Krissan Veerasingam lives in Scarborough’s South Bendale neighbourhood, a short walk from the apartment building where he grew up. As a Scarborough kid, his family never owned a car, so he walked, biked, and took the bus everywhere, which connected him more to Scarborough’s local communities. In 2022, he and his wife, Fizza, co-founded the Scarborough Environmental Association, which runs programming like repair cafés to support local residents. This year, Krissan decided to run for city council in Ward 21, Scarborough Centre, as Toronto heads to the polls for its municipal elections. During the day, he works as a software engineer, and when his shift ends, he heads out to knock on doors and canvas the neighbourhood as a candidate.
Krissan Veerasingam, as told to Sid Naidu for Change Made
The Everyday Scarborough Kid
I was born at Scarborough General Hospital in 1994, and I lived in a nearby building for 30 years. Then I moved to a house that’s also near that building. So I’ve spent my whole life in the South Bendale area of Scarborough.
It’s a privilege because I have access to so much nature through our ravine systems. The schools in the area were walkable, so I walked to school every day with my parents, and by grade three, I was walking by myself with my siblings. At school, we also walked to the local library as a class. To get there, you had to travel through the ravine, and that was important because it gave you a sense of spaces around your school that your parents might not have had time to take you to.
My family didn’t own a car, so I had to walk, bike, or take the bus to get places, and that habit can carry through your life once you build it as a child. I think if you’re someone who had access to a car maybe younger in life, you might gloss over things in your community because you’re just driving past them. I feel like I grew up in a unique bubble in Scarborough, but it’s a bubble that exists in a lot of neighbourhoods, and it made me who I am.
My dad was a refugee from Sri Lanka. His journey took him through places like Pakistan, Germany, Italy, and France. Sometimes I’m like, wow, no wonder you don’t want to leave Canada for vacation, because you’ve already been to all these places, and under more stressful circumstances. My dad worked at a nearby plastics factory. My mom was also a refugee, but she was sponsored to come to Canada after my dad got here. My mom worked on and off in different jobs, and now she’s a postal worker, which has given her a lot of labour stability, but it is very difficult work, especially as she ages.
When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re poor. And then by the time you hit seventh grade, that’s when you start realizing, like, oh, I want to get these Michael Jordans that everyone in this school is getting, and instead you’re getting “Air Monarchs,” because that’s all we could afford. My dad would get the toys people throw out in a box by our building. I would see it, and then the next day it would be at our home. I played with it regardless because I was a kid, and I’d think, wow, I get this toy none of my other friends could quote-unquote “afford” because my dad was thrifty.
My dad was probably the biggest influence in my career. Growing up, he put us into a lot of extracurriculars. We’d learn martial arts, chemistry, English, math, and computer science. Some of my older cousins got into software development. So my dad’s like, “Oh, that’s where we got to send you, because that’s where the jobs are.” It’s why my other brother and I went into programming at the University of Toronto in Scarborough.
Sometimes people don’t realize that when they meet me now, because I have a great job and I’m doing all this stuff, they think I must have been a smart kid; I wasn’t. I was doing very poorly academically, and in third year of university I realized that I needed to get my act together when my grades got so bad I might not have graduated. I learned you just have to work intentionally. Before, I worked very hard, but I didn’t think about what I was working hard for. Now I carry that principle throughout my life, and I always feel there’s a solution to any problem, and there’s always an answer.
Learning That Change Starts At Home
The older I got, the more interested I was in how change happens. Well, it doesn’t come from arguing online about random issues, because you’d be arguing with someone halfway across the world. Then I realized I’m represented by geographic boundaries, so I’ve got to organize geographically. I can’t talk to people halfway across the world; I’ve gotta talk to my neighbours.
I was involved in a couple of electoral campaigns with great people. They’re qualified and have good intentions, but time and time again they were sidelined and couldn’t win because the monetary barrier is high. So I realized that if I want to make change, I have to create a new constituency that speaks to working-class people who can’t afford a car and struggle to get to work. By the time they get home, all they want to do is sleep. I wanted to bridge that gap
I tried creating a group called Call Club, where we’d try to call elected representatives every week about various issues. But I realized quickly that’s kind of boring. All my friends are working-class people. They don’t want to spend their free time calling elected representatives to yell at them about various issues. So I started thinking about how we engage people in a way where they feel like they’re getting something out of it.
