Joe Cressy wins vacant Ward 20 Trinity-Spadina seat

Joe Cressy has overwhelmingly won Ward 20 Trinity-Spadina, a wide-open race with more than a dozen candidates and no incumbent.

He won with 44.3 per cent of the vote in early results, well ahead of second-place candidate Terri Chu, who won 12.3 per cent. Sarah Thomson, a former mayoral candidate, won 8.8 per cent.

Cressy, Olivia Chow’s former campaign manager when she was a federal MP, ran in Ward 20 after losing June’s federal byelection to former Ward 20 councillor, now Liberal MP Adam Vaughan, the former city councillor for Ward 20. (To add to the “six degrees of Ward 20″ game, Vaughan resigned his council seat in May to run in the federal byelection for the seat formerly held by Chow, who resigned her seat in Ottawa to unsuccessfully run in Toronto’s mayoral election.)

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Thomson entered the mayoral race in March, sent out some late-night robocalls, promised the city’s low-income seniors free Viagra, before dropping out of the race in September and choosing to run for council instead. Thomson also ran in the 2010 election but dropped out early, throwing her support behind second-place candidate George Smitherman.

Also running in Ward 20 was Anshul Kapoor, the founder of NoJetsTO – a grassroots organization that opposes the expansion of Toronto’s Billy Bishop Airport to allow jet aircraft and extended runways – a controversial issue in the downtown.