Reading a new paper by University of Calgary political science profs Elliot Dillabough and Jack Lucas tonight, I learned:
“In Ontario, municipalities may adopt ward, at‐large, or hybrid systems (Municipal Act, ON), except in the cities of Hamilton (City of Hamilton Act, ON), Ottawa (City of Ottawa Act, ON), Sudbury (City of Sudbury Act, ON), and Toronto (City of Toronto Act, ON) which must use wards.”
I didn’t know this.
I recollect discussions about switching to an at-large or hybrid system during the 2016/2017 ward boundary review process.
I either assumed every municipality needed provincial permission, or didn’t, to make this change.
One proposal that gained some attention in 2016/17 was setting our municipal boundaries based upon federal boundaries. Hamilton’s 15 wards should be created as either three wards within each of the five federal ridings or each federal riding should become a ward with the top three candidates elected to Council.
The strongest argument for this is that it would force a ward boundary review every decade following the decennial federal riding redistribution.
Successive Hamilton Council’s had deferred ward boundary reviews, causing imbalanced representation on Council.
Had this been adopted, we would have a dilemma because Hamilton now has 4.5 to 4.75 federal ridings with Flamborough-Glanbrook now extended into Brant County as Flamborough-Glanbrook – Brant North.
The next Council would be wise to launch a ward boundary review shortly after taking office.
Other Notes from the Paper
Dillabough and Lucas have done something nobody has done: count the number of municipalities in Canada and the number of municipal politicians.
The researchers count 3,503 municipal governments across Canada with at least 23,100 municipal politicians.
There are 444 municipalities in Ontario, much less than the 1134 in Quebec and 767 in Saskatchewan.
In general, about 70% of municipalities employ at‐large elections, 28% employ ward elections, and 2% employ a hybrid of the two systems.”
Larger municipalities tend to have ward electoral systems, and so do low-density “extremely large rural municipalities.”
They write “the probability threshold for having an at‐large system tips at around the 10,000 population mark, at which point it becomes more likely that a municipality has a ward electoral system.”
“The probability of an at‐large municipality increases sharply with population density (up to about 300 persons per square kilometre), flattens off, and then decreases sharply; this indicates that at‐large elections are most common in municipalities with moderate levels of population density.”
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Published: April 14, 2025
Last updated: April 14, 2025
Author: Joey Coleman
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