The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Does Local Government Matter More Than You Think?

Episode Date: October 16, 2026

Local government has a major impact on everyday life, but how well do Ontarians understand what municipalities are responsible for? Charlie Buckley hits the streets of Toronto to put voters' knowledge to the test. Then, with voter disengagement and political burnout challenging local democracy, France Bélisle, Peter MacLeod, and Lindsay Jones discuss why Ontarians should vote, what it takes to run for office, and how to strengthen participation in municipal politics.Donate Today : https://tvo.me/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What a difference a year can make. When you support TVO, you're helping bring trusted stories, inspiring ideas, and lifelong learning to people across Ontario. And as a thank you, you can receive the 2027 TVO calendar. Filled with beautiful photography from the documentaries and programs your support helps make possible. It's a year-long reminder of the learning, beauty, and discovery your generosity supports. Donate $40 or more to claim yours today at TVO.com slash calendar 2027 and make every month a little more inspiring. We are used to hearing about low turnout for municipal elections, like really low. In 2022, less than a third of eligible voters marked a ballot, according to the Association of Municipalities of Ontario.

But things could be different this year. I mean, just look at the headlines from this week. Advanced voting in Toronto has hit a record high. So is this a sign that more people are getting engaged in local politics, or am I getting ahead of myself? We dig into the state of local democracy in Ontario because here's the thing. Municipal governments make decisions that affect our lives every day. So why do so few of us vote? And it's not just voters.

There's another challenge facing local democracy, keeping people in office once they are elected. As of mid-March, more than 150 local local. leaders had resigned from their seats they'd won in 2022. That's double the number from the previous four years. So what's driving people away from local politics? And what would it take to get more people involved on both sides of the ballot? I'm Jay and Jahn Jekinawomen, and this is the run-day. Local government really does have a massive effect on your day-to-day life. But it can be hard to figure out how sometimes, because there are obviously the provincial and federal governments and the division of powers can be pretty confusing.

So which level of government handles which issues and how much do Ontarians know about how it all breaks down? Rundown segment host Charlie Buckley hit the streets of Toronto to find out. I don't know about you, but it seems like people have a lot of feedback for the government. I'm always hearing about gridlock streets and highway traffic jams, garbage on the ground, pollution in the air. Somehow every public service is underfunded and over-funded and over-referenced. overpriced at the same time, and don't get me started on taxes, bylaws, gas prices, policing,

transit, education, housing, the military, statutory holidays, funding for the arts, the Olympic team, I could go on. But before we all demand to speak to a manager, I gotta ask, who's in charge of all this stuff anyway? All right, quick recap from high school civics. Our government has three levels, municipal, provincial, and federal, and each handles a different set of issues. Our friends in Ottawa handle the big picture stuff. Think foreign relations. Immigration, Defense, things that tend to affect Canada as a whole. Your province, meanwhile, is behind a lot of the big infrastructure and institutions, things like highways, hospitals, and power plants.

Finally, your local city hall oversees the services specific to your neighborhood, running water and utilities, firefighters, libraries, and health inspectors. But it's not always so simple. Bigger cities usually have municipal police, but for a lot of smaller communities, it's more effective to work with the detachment of the Ontario Provincial Police, or the federal R-CMP. Speaking of the law, a lot of responsibilities are shared. While Parliament's in charge of writing the criminal code, most cases end up going through provincial courts instead. And how about education? Don't be confused by a name like Toronto District School Board. For the most part, it's a provincial

responsibility, from funding to curriculum. As for public transport, it really depends. Catch a bus across Toronto, that's municipal, but if you want to go to Kitchener, Waterloo, you'll likely be on Ontario Go Transit. And if you're headed outside the province entirely, you might find yourself on a via rail train, courtesy of the federal government. And it gets more complicated than that. Like with any big system, a lot of the moving parts tend to influence one another. Say you wanted to build a lot of housing really fast. Hard to imagine. I know. You'll need municipalities to approve the zoning, but the province could help by updating some of the zoning rules. Plus, the feds might have some land despair or even whole buildings to convert

to residential, so don't forget to CC them on the email. Next, you'll want infrastructure, city power lines and provincial roadways and before you know it you're going to need a lot of natural resources to keep all that humming so now that's a job for all three levels too not to mention someone's going to have to build all this stuff and build it properly so now you're talking permits construction and safety codes but you'll also need to train up an army of skilled tradespeople and if you end up in a labor shortage maybe even an immigration drive so how well do we know which government is in charge of what to find out we hit the streets with this quiz published by Elections Canada.

