Prime Minister Mark Carney has called six byelections for Dec. 7, and one of them is Scarborough North, the Toronto riding where Liberal Shaun Chen won last year with 63% of the vote and a margin of 13,931 over the Conservatives.
Chen left Parliament in August, citing health concerns after a car crash in October 2025. His seat is the kind that parties count on and rarely contest in earnest. For Black Scarborough, that is the problem. About 8.2% of the riding’s residents are Black, according to the 2021 census, roughly one in 12 residents, who have as much say as anyone in who answers their calls in Ottawa.
The other five seats are Brantford-Brant South and Yorkton-Melville, both vacated by Conservatives, and three in Quebec: Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie, Saint-Hyacinthe-Bagot-Acton and Laurier-Sainte-Marie. The Liberals have named an accountant, James Li, in Scarborough North, and a former Desjardins chief executive, Guy Cormier, in Laurier-Sainte-Marie. The votes give Carney a chance to widen what the CBC describes as a thin Liberal majority in the House of Commons.
One analyst, Dan Arnold, called the contests “Canadian midterms” and said “timing is everything in byelections, and the timing is great for Carney right now.”
That is the national story. The local one is simpler. A byelection in a safe seat is a low-turnout vote in December, and low turnout is where communities that are already underserved get skipped. Scarborough’s Black residents have good reason to ask the candidates plainly what they will do about police stops, housing costs and jobs, and to ask before Dec. 7, not after.
The Liberals should not treat a 14,000-vote cushion as a mandate to say nothing.
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