Rachel Chernos Lin won the Don Valley West byelection with 55 per cent of the vote.
The Toronto District School Board chair easily held off former Toronto Sun columnist and 2023 mayoral candidate Anthony Furey in the race to replace Jaye Robinson, who died in May after a battle with cancer.
Furey finished second, with 31 per cent of the vote.
Chernos Lin earned roughly 5,500 more votes than Furey, beating him by 24 percentage points, according to the City of Toronto's unofficial results.
In the lead up to election day, city hall watchers were predicting a much closer result between the race's two front-runners.
Prominent municipal and provincial political figures backed Chernos Lin in her bid to keep Furey out of city hall.
Former premier Kathleen Wynne and former Toronto mayor John Tory urged other candidates in the race to drop out to support Chernos Lin and avoid splitting the centre and left-of-centre vote, according to the Toronto Star.
The outreach worked. Evan Sambasivam and Dhruv Jain both withdrew to back Chernos Lin.
Sambasivam said he dropped out to “stop Anthony Furey and his white nationalist rhetoric.”
Sambasivam and Progress Toronto, a left-leaning interest group that ran an anti-Furey mail campaign during the race, cited Furey’s past writing as evidence of bigotry.
Furey denied the allegations and threatened to sue Sambasivam.
Chernos Lin also won endorsements from Don Valley West’s Liberal representatives at Queen’s Park and in Ottawa.
She said she’s not a member of the Liberal Party and doesn’t see the association as politically harmful.
Chernos Lin also avoided leaning into Furey’s past comments and kept her campaign focused on her resumé and local issues.
“I have lots of experience, and experience matters,” she said. “I live in the riding and I have a proven track record of getting things done.” Furey lives just south of the ward.
Chernos Lin’s platform tried to strike a balance on some of the hottest issues at city hall.
She said taking out all of the city’s existing bike lanes — provincial intervention notwithstanding — isn’t going to happen.
“We need to really think carefully about what the future of the city is, and what does the city with bike lanes look like?” she said.
On housing, she said she’d prefer to see low and mid-rise apartments built along main streets in her ward. She’s not in favour of more tall towers.
“I understand we need housing, and I understand we need different types of housing but I just worry that we're going to end up like Yonge and Eglinton at Bayview and Eglinton, and at Yonge and Lawrence, the same thing,” she said.
Provincial Energy Minister Stephen Lecce canvassed for Furey, as did Laryssa Waler Hetmanczuk, a former top staffer to Premier Doug Ford.
Over 4,000 people voted in advance polls on Oct. 26 and 27, which was nearly 20 per cent of the ward’s turnout in the 2022 general election. Polling stations were open from 10 a.m to 8 p.m. Monday.