All right, first question. A garbage strike leads to raccoon problems in many neighborhoods. Which level of government is that? Municipal. Brecht? New high school to be built in a growing community. I think provincial. Improvements announced for the TransCanada Highway in a national park.

What was it? Provincial? Yeah. I think most highways are provincial, but if it's in a national park, that's federal. Report proposes changes to media regulations. That be the provincial government. Not federal CRTC? Um,

I know that the guidelines are like, according to the federal government, but the actual like jurisprudence over and regulating it, like, or looking over it would be the province. Community soup tasting competition raises funds for youth programs. Province, I'm not sure about this. That one's a bit tricky. I think it could be provincial. I think the first answer would be municipal.

Armed forces to help with the response to spring flooding. Armed forces would be federal, no? Property taxes will increase to pay for a new water treatment plant. Municipal. Municipal is right, yeah. Electrical fire forces evacuation of business. Electrical fire. Municipal firefighters, that's right.

Changes coming in university tuition fees. Ooh, it's both provincial and federal. Why is that? So the province and federal government collaborate with universities to determine, like, tuition costs for domestic students and international students, but also like it helps them plan for OSAP funding, like specifically to Ontario. So it would be both. I really feel like I'm being schooled. It turns out this stuff can be tricky, and there's a lot to keep track of. Fact is, every day we're impacted by a million decisions from all levels of government.

Some of them big, and a lot of them really small. if you care about how they decide just about anything, you should keep that in mind next time election season rolls around. Kind of like right now. Elections for Ontario municipalities are this Monday, October 26th. Check your local city website for details and don't miss your chance to let your voice be heard. That's your reality check. Now you're in the know. Historically, local democracy in Ontario has often meant disengaged voters and increasingly burnt out to politicians. So why should you vote or run for office? Peter McLeod, Franz Belil, and Lindsay Jones.

Great to have you on the rundown. How are you guys doing here in studio? Great. Very well. Brantz, great to have you on the line as well. Peter, I'm going to start with you. You have been in the game for quite a while, for the last two decades or so. How is the state of democracy right now? Well, I don't think you need to ask me.

I think you can ask anyone on the street, and they're going to tell you much of the same thing. They don't feel very confident about the health of our democracy, and that might be at the national level, it might be at the provincial level. Canada's being sorely tested right now. But where the rubber hits the road is always at that level where people are closest to their government,

and that is municipal. And let's just rehearse a couple of numbers over the past couple of decades, because there have been a number of things going on that I think are cause for alarm. There are about 2,800 elected positions in municipal government in Ontario. And in 2022, about 500 of those were acclaimed,

which means that they weren't competitive. People weren't stepping forward. It's too soon to know what's happening this year. We hope more people, of course, are engaged in putting their names forward. I think it's heartening to see all those signs pop up. But, you know, the other number that concerns me has been the disappearance of local media.

You know, some 600 news outlets have vanished in Canada since 2008. How are you even supposed to know who's running if you don't have local media telling you about those candidates and what the issues are? The last number I want to give you is simply the fact that even when people step forward and when they are elected,

they are resigning more frequently than we have seen previously. And next door in Quebec, 8% of those who are elected in 2020, they decided to step away before the end of their term of office. Okay, I appreciate you laying the land there for us. Lindsay, help us understand what should Ontarioans be worried about, or why rather, should Ontario

be worried about the health of democracy? Well, democracy works best, of course, when everybody participates and everybody is informed about what the issues are. So we've been at AMO trying to do some work on that front since 2022, which, as Peter mentioned, was a bit of a low watermark for participation in local democracy in Ontario. So our efforts have really been focused on trying to encourage more candidates to come forward, to understand the importance of municipal government to people's daily lives, and then on the flip side, to encourage voters to come forward and to participate.

