Canada's municipal elections: the exciting, the irrelevant, and the factless

Depending on who you believe city election campaigns are either important, irrelevant, or maddeningly lacking in facts.

Cities across Canada are gearing up for municipal elections later this month. And for once, many of the races look exciting.

“For a long time municipal politics has been considered minor ball,” says an Ottawa Citizen editorial. “Suddenly, civic politics has a newfound cachet.” In London, Toronto, and Ottawa prominent former provincial and federal ministers have returned to their home cities to run for mayor. Urbanization has made cities more powerful, and the fact that civic politics frees politicians from toeing provincial and federal party’s lines is attractive. City Hall is “is the one place where you can make a difference – and do so on your own terms.”

In the Toronto Sun, Brian French makes the rare ‘don’t get out the vote’ argument. The idea that it's politicians who make a city great is "dumb and absurd," he says, arguing that most of the great institutions like the University of Toronto, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Toronto Film Festival were started by private citizens, not City Hall. “It doesn’t matter much who gets elected on Oct. 25, it is people that make Toronto great.”

If municipal elections don't matter, why not elect the National Post’s Kelly McParland, who fears George Smitherman might become mayor of Toronto solely because of growing anyone-but-Rob-Ford sentiment. “Smitherman has had six or eight months to present a platform attractive enough to Toronto voters to make them want to elect him mayor, and got nowhere … his chief attraction has come down to not being Rob Ford. I’m not Rob Ford either, anyone want to make me mayor?”

In Ottawa, no one seemed to notice that candidates Jim Watson and Larry O’Brien both slammed the idea of safe-injection sites in the city before even reading a major report on the issue. “Seen from the perspective of how public policy is made, it is devastatingly revealing,” writes the Post’s Dan Gardner. Ignoring facts “is indefensible. It is nakedly irrational … (and) is so common we seldom stop to think how utterly bizarre it is.”