2018 Oshawa Municipal Election

Oshawa held its municipal election on Monday, October 22, 2018. Voters elected a mayor citywide and, for the first time since 2006, chose their councillors by ward: each of five new wards elected one regional and city councillor, who sits on both Oshawa City Council and Durham Regional Council, and one city councillor, who sits on city council only. Oshawa voters also elected the chair of Durham Region and school board trustees.

The mayoralty was open. John Henry, mayor since 2010, ran for Durham regional chair instead of seeking a third term as mayor, and won. Seven candidates ran to succeed him and 43 ran for the ten council seats. Dan Carter, a regional and city councillor since 2014, was elected mayor with 69.4% of the vote. Only three members of the outgoing council returned: Carter and councillors John Neal and Rick Kerr. Of 109,208 eligible electors, 26,298 voted, a turnout of 24.1%.

The Return to Wards

Oshawa elected its councillors by ward from 1985 to 2006. At the 2006 election, two ballot questions asked whether councillors should instead be elected by a general vote across the city, and 64.4% and 61.3% of those who answered them said yes. Turnout was too low for the results to bind council, but in April 2007 council changed the method of election, and the 2010 and 2014 elections were held at large, with every voter choosing seven regional and city councillors and three city councillors.

In 2014 the ballot carried a question, amended by the Chief Electoral Officer of Ontario after council's wording was appealed, asking whether all councillors other than the mayor should be elected "by ward vote instead of general city wide vote." 19,013 voted yes and 7,530 no (71.6% yes). Fewer than half of eligible voters took part, so the result did not bind council, but in December 2014 council directed staff to reintroduce wards for the 2018 election. In September 2016 the City began a ward boundary review by Watson & Associates Economists and Dr. Robert J. Williams, and on September 27 Durham Regional Council reduced Oshawa's regional councillors from seven to five. At a special meeting on June 15, 2017, council chose five wards, each electing one regional and city councillor and one city councillor. Council stayed at 11 members, with five city councillors instead of three. By-law 55-2017, passed on June 26, 2017, set the boundaries.

Ward 1 takes in rural Oshawa, Taunton, Kedron and Columbus. Ward 2 runs from Highway 407 to Rossland Road west of Ritson Road, and Ward 3 from Taunton Road to Olive Avenue east of Ritson and Wilson roads. Ward 4, from Rossland Road south to Gibb Street and Olive Avenue, includes downtown; Ward 5 covers the south end.

Mayoral Race

Carter received 17,651 of the 25,452 votes cast for mayor (69.4%). Sara Lear finished second with 2,899 (11.4%), followed by Joe Ingino with 1,409 (5.5%), Bob Rutherford with 1,083 (4.3%), Adam Kunz with 1,060 (4.2%), Kenneth Carruthers with 983 (3.9%) and Rosaldo Russo with 367 (1.4%). Carter finished 14,752 votes ahead of Lear. In the City's results by voting place, he placed first at all 32 election-day voting places and in the combined advance and City Hall vote. His share of the election-day vote was above 70% in Ward 2, Ward 3 and Ward 4, and lowest in Ward 5, at about 59%, where Lear had her best result (about 16%).

Carter was the first candidate to enter the race, in May. At his campaign launch on June 12 he said Henry had encouraged him to "pick up the baton and move forward." As the July 27 nomination deadline approached he was still the only candidate; six others filed before nominations closed at 2 p.m.

Henry, a regional councillor from 2006 to 2010 before his two terms as mayor, defeated four challengers for regional chair, only the second time Durham voters had elected the chair; Roger Anderson, first elected in 2014, died in March 2018. In Oshawa, Henry received 18,782 of the 25,698 votes cast for chair (73.1%); across the region, the Oshawa Express reported, he won 54.99%.

The Candidates

Dan Carter was first elected to council in 2014 as one of Oshawa's seven at-large regional and city councillors, and chaired the city's finance committee; he was the only mayoral candidate with a seat on council. A former local broadcaster and business owner, he spoke openly about his recovery from alcohol and drug addiction and a period of homelessness, saying those years taught him "how I need to serve as a public servant on behalf of those who do not have a voice." He described himself as having a "socialist heart, conservative head and a lot of liberal friends." He promised to keep paying down the city's debt, control spending, build reserves and maintain "a competitive tax levy," to support entrepreneurship through partnerships with post-secondary institutions, and to invest in a strong downtown and in an active transportation network of bicycle routes and trail paths.

Sara Lear, a strategy consultant and project manager, said the biggest issue facing Oshawa voters was "complacency": she said she had knocked on more than 6,000 doors and that most people who came to the door told her they did not vote. She proposed freezing property taxes for at least two years and reforming the city's procurement process to give preference to businesses registered in Durham.

Joe Ingino, the publisher and editor of the local newspaper The Central, had also run for mayor in 2014, receiving 374 votes. He described the race as "the institution versus the people." Adam Kunz, a Durham College professor, proposed reinstating the city's auditor general and ordering a forensic audit.