To participate, yes, in elections, but not just on election day, participate more in local democracy year-round by getting involved in all types of opportunities that exist at the local level. Help me understand. What trends are you hearing from municipal leaders about what's making local government so hard these days? Well, I mean, and I think I just heard in the background, but there's no single factor, but there's a variety of things. The roles are a lot more complex. Local governments, particularly in Ontario, are being asked to take on so many different kinds of issues and more so than they did before. So it used to be the roads, the sewers, the buildings, and now it is homelessness, it's climate change, its energy, it's indigenous relations.

These are complicated issues with public expectations that are really, really high. There's also this real issue around the civility of public discourse that hits really hard at the local level, just because the electorate is so close to the people that they serve, and they're in the grocery stores with them every day. And that makes it really challenging for folks to continue in those roles. Well, I think that's a good time to bring France in, as we know. In 2024, you left your post as mayor of got no early. What drove you to that decision?

Well, I wanted to protect my health, that's for sure. To be quite honest, I didn't have the choice physically. and mentally I needed to leave for me, but also for my family. We don't talk about this very often, but it's very difficult. Like for the husband, the parents, the kids, they are sometimes a collateral victim of the job we chose, and the fact that we were chosen by the public. So for me, it was just impossible, and I think it was an issue with the relationship within the city. within the council, not with everyone, of course,

but some relationships were very mean and difficult, and months after months after months, it finally got under my skin. And I'm a former journalist, but also a former head director. And it was tough for me to see how some of my colleagues didn't take the job seriously, didn't prepare enough before voting,

and it is a privilege to vote. And for me, it was very difficult to accept that. And all of this at the end played also on my health. I was getting up in my office. couldn't remember where I was going to, needed to open my computer, look at my agenda. And I felt very, very lonely because as an elected official, if you show that you're vulnerable,

then you're going to be kicked even more by your opponents that sometimes become your enemy. So I just decided to leave. Never regret it. Never regret the fact that I ran. but didn't regret the fact that I chose me. For me, I didn't quit. I chose me.

Franz, I do have to ask, I know it's been two years since you've removed yourself from office, but do you think the issues for politicians and what you experience has gotten worse? Has it improved? I'm torn about this. And to give you an example, less than two weeks ago,

a mayor near Quebec City resigned because of what she received. There was a very hot topic in her municipality. And she said she wasn't sleeping anymore. And her nose was bleeding all the time. And then she resigned because the citizen were mean and aggressive and threatening her. So I'd say like the question is, does an elected official today feel safer than two, three, five, ten years maybe ago? I'm not sure it's the case all the time. Peter, I want to talk some more data.

According to AMO's data, Ontario had double the number of resignations from municipal election seats one in 2022 compared to the previous 2018-2020 cycle. Are municipal politics becoming unsustainable for some elected officials? Well, I think clearly for some elected officials, it is unsustainable. And nobody should have to put up with what too many people face. And they face it on a number of fronts.

Yes, when they're out in public, But we haven't even talked about what has changed in our information system. And that, of course, is the rise of social media and the way in which we are all connected. And how some of the norms of public discourse, of course, have changed considerably. So to open up a social media account of an elected politician is a bracing experience, to open up the inbox of that elected official bracing experience. And that's not even to mention the people who are staffing that official, and who are dealing with this onslaught.

And I want to be careful here because it's not that the wider public has suddenly become that much more pernicious and volatile. It's the fact that social media has allowed, call it 5%, call it 8% of the population, to pop off with far fewer barriers, far less standing between them and, you know, harassing and really trying to disrupt a political process.

And we've struggled to develop new social norms to govern this. I think there are two things that we need to address here. One, we are well overdue in this country to have an effective digital services regulator. We haven't put into place at the national level the important policies that can help protect people, whether they're elected or not. Canadians have been saying for some time, we need to get a handle on social media.

