Chiara Padovani appears on the City of Toronto’s list of certified candidates for Councillor in Ward 5 York South-Weston. A certified candidate is one whose nomination the City Clerk has accepted. The list shows the nomination date as May 1, 2026 and the campaign website chiarapadovani.ca.
The City Clerk’s declaration of results for the October 24, 2022 general election lists Chiara Padovani second among 3 candidates for Councillor in Ward 5 York South-Weston, with 9,983 votes. Frances Nunziata was elected with 10,077 and Gabriel Takang had 1,107. The 3 declared totals add up to 21,167 votes, so her share was 47.2 percent, calculated by voche.me from those figures. The Clerk’s 2018 declaration lists her third among 5 candidates in the same ward with 5,358 votes of 24,518, a share of 21.9 percent calculated by voche.me. The Local reports that she ran in Ward 5 in both years, and her campaign website says she came within 94 votes of the incumbent in 2022, which ties both entries to her.
Her campaign website says she is a human rights activist and social worker who works with the North York Harvest Food Bank, helped found the York South-Weston Tenant Union, and spent six years in Argentina and Ecuador working on human rights, specifically housing and women’s rights. It says that after 2022 she turned her campaign office into a community hub that she ran as a volunteer for over 3 years, and that she and her team ran a free tax clinic for seniors, stopped hundreds of evictions and saved tenants over $5 million in rent. Those are the campaign’s own claims, and voche.me has not checked them against another source.
Her platform pages cover housing and tenant rights, safe roads and better transit, opportunities for youth, protecting homes from flooding, and main street revitalization. In her answers for the Toronto Public Library’s Know Your Vote T.O. project, which the library says candidates write themselves and it does not fact-check, she names housing as her first priority and says she would keep the TTC fare freeze and fare capping.