Campaign Issues

Homelessness, the downtown, city debt and fire safety were among the issues at the first mayoral debate, and a seniors' forum took up affordable housing for seniors. At a debate held by the Greater Oshawa Chamber of Commerce and the Durham Region Association of Realtors, every mayoral candidate present opposed a municipal land transfer tax. On affordable housing, Carter said the city had approved more than $2 billion of housing and that the city and region were lobbying the federal and provincial governments for more investment; Lear said developers should be required to set aside a share of their buildings for affordable and accessible housing. Candidates also debated red tape, the shortage of serviced employment land (Carter said only about 85 of some 3,500 available acres were "shovel ready") and the downtown, which Carter called the "heartbeat of the city."

Candidates in every ward raised property taxes, and both Kunz and Neal said Oshawa's were the highest in Durham Region. Three candidates raised council's elimination of the city's auditor general. Kunz and Ward 1 candidate Cathy Clarke called for the position to be restored: Kunz said the office was closed in 2013 "amidst allegations of improper processes and overspending" on the property for the city's Consolidated Works Depot, and Clarke said council did not renew the auditor general's contract when he wrote a report critical of the purchase. Neal, her opponent and the ward's incumbent, called the $117,000 paid to a consultant to eliminate the position wasteful spending.

In the regional chair race, homelessness in Oshawa was raised at every debate, according to the Oshawa Express; data from Community Development Council Durham put about 70% of the region's documented homeless population in Oshawa. In Ward 2, candidates raised student housing and rooming houses, the conversion of buildings to multi-residential use, and traffic. In Ward 4, candidates for both seats named the revitalization of the downtown, along with housing, homelessness, mental health and addiction. In Ward 5, candidates raised the waterfront, a marina and boat launch, and property taxes.

Council

Eight of the eleven members of the new council had not sat on the outgoing council, although four of them (Chapman, Marimpietri, Nicholson and Gray) had served before. The outgoing council had changed during the term: after regional and city councillor Nancy Diamond died in 2017, council appointed city councillor Doug Sanders to her seat and Gail Bates as a city councillor, and after Bob Chapman resigned in April 2018 to run for the Progressive Conservatives in the provincial election, council appointed Joseph Kolodzie, a councillor from 1985 to 2010. Regional councillor John Aker had said he would not seek re-election.

• Ward 1: John Neal, a regional and city councillor, was re-elected with 1,410 votes (50.6%), ahead of Cathy Clarke (1,054) and Dominic Barone (320). For city councillor, Rosemary McConkey, a real estate broker who had finished third for mayor in 2014, won with 1,154 votes (43.6%) over Durham Catholic school trustee Theresa Corless (834) and three others.
• Ward 2: Tito-Dante Marimpietri, who had served 11 years as a city councillor, regional councillor and deputy mayor before running for the federal Liberals in 2015, won the regional seat with 2,140 votes (43.7%); Julia McCrea was second with 1,233 in a field of five. For city councillor, realtor Jane Hurst won with 1,760 votes (37.9%), defeating Bates (1,007).
• Ward 3: Chapman, a retired Durham Regional Police superintendent first elected in 2010, lost to NDP MPP Jennifer French in June and then, despite having said he would not run municipally, sought his old seat. He won with 3,089 votes (44.2%), 533 ahead of city councillor John Shields (2,556); Teresa Aker, John Aker's wife, received 1,350. For city councillor, lawyer Bradley J. Marks won with 3,057 votes (45.8%), 1,561 ahead of Eric Guernsey: the largest margin in any council race.
• Ward 4: Two sitting councillors met for the regional seat. Kerr, a city councillor since 2014 who had taught in Durham College's police foundations program, defeated Sanders by 3,183 votes to 3,119. The 64-vote margin was the closest in the city, and Kerr's total was the highest of any council candidate. Ten candidates ran for city councillor, the largest field in any race; Derek Giberson, who had run in 2014, won with 1,466 votes (23.0%), 523 ahead of Catherine Hawthorn (943).
• Ward 5: Brian Nicholson, a councillor for 25 years until he lost his seat in 2010, won the regional seat with 1,676 votes (39.7%), defeating Nester Pidwerbecki (1,393), a councillor for 28 years, and Kim Beatty (1,149). For city councillor, former mayor John Gray, who had finished second to Henry in the 2014 mayoral race, won with 2,413 votes (57.8%).

Four incumbents were defeated: Sanders, Shields, Bates and Pidwerbecki. After the Region's 2016 decision, Oshawa's members of Durham Regional Council fell from eight to six: the mayor and the five regional and city councillors.

Voting and Turnout

Voters marked paper ballots, which optical-scan tabulators counted. In March 2017, city staff had recommended against introducing online or mail voting, saying the return to wards would already require more voter education. Ballot marking devices for voters with disabilities were available at every advance voting location and at an accessible voting place at City Hall on election day.

The City offered ten advance voting opportunities at six locations between October 5 and October 14, used by 3,929 voters, and special advance voting at eight multi-residential buildings on October 9 to 11, used by 306. The 4,235 advance voters were 3.9% of eligible electors, up from 3.2% in 2014. The City reported the advance votes and the City Hall voting place as one combined total (4,586 ballots), so that the votes of people with disabilities could not be identified.

Turnout was 24.1% (26,298 ballots from 109,208 eligible electors), down from 26.4% in 2014 (29,271 of 110,789) and 29.9% in 2010. It was the lowest in the City's table of turnout by year, which begins in 1945; the previous low was 25.1% in 2006. Excluding the advance and City Hall ballots, which were not reported by ward, turnout ranged from 21.6% in Ward 2 to 15.9% in Ward 5.