That is only more the case when we see who owns those social media platforms and the role of foreign interference. But on the municipal end, and this is the work we've been doing with AMO, developing policies and protocols that municipalities don't need to invent for themselves, but can just grab, implement, and start to establish those new norms, not only between electeds and members of the public, but also between the electeds themselves, where we've seen unnecessary friction and incivility that contributes to the kind of stress

that Franco was describing. Lindsay, I want to switch gears a little bit, talk a little bit about its early days right now, still with the election, but if you notice any changes in our current election season, we talked about acclamations, not necessarily the case this time around in terms of how many people are running,

early voter turnout was pretty good in Toronto. But what do we see so far? Yeah, I mean, we are seeing some encouraging signs for local democracy this cycle. So we took a look at all of the candidate information a couple of months ago, and candidate numbers are back up to where they were in 2018. So Peter mentioned the 2,800 elected positions that are that are, up for grabs this this year it's 6,600 folks came forward. Also, the number of acclamations has declined significantly.

So we're down to 400 acclamations from that, you know, 500 or more last time around. And a lot fewer acclamations as well of the full councils. Finally, a couple more numbers. We're seeing around two-thirds of the candidates who have come forward are new candidates, new folks who are throwing their hat in the ring for the first time and see a lot of value in participating in the process. But also 77% of those folks who are currently in their council seats are running again. So we were keeping an eye on that one because of these issues around incivility.

So we're seeing, we're cautiously optimistic. All right. Those sound like encouraging numbers, but I am curious with your background, would you still encourage someone to run for local government? Totally. And if you want good people to step forward, we also need to give them a reason to stay. And the reason to stay are the citizen. And like Peter was saying earlier, sadly, tough stories like mine make news.

And citizens that are angry are also put in front of the media, sometimes with no consequences on the behavior they're having or showing. But the majority of the people are kind. They come to you at the grocery store. They ask you how you are if you have kids and a family. The majority is supportive and nice, but not vocal. And so I think

it's municipal politics is a wonderful tool to serve your community. It is really. I've been approached by provincial and federal government parties to run. I've

declined and I always thought that being a municipal leader or elected official was a privilege to serve my community. So even if it was very difficult for me, to the point that I had to leave, I say, to preserve myself, I would encourage people to go, especially women, because we know also that women, they think a lot before jumping in politics if we compare to men. Some people are saying that for a guy, it's like, just watch me, bro. It's going to take me two months.

I'm going to speak with my wife and I'm going to be out there. And for a woman, it can take up to two years before she decides to run. So I also want to say that the fact that I resign is not because I'm a woman. It's because politics can be tough, whether you're women or a man. But certainly we need also to see more women out there. Yeah, we can't talk about municipal politics without talking about strong mayor powers. So that's what we're going to talk a little bit about. it has sparked criticism not only amongst the public, but some municipal officials,

and Stratford has even pursued a legal case against the province. How do strong mayor powers potentially impact voters and candidates? Well, the powers that now are available to around 150 different mayors are to be able to have different decision-making power around things like budgets. They're allowed to put forward their own budget. They're allowed to veto certain decisions of counsel. They're also allowed to make decisions about hiring and firing senior levels of staff in municipal governments. And so this is the first election cycle at the municipal level, where those powers have been in play.

And so there had been some speculation that this might impact the number of people who are interested in running for counsel or the way in which different slates of candidates might order. organize themselves. So we're pleased to say that we haven't seen the impact on the numbers that some were speculating about. But we are really encouraging residents and voters to ask folks who are running for mayor how they intend to use these powers because there's a wide range of options and approaches that can be employed. Peter, help us understand how do we move forward without disenfranchising voters and candidates? Well, it still means a lot. And councils are still quite powerful.

