Candidate Profile: Ana Bailão
Bio
- Ana represented the Davenport Ward on Toronto City Council from 2010 to 2022. She resigned her seat before the October 2022 municipal election.
- She was the Deputy Mayor representing Toronto and East York from 2017 to 2022.
- During her time in municipal office, she sat on the Executive Committee, and served as chair of the Planning and Housing Committee. She worked extensively on housing issues, and her deputy mayor portfolio included responsibility for housing. She was instrumental in the launch of initiatives like HousingTO 2020-2030 and the Housing Action Plan.
- In January 2023, Bailão announced she was taking on a new role as Head of Affordable Housing and Public Affairs with Dream Unlimited. She has since resigned to run for mayor.
Key Themes
- Transit
- Bringing cell service to the TTC.
- Reduce fares to $2 for a single ride on the 501 streetcar and the Scarborough SRT until reroutes and BRT construction is complete.
- Transportation
- Get tough on ticketing and increase fines during rush hour.
- Prohibit lane closures.
- Transfer responsibility of DVP and Gardiner maintenance and operation back to the provincial government.
- Safety
- Hiring more TTC staff, reversing transit cuts, increasing cleaning schedules and expanding security camera footage across the TTC.
- Proposing mobile mental health clinics, and expanding the Toronto Community Crisis Service to cover the entire city.
- Housing
- Putting People First
- Expand the Dufferin Grove pilot project city-wide, creating pathways out of homelessness.
- Establish a specialized Anti-Displacement and Evictions Prevention Unit with 30 staff within Municipal Licensing & Standards.
- Temporarily freezing new proposals that would demolish rental apartment buildings while undertaking a comprehensive city-wide review to provide greater predictability.
- Building Homes
- Ensuring that 20% of all new homes built by 2031 – a minimum of 57,000 homes – will be purpose-built rental homes.
- Investing in speeding up construction readiness for non-profit and co-op organizations’ pre-development activities.
- Making additional surplus municipal properties available for non-profit and co-operative housing available to build new affordable homes.
- Getting City Hall Moving
- Hold City Hall accountable and instruct the City Manager to publish semi-annual public updates on progress delivering our housing commitments.
- Champion reforms to planning regulations, zoning and land use to get homes built with a focus on “missing middle” housing, and housing of medium scale and density that meets the needs of residents between condos and single-family homes.
- Lead a Mayor’s initiative on residential intensification to develop incentives and launch new policies to support the delivery of 285,000 new homes by 2031.
This Housing Plan will build 285,000 new homes with a minimum of 57,000 being purpose-built rental homes, and will directly support at least 95,000 vulnerable residents. The total cost of this Plan’s new initiatives is $48.5 million which will come from the City Building Fund which is forecast to generate an additional $60 million this year.
