ONTARIO’S FUTURE BY DESIGN
As of this past Friday, the 2026 municipal election cycle is officially underway across Ontario. Over the coming weeks we’ll find out who’s running, what they’re promising, and whether any of them are prepared to have the conversation communities across this province actually need to have.
The timing matters. Over the past year, Ontarian’s participated in consequential federal and provincial elections, both fought, in their own ways, on the terrain of governing capacity.
The “Canada Strong” message that carried Mark Carney’s Liberals to a federal mandate and the “Protect Ontario” campaign that returned Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives were not simply partisan slogans. They were, beneath the surface, arguments about the role of government in serious times, successfully arguing that the challenges facing Canadians require institutions that can actually deliver, not just intent but results. Voters responded.
Now the question arrives at the municipal level: how will local governments rise to the same moment?
There’s a debate happening in politics that rarely makes it down to local elections, but it should. Writers like Ezra Klein have spent years diagnosing why liberal democracies struggle to get big things like housing, infrastructure and transit, built. His argument is uncomfortable: politicians have spent decades defining themselves by what they want government to do, while largely ignoring whether government is actually capable of doing it. The ambitions are real enough. The capability to match them often isn’t. Ontario’s municipalities should take this challenge seriously as a practical necessity.
In advising governments and organizations on performance, this is the central question: are you building a future by design, or simply inheriting one by default? Design means clarity of purpose driving capable implementation. Default means good intentions accumulating into outcomes nobody quite chose.
Many of Ontario’s cities and towns have real ambitions. Many have strong civic identities, engaged electorates, and genuine local pride. None of that is the problem. The harder question is whether the institution of municipal government, which communities rely on to translate those values into results, is actually built for the moment we’re in.
Governing a municipality has changed. The problems that land at City Hall like housing, mental health and addictions, affordability pressures and economic resilience, are harder, faster-moving, and more interconnected than the municipal systems designed to handle them. That’s not a criticism of the people doing the work. It’s an honest look at the moment.
Across many towns and cities across Ontario, that shows up in approval timelines that outlast market windows, in advocacy to Queen’s Park that is heartfelt but vague, in programs that grow without any clear picture of what they’re achieving. It shows up in a governing culture more comfortable explaining why things are hard than figuring out how to get them done.
None of this is anyone’s fault, exactly. But it is everyone’s problem and this election cycle is a chance to name it and make a different choice.
The difference matters; ‘by default’ is what you get when a municipality lets process substitute for progress, when the machinery grinds along and outcomes arrive (or don’t) by accident. ‘By design’ is what becomes possible when a community decides that how it governs is itself a civic priority. Some examples:
ON HOUSING AND DEVELOPMENT: POSITION TO MOVE, NOT CATCH UP
Municipal governments don’t control interest rates or global construction costs. But they control their own approval processes, their own zoning rules, their own development partnerships. Every candidate will say they support housing. The question is whether we’re building the institutional conditions for housing to actually get built with faster approvals, clearer rules, a pipeline of shovel-ready projects ready to move when market conditions improve rather than still navigating internal review when the window closes. Capable government doesn’t wait for conditions to change. It prepares so it can move when they do.
Rural municipalities are on the front lines of one of Ontario’s most consequential long-term decisions. Local councils don’t control provincial planning instruments, but they do control their own official plans, their own settlement area boundaries, and their own posture toward development pressures and opportunities. A municipality that treats its official plan as a living strategic document, actively maintained, is a very different institution from one that lets it allows decisions by default while approvals drift case-by-case. The tension between housing supply and farmland protection is real, but it is not irresolvable provided councils approach it as a planning challenge to be designed through, rather than a political hot potato to be managed around.
For small-medium, rural, and northern Ontario communities, the infrastructure challenge is even more existential than in larger cities. Aging roads and bridges, aging water and wastewater systems, and a tax base too thin to fund renewal on its own are the defining fiscal reality of “small-town” governance. Provincial programs like the Ontario Community Infrastructure Fund provide a measure of relief, but grant dependency is not a strategy. The municipalities that will fare best are those whose councils enter the next term with a credible, costed asset management plan and the political will to use it as a platform for specific, evidence-based asks of senior governments. Rural municipalities should arrive at Queen’s Park and Ottawa with proposals, not appeals.
ON HOMELESSNESS: LEADERSHIP MEANS COORDINATION, NOT JUST COMPASSION
No municipality can solve mental health, addictions, and homelessness on its own, and no credible candidate should pretend otherwise. But “we can’t do it alone” cannot become a reason to do very little. What’s needed is local government leadership acting as a system convener pulling together municipal services, health partners, social agencies, and law enforcement around a plan with defined roles, shared accountability, and specific, costed asks of Queen’s Park and Ottawa. Senior governments respond to proposals, not appeals. That’s how partnerships get built.
ON AFFORDABILITY: DISCIPLINE IS NOT AUSTERITY
A genuine commitment to fiscal discipline starts with harder questions: which services do residents actually rely on, and are we protecting them? Where are we adding cost or duplication without real value? How do we do what matters, better? Calls for “back to basics” isn’t a call for doing less. It’s a call for intentionality. If a municipality holds property tax increases near zero, it should be because it has genuinely rethought how it delivers services not because it has quietly shuffled the problems down the road.
There is precedent for this kind of thinking in Ontario. The 2012 Drummond Commission (formally the Commission on the Reform of Ontario’s Public Services) was not, at its core, an exercise in spending cuts. It was an argument that a government facing genuine fiscal pressure had an obligation to ask hard questions about how every dollar was being spent and whether services were being delivered in the most effective way possible. Whatever one thinks of its specific recommendations, the Drummond tradition, zero-based scrutiny of service delivery, not just line-by-line budget trimming, is an example of a model for the moment. The municipal equivalent is already visible in communities across Ontario that have pursued shared procurement, consolidated back-office functions, and joint service agreements with neighbouring municipalities, working to maintain or improve what residents actually receive while reducing the cost of producing it. Fiscal responsibility at its best is an act of institutional imagination: not a mandate to cut, but a commitment to ask whether what we’re doing is actually the best way to do it.
THE QUESTION THIS ELECTION SHOULD ANSWER
Federal and provincial voters have already sent a message: they want government that is serious, capable, and equal to the challenges of the moment. Municipal elections are where that mandate either connects to people’s daily lives or doesn’t. The “serious government” argument doesn’t stop at Queen’s Park or Parliament Hill. It must reach City Hall too.
Governing well isn’t a constraint on ambition. It is the precondition for it.
Ontario’s communities have the capacity and the caring. What they haven’t done is fully align the two. The gap between what communities want and what their institutions are built to deliver is exactly the gap that an election exists to close.
Results require execution, not just intention with a serious account of how, not just a vision of what. Results require measures, timelines, and accountabilities. The machinery matters as much as the mission.
A future by design means asking, “how could we?” A municipality where that question drives everything, where the response to complexity is agency, not deference, is the future worth voting for.