There's no question that mayors can do things that they previously couldn't, and with great powers come great responsibilities. We need mayors who are going to use these powers responsibly, take accountability for their choices. And I think one of the areas we can be concerned about is the relationship between the city manager, who's effectively the chief executive of the public service in that community, and the mayor, and that needs to be a strong, healthy,

and trusting relationship. But we do need people to participate. And one of the things I'm most excited for in this municipal election is a first-ever pilot that's taking place in Innesville and Cobur because democracy is about more than voting. We need great candidates

and we need people to get out in the polls. Even if we get back to those 2018 numbers, the story has been one of long-term decline. And that means voter turnout is only about 30-some percent, a third of people eligible to vote. vote will make their way to the polls. Look, we can all do

more than vote. The other great act of democratic citizenship is getting involved between elections. It's volunteering. So in these two communities, Innesville and Coburg, they're being asked to do both things at once. Vote and also fill in a form that allows

you to be put in a pool to be called on, to serve on advisory committees, but also to help out with local events. There's so many ways we can get involved. And I think as a province and as a country, we need to take far more seriously the need to connect with Canadians, not just every four years, but in the space between elections as well, and tap into their talents, capabilities.

We're big-hearted people. We want a chance to be involved and give something back. Franz, there might be some viewers and listeners who might be thinking, you know what, I don't think I'm going to vote. I don't understand or why I would like to vote. Help us understand why should people be taking part in local democracy. Because people are dying around the world to have this right. And we are lucky enough.

And we take it for granted here that voting is a very powerful way to express your view, your desire, your perspective. And it gives you also the chance to complain. And this, you know, you need also to consider this. When it was walking as a mayor and people were whining about decisions, the first question I was asking them was, did you vote? Some people were looking at me right in the eye and say no. And I was like, well, I'm sorry, I'm not listening to you. If you're not happy, go vote in four years.

And then we'll have a discussion. And the second question was, if you were at my place, what would you do? And then I was asking, they were like, well, maybe you should cut this. And I'm like, what about we cut the pool? What about the park? Well, no, no, no, of course. They want everything, but they want to pay for nothing. So that's also a reason why you should vote.

It is also money in your pocket and the quality of life for your community that you're choosing. It's funny. Every conversation I have with family members, extended to. family members. If we go into a debate, it usually ends right there if they're not, if they're not voting, we're done here. We're done. Lindsay, what's one thing governments could do tomorrow? That would make citizens feel like their participation actually matters. Oh gosh, that's a tough one. Well, I do think that it is a really important responsibility of governments to communicate to

to the people just how important all the decisions are that they're making to their daily lives. Municipal government, so many people don't understand the huge range of responsibilities and the impact. So I think that, again, it's all about

communicating to the population just how important it is to vote. Peter. There's so many things that we could be doing and we have to remember that, yes, we are lucky as Canadians. There are 44 million of us, there are only 650 million people in this world who live in full and free democracies. There are six billion people who don't and the balance are in between. So we have to take our

institutions seriously. We do need to involve ourselves, but we have to get a hold on our information system. And I think one of the best things we can do in addition to bringing back the possibility of ranked balloting at a municipal level. That's a whole other conversation. conversation is to reinvest seriously in local journalism, village media. There are other green shoots that are starting to fill in some of the news deserts that have been created, but without significant public investment, we're going to struggle to tell our own stories, to understand our own politics, and to make good choices. Franz, you get the last word.

Oh, that's fun. Okay, I actually wrote a line. Respect is not a bonus. It's a basic condition. So food for thought. We're going to leave it there. I think that's mic drop right there. Well, France, Peter, Lindsay, thank you so much for joining us for all of this and for your insights as well. Thanks so much. Thanks. Great to be here. Are you planning to vote on October 26th and have you ever considered running for office?

Let us know in the comments or send an email to rundown at tv0.org. Until then, I will see you next week. Starting this year, grade 10 students must complete the financial literacy graduation requirement to earn their Ontario secondary school diploma. Need little help getting started? TVO learn is here for students, teachers, and families. Explore free curriculum-connected resources developed by Ontario certified teachers. You'll find engaging lessons, activities, and tools designed to build a new curriculum-connected resources developed by Ontario-certified teachers. designed to build confidence, strengthen financial literacy skills, and support student success.

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