Zakir Patel

Zakir Patel appears on the City of Toronto's list of certified candidates for Councillor in Ward 25 Scarborough-Rouge Park. A certified candidate is one whose nomination the City Clerk has accepted. The list shows the nomination date as July 20, 2026 and gives his campaign website, votezakir.ca. voche.me treats that site as the campaign's own statement.

The Toronto District School Board's Ward 19 Trustee Bio page describes him as Vice Chair of the TDSB and Ward 19 Trustee for Scarborough-Guildwood since 2018, and says that in the past year he chaired the Finance, Budget and Enrolment Committee, was a Director of the Toronto Lands Corporation and sat on the Board's Negotiations Steering Committee. The page carries no date, so voche.me gives no year for those committee roles. The City Clerk's declaration of results for the October 24, 2022 general election lists a Zakir Patel first among 6 candidates for TDSB trustee in Ward 19, marked elected, with 5,791 of the 12,380 votes declared for that race (46.8 percent, calculated by voche.me). The Local's 2026 tracker says his trustee term ran from 2018 until 2025, when trustee roles were eliminated after the province put the TDSB under supervision. voche.me read no board minutes, so it states no vote or motion from his time as trustee.

The City Clerk's declaration of results for the September 29, 2025 by-election lists him fifth among 20 candidates for Councillor in Ward 25 Scarborough-Rouge Park, with 1,521 votes. Neethan Shan was elected with 5,174. The 20 declared totals add up to 19,260 votes, so Patel's share was 7.9 percent, calculated by voche.me from those figures. The Local's 2026 tracker describes this by-election as one for Ward 19. The City's declaration, which lists the 20 candidates under Ward 25, is the source voche.me follows.

His campaign website, the campaign's own account, says he arrived in Ontario in 1995, bought a grocery business in 1999, studied business administration at Centennial College, began volunteering in political campaigns in 2003 and was elected a TDSB trustee in 2018. It says he served in leadership roles at the TDSB from 2018 to 2025, including Vice-Chair. The Centennial Community and Recreation Association's candidate listing describes him as a longtime Scarborough resident and West Hill resident.

His campaign website lists seven priorities. They are affordability, with property tax increases kept reasonable, respect for tax dollars through scrutiny of spending, safer communities with community-based policing and visible neighbourhood presence, responsible growth with community consultation, accountability at City Hall on project budgets and timelines, transit with more frequent bus service and converting Red Lanes into lanes for vehicles with several occupants, and support for families and seniors. TTCriders' Ward 25 page records "No response" from him to each of its 18 transit questions, and Build Canada's page lists him among the candidates who had not yet answered its questionnaire.