A big focus for me is our sewing program because it happens every week. I take my mom to sewing every week, and I don’t know if she’d get the socialization otherwise. Before, we lived in a building with people on every floor. But when you live in a house, it’s tough to keep that socialization. So it gives her an opportunity to interact with communities she wouldn’t regularly interact with, and feel like she’s a part of something.
I think of environment so broadly, where it’s not just that we’re organizing around trees and ecology. My partner Fizza and I organized for a while through Progress Toronto. And I think the same year we started Scarborough Environmental Association, when we joined the board of TTC Riders
We’re organizing around the spaces people live in, where they go to school and how they get to work. The most important event that I like is the Repair Cafe, just because we’re providing a service and showing an example of how a community can be oriented to not just be people who grow, become seniors, like just retiring and then living in social isolation. They can still be active participants in the community.
Any sort of repair we do, it’s good. It matters to the people who benefit, but it’s at a scale where we’re not making an impact on overall emissions or the climate. By coming to the programme, they learn and interact with people who are also passionate, and they’ve now become a constituency for elected leaders to sort of try to win over. They’re not just trying to win over wealthy people; now they have to win over lower-income folks in Scarborough.
The Need To Push For More
Scarborough doesn’t have rapid transit to the extent that other parts of Toronto do. We’re actually losing rapid transit because the Scarborough RT was decommissioned. So I looked at all this, and I’m like, well, that’s not right. And then I looked at housing, where I’m like, I grew up in an apartment building where everyone knew each other. It was a very community-centric vibe. Folks were living with like 10 people in one apartment, and they were trying to find more spacious places. They had to go to Pickering, and all of a sudden, that community started to disintegrate. I just kept seeing these things that didn’t make sense to me. Those sort of contradictions influenced me to run for office.
Ever since my first big event, people would come and be like, you should run for office one day. And I’m like, me? I always assumed more from my elected representatives than what I thought I was capable of. But what I realized is that’s not really the case. A lot of our elected representatives aren’t there because they’re quote-unquote the best for the job. They’re there because they have the funds and the free time to run a campaign.
I’m gonna be asking for people’s time, people who are working class, people’s donations. That’s money that could go toward groceries or a thousand different things. If I’m going to do that, I feel like the campaign can’t just be about me winning; it has to be about building something that’ll last beyond me.
It starts not by showing up at the door and asking for a vote; it starts by asking what they care about and what I could do for them. When I canvassed Midland, on one side the concern was TTC and buses showing up on time, and on the other side it was congestion and all the construction. It was an interesting dichotomy: on one side of the street, they’re desperate for reliable bus service; on the other, we don’t think anyone’s actually using it. In the city, we’re dealing with a physics problem, not necessarily a cultural problem of buses versus cars. There’s only so much space on the road.
A lot of people that I talked to at the door feels like the city says they’re delivering the 57 bus every 15 minutes, but on the ground, it’s 20 to 30 minutes. And over the course of a year, that’s hours of their life gone. For them it’s about putting food on the table, finding a way to make your next rent payment, and getting to work on time. So I’m just trying to find ways to save people money and time.
I believe in sustainability through affordability. The less wasteful we are, the more affordable society is. My ultimate goal is to create a Scarborough where marginalized folks feel like they have a voice. I want my journey to be more than something that ends with whether I win or lose. I want it to end with a bunch of movements or organizations that were created because of it.
This is testimonial journalism: Krissan’s story in his words, as told to Change Made, comes from two seperate interviews and two days spent documenting him this year before he officially announced his campaign and while he was canvassing Scarborough Center as a candidate. On Monday, October 2026, Toronto heads to the polls to elect a mayor and city council representatives.
Change Made covered this story as change profile to raise awareness on a new generation of community leaders leading change. For the full list of candidates running for elections visit Toronto Votes. I’ve also covered another election story in Scarborough North for The Local, you can check it out here The Battle Over Sixplexes in Scarborough North
Note from the Photojournalist & Editor
Over the past two years, I’ve invested my time and energy in growing Change Made, both as a production studio supporting social change organizations and as a platform for independent visual journalism and solutions-driven reporting. Testimonial journalism is our latest exploration.
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