Ana Bailão

Ana Bailão was born in Vila Franca de Xira in 1976 and raised in Alenquer, in the central mainland region of Ribatejo. In 1991, when she was 15 years old, Bailão immigrated to Canada with her parents and settled in Toronto’s Little Portugal neighbourhood. She went to high school at West Toronto Collegiate, after which she graduated from the University of Toronto with a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and European Studies. While at the university, she co-founded the Luso-Can Tuna in 1998, the only Portuguese academic tuna in North America.

That same year, Bailão began working as the executive assistant to Mário Silva, the Portuguese-Canadian city councillor for Ward 18 (Davenport), which includes the Little Portugal neighbourhood. In 2003, after Silva left office to run in the upcoming federal elections, she succeeded him as the Liberal-backed candidate in that year’s municipal elections and finished in second place behind the NDP-backed Adam Giambrone. After this, Bailão became the president of the Federation of Portuguese Canadian Business and Professionals in 2005-2006 and the Working Women Community Centre in 2007. In 2010, when Giambrone ran for mayor of Toronto, Bailão again ran for city council in Davenport and won with a 44% share of the votes (6,777). She was re-elected in 2014, 2018 (with over 80% of the votes), and 2022.

As city councillor, Bailão was most active in community housing policy.  In 2011, during Rob Ford’s mayoralty, she was appointed chair of the Affordable Housing Committee. That year, she hosted a Symposium on Poverty, Housing and Homelessness that brought together close to 250 experts, non-profit organizations, businesses and other community stakeholders to produce policy recommendations. As committee chair, Bailão led multiple initiatives addressing the lack of social housing stock and the extensive repair backlog in the Toronto Community Housing Corporation. She led a special housing working group that studied the proposed sale of a large number of social housing units to pay for repairs. The resulting report, Putting People First, published in September 2012, proposed private-public partnerships and innovative measures to fundraise $120 million and reduce the need to sell social housing units. As chair of the Planning and Housing Committee, Bailão also led the development of the 2020-2030 Housing Action Plan, which called for the amending of Toronto’s zoning regulations to allow for “missing middle” densification within single-family dwellings. She also led the related programs Modular Housing Initiative, Open Door Affordable Housing Program, and the Multi-Unit Residential Acquisition; and advocated for a vacant home tax. In 2017, Mayor John Tory appointed Bailão as Deputy Mayor for Toronto and East York, where she continued to focus on affordable housing. During her time in office, Bailão received multiple local and national government officials from Portugal, and facilitated or participated in numerous Portuguese community initiatives in Toronto.

Bailão decided not to seek re-election in the 2022 municipal election. In January of the following year, she became the Head of Affordable Housing with the real estate company Dream Unlimited. In March, she resigned that position and announced that she was running for Toronto mayor in the June by-election.