Give every Toronto ward a brief, its statistics, and its incumbent

[mikaalnaik]

Ward pages opened with a name, a map and a list of candidates — who is running, and nothing about the place they would represent. This adds the missing half.

Every ward now gets a short brief, eight Census statistics, and the name of the sitting councillor when they are registered to run again. The section sits at the bottom of the page, after the ballot a reader came for.

Where the numbers come from

Nothing here was typed from memory. Two City of Toronto Open Data sets, over Statistics Canada's 2021 and 2016 Census:

• Ward Profiles (25-Ward Model) — the statistics
• Ward and Elected Councillor — who holds each seat

Each is extracted into a small checked-in CSV under scripts/data/, and scripts/gen-ward-profiles.mjs turns them into the display strings the pages use. scripts/data/README.md gives the provenance of every column down to its row in the City's spreadsheet, so any figure can be checked without opening an XLSX. The extraction asserted each field against its source row label rather than trusting row offsets.

Neighbourhood names in the briefs are the City's own, assigned by which ward contains each neighbourhood's centroid — all 158 assigned, no orphans.

Structure

The generated and hand-written halves are kept apart, the same way wardGeo.ts and candidates.ts already are:

file	edited by
wardStats.ts, wardCouncillors.ts	the generator — do not edit
wardProfiles.ts	hand; holds the 25 briefs and combines both halves

WardProfile.tsx owns the WardStat / WardProfile types, as WardMap already owns WardGeo. WardDetail takes an optional profile prop, so Hamilton and Brampton are untouched.

Two decisions worth a look

Every figure is shown against the citywide one. A ward statistic read alone means very little: 45% of households renting is unremarkable until you know the city sits at 48%, and Ward 10's 88% of homes in towers is only legible beside a city average of 47%. The comparison was free — the source has a Toronto column.

Incumbency and candidacy are read from different places and joined at render time. Who sits comes from the City's data; whether they are standing again is answered by looking for them among the ward's registered candidates who have not withdrawn. This deliberately does not use the hand-kept tag: "Incumbent" in candidates.ts — only 13 of 25 wards carry one, so twelve wards would have shown nothing whether or not their councillor was running, and silence there reads as an answer.

Twenty-one wards name someone. The four that do not are all correct: Ward 19's councillor is registered for mayor, Ward 11's is registered in Ward 14, and Wards 4 and 14 have no sitting councillor on their own ballot.

Reviewer notes

• The layout is visually unverified. No browser was available in the session, so the eight-cell stat grid and the incumbent line were checked in the rendered HTML but never actually looked at. Worth opening /toronto/vote/2026/wards/13 before merging.
• A latent trap, untouched: candidates.ts:470 lists Dianne Saxe under ward "11" with tag: "Incumbent", but she is registered in Ward 14. The entry is currently inert — enrichment matches within a ward, so Ward 14 finds nothing for her and she renders as "Registered" (zero Incumbent badges on that page). But moving that entry to "14" without changing the tag would badge her incumbent for a seat she does not hold. Either fix the entry, or derive the roster badge from WARD_COUNCILLORS so incumbency has one source instead of two. Out of scope here.
• Refresh points: wardCouncillors.ts after any by-election and once 2026 results are declared; toronto-ward-census-2021.csv when the City publishes 2026 Census profiles.
• While drafting the briefs I initially wrote ten false superlatives (wrong ward for lowest rent, lowest income, lowest low-income rate, largest households, lowest rent burden). All ten were caught by ranking each claim against the data and corrected. If you add or edit a brief, the CSV is right there to check against — that failure mode is real.

tsc and eslint are clean; the four remaining eslint warnings are pre-existing in bills/ and state-of-the-nation/. Wards 01, 05, 13 and 25 were verified rendering against the dev server.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[greptile-apps]

Greptile Summary

The PR adds an “About this ward” section to Toronto’s 25 ward pages, combining generated Census statistics, hand-written briefs, and incumbent information derived from the current candidate roster.

• Adds checked-in source extracts and a dependency-free generator for ward statistics and councillor records.
• Adds Toronto ward briefs and joins sitting councillors to active candidates using normalized names.
• Extends the shared ward-detail page with an optional profile section, leaving cities without profiles unchanged.

Confidence Score: 5/5

The PR appears safe to merge with no concrete blocking or independently actionable non-blocking defects identified.

The new profile data remains Toronto-specific, ward tokens are normalized through the existing roster, incumbent links use the same name normalization as candidate routes, and the shared component remains backward-compatible through its optional prop.

Important Files Changed

Filename	Overview
scripts/gen-ward-profiles.mjs	Generates validated, display-ready statistics and councillor maps from the checked-in CSV extracts.
src/app/toronto/vote/2026/wardProfiles.ts	Combines ward briefs, generated statistics, and current candidate data into optional ward profiles without an identified correctness defect.
src/app/toronto/vote/2026/wards/[ward]/page.tsx	Supplies the resolved, canonically padded ward token and council roster to the new profile accessor.
src/components/elections/WardDetail.tsx	Adds the optional profile section after ballot content without changing behavior for callers that omit it.
src/components/elections/WardProfile.tsx	Renders the brief, incumbent status, comparative statistics, and source attribution with semantic section and definition-list markup.

Flowchart

%%{init: {'theme': 'neutral'}}%%
flowchart LR
  Census[Ward Census CSV] --> Generator[gen-ward-profiles.mjs]
  Councillors[Councillor CSV] --> Generator
  Generator --> Stats[wardStats.ts]
  Generator --> Seats[wardCouncillors.ts]
  Briefs[wardProfiles.ts briefs] --> Profile[wardProfile]
  Stats --> Profile
  Seats --> Profile
  Roster[Current ward candidate roster] --> Profile
  Profile --> Page[Toronto ward page]
  Page --> Section[About this ward section]

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