatisfactory” responses to messages she sent to his office, and practically slammed the door on his canvassers.
The councillor acknowledged that it can be difficult to get across the message that progress is being made when constituents still see problems on their street. He argued the city can only do so much, and provincial policies such as the closure of supervised consumption sites have caused drug users to consume in public, or overwhelm the remaining service providers in the ward, such as Street Health at Sherbourne and Dundas Streets.
Residents “only see what’s in front of them,” not “the work behind the scenes and some of the successes that we’ve had,” Moise said. If it weren’t for the measures he’s put in place, “things would have been a lot worse.”
Challenger filed ethics complaint against Moise
At 4 p.m. on a recent Wednesday afternoon, more than a dozen people sat in Barbara Hall Park off of Church Street. Some talked and laughed, others slumped motionless on a bench. One man smoked from a glass pipe.
Daniel Tate, one of the 10 candidates hoping to oust Moise, pointed out the garbage strewn around a storefront next to the park, which he says the incumbent councillor has allowed to become a no-go zone for locals.
Daniel Tate is running for council in Toronto Centre.
Richard Lautens Toronto Star
Tate runs the divisive IntegrityTO online advocacy that has gained popularity by posting graphic — and critics say dehumanizing — videos of homeless people and drug users on Toronto’s streets. The account has also reposted a video of a comedian performing a racist caricature of Chow.
Tate has clashed with Moise before, and was a vocal critic of the councillor’s support in 2023 for renaming Yonge-Dundas Square. Tate filed a complaint with the city integrity commissioner after a January 2025 exchange in which Moise accused him of harbouring “a white supremacy view.” The commissioner found Moise breached council’s code of conduct, but didn’t recommend any penalty. Tate denies holding racist beliefs.
Tate advocates a “zero-tolerance approach to criminal behaviour in public spaces,” and supports police patrols on transit, mandatory addiction treatment for some drug users, and “meaningful consequences” for vandalism, public defecation and other petty offences.
He has called for an end to the distribution of drug paraphernalia, which organizations such as the Canadian Mental Health Association say is a harm reduction measure that can reduce illness and overdoses, but which Tate argues is a “failed” policy taxpayers shouldn’t foot the bill for.
As he knocked on doors at a condo building on Gloucester Street just north of Barbara Hall, he vowed to “fight back” on behalf of residents fed up with the state of their neighbourhood. At least one resident said he followed Tate online and was happy to meet him in person.
Toronto Centre – Ward 13
The dense ward in the heart of Toronto is home to some of the city’s most distinctive districts, from the tenant neighbourhood of Regent Park in the southeast, to the LGBTQ bars of the Church-Wellesley Village in the northwest. It also features the bustling campus of Toronto Metropolitan University, and important landmarks such as St. Lawrence Market and Riverdale Farm. It’s a young and booming part of downtown, where the population jumped more than 17 per cent in five years, rising to 117,000 by 2021, and the median age is under 35.
Tate acknowledged his online popularity won’t necessarily translate into electoral success. But he said he’s has dozens of volunteers, and has raised more than $75,000 for his campaign. As of Friday, Moise said he’d raised about $50,000, while candidate Curran Stikuts said he had netted more than $60,000.
Tate’s opponents charge he’s adept at stirring up anger about Toronto’s problems, but it’s unrealistic to think the city can arrest its way out of complex issues like addiction and homelessness.
He conceded that there are no overnight fixes, but disagreed that he’s merely getting people fired up.
“People are already angry,” he said. “They don’t need Daniel Tate to show them what they see every single day when they go to the grocery store.”
Prominent progressive now backing a new candidate
The race in Toronto Centre took a twist in August when Kristyn Wong-Tam, the area’s popular former councillor and now the local NDP MPP, announced they were endorsing Stikuts instead of Moise. Wong-Tam backed Moise four years ago, but said that since then had heard that residents were “disappointed” with his leadership.
While only 36, Stikuts has done advocacy around community housing, education policy and missing men in the Church and Wellesley Village, and his “compassionate” and “hardworking” approach would make him an effective councillor, Wong-Tam said.
According to Moise, his relationship with Wong-Tam broke down because after he took office the MPP “tried to tell me how to do my job,” and bombarded him with “constant” phone calls and texts.
Wong-Tam refuted that account. They said they gave Moise space and only reached out to warn him that constituents were complaining he was “unresponsive.”
The former director of advocacy at the 519 Community Centre, Ward 10 council candidate Curran Stikuts has also been endorsed by the Toronto & York Region Labour Council, and says he’s running a “strong progressive campaign.”
Lance McMillan Toronto Star
The former director of advocacy at the 519 Community Centre, Stikuts has also been endorsed by the Toronto & York Region Labour Council, and says he’s running a “strong progressive campaign.” On a recent evening, he posed for a photo with more than a half-dozen volunteers before the group split up to blitz a tower at Wellesley and Sherbourne Streets.
At the doors Stikuts told residents there “will always be a role” for law enforcement to play in combating public disorder. But he said the policies that would provide stability to homeless people “are the same things we need to do in order make sure that you feel safe walking home at night.” That includes making investments in affordable and supportive housing, treatment options, cleaner public spaces and the community crisis service that provides a non-police response to some mental health calls.
In an interview, Stikuts accused Moise of failing to broker difficult conversations between residents, service providers and city staff to get everyone on the same page about the ward’s problems. “It’s an important job of the councillor to help facilitate that, and I haven’t seen that over the past four years,” he said, claiming residents have told him calls to the councillor’s office have gone unanswered.
Moise called accusations he is not responsive “not accurate.” He said his office keeps close track of constituents’ messages and he prides himself on returning them. “I’m always engaged with the public,” he said, pointing to 18 town halls over his term, and weekly meetings with residents.
The councillor said losing Wong-Tam’s backing won’t make it harder for him to win. “I have a record, people know what I’ve been doing,” he said.
Other candidates include tenant advocate Walied Khogali Ali, and Nicki Ward, who finished a distant second to Moise in 2022 and would be Toronto’s first openly trans councillor.