2018 Ontario municipal elections


The 2018 municipal elections in Ontario were held on October 22, 2018.
Voters in the province of Ontario elected mayors, councillors, school board trustees and all other elected officials in all of the province's municipalities.

Electoral period

As per the Ontario Municipal Elections Act, 1996, nomination papers for candidates for municipal and school board elections could be filed from May 1, 2018, at which time the campaign period began.
Nominations closed on July 27, 2018, at 2 PM local time. Certification of nomination papers was completed by 4 PM on July 30, 2018.
Voting was on October 22 from 10 AM to 8 PM.

Ranked ballots

In 2016, the provincial government passed Bill 181, the Municipal Elections Modernization Act, which permitted municipalities to adopt ranked ballots for municipal elections.
London was the only municipality to use ranked ballots in the 2018 election itself, with the decision in that city being made by London City Council in 2017, while Kingston and Cambridge held referendums concurrently with their 2018 elections on whether to adopt ranked ballots for the next municipal elections in 2022. Both of the referendums passed, though neither reached the 50 per cent turnout required to make the results legally binding.
In 2020, the provincial government passed Bill 218, the Supporting Ontario's Recovery Act, which, among other things, eliminated the option of ranked balloting for municipalities. The City of London will now have to switch back to first-past-the-post for its 2022 municipal elections.

Online voting

The 2018 elections were also noted for a significant increase in the adoption of online voting. Across Ontario, over 150 municipalities conducted their elections primarily online, with physical polling stations either abandoned entirely or limited to only a few central polling stations for voters who could not or did not want to vote online.
On election day, however, 51 of those municipalities, all of which had selected Dominion Voting Systems as their online voting contractor, were affected by a technical failure. According to Dominion the company's colocation centre provider imposed a bandwidth cap, without authorization from or consultation with Dominion, due to the massive increase in voting traffic in the early evening, thus making it impossible for many voters to get through to the server between 5:00 and 7:30 p.m. All of the affected municipalities extended voting for at least a few hours to compensate for the outage; several, including Pembroke, Waterloo, Prince Edward County and Greater Sudbury, opted to extend voting for a full 24 hours into the evening of October 23.

Counties

Regional municipalities

Districts

Single tier municipalities

Chatham-Kent

[Chatham-Kent Municipal Council]

The results for Chatham-Kent municipal council is as follows:

Haldimand County

[Haldimand County Municipal Council]

The results for Haldimand County Council are as follows:

Kawartha Lakes

[Kawartha Lakes Municipal Council]

For 2018, the Kawartha Lakes council will be reduced from 16 to 8 seats, plus the mayor.
The results for Kawartha Lakes council are as follows:

Norfolk County

The following are the results for Norfolk County.

Norfolk County Council">Norfolk County, Ontario Council">Norfolk County Council

There were some slight alterations to Norfolk County's ward map.
By-election
A by-election was held on June 3, 2021, in Ward 2 to fill the vacancy of Roger Geysens who retired.
CandidateVote%
Linda Vandendriessche1,02556.57
Bill Dendekker33818.65
Noel Haydt20011.04
David Van Hamme1287.06
Pamela Moore1065.08
Russell Colebrook100.55

Prince Edward County

Mayor

The following are the results for Prince Edward County.
CandidateVote%
Steve Ferguson4,98150.17
Dianne O'Brien4,04340.72
Richard Whiten9049.11

Separated municipalities

Belleville

The following are the results for Belleville.

Brockville">Brockville, Ontario">Brockville

The following are the results for Brockville.

Councillors

Eight Councillors were elected.
CandidateVote%
Matt Wren4,4328.83
Cameron Wales4,1198.21
Mike Kalivas 4,0548.08
Jane Fullarton 3,8067.59
Larry Journal3,1266.23
Jeffrey Earle 3,0436.07
Nathalie Lavergne2,9935.97
Leigh Bursey 2,8435.67
Joy Sterritt2,8305.64
Jessica Barabash2,7595.50
Philip Deery2,5335.05
Naomi McNeill1,9673.92
Bud Eyre1,6063.20
Tony Barnes1,4862.96
Mark Darrah1,4442.88
Willy Stevenson1,4362.86
John Henderson1,3862.76
Robert Shannon1,3602.71
Matthew Blair1,0592.11
Jeff Severson1,0142.02
Ralph Legere8231.64

Cornwall

[Cornwall City Council]

The results for Cornwall city council are as follows:

Guelph

[Guelph City Council]

Two councillors to be elected in each ward. Results for Guelph city council are as follows.

Kingston

Referendum

Referendum on ranked ballots. The "yes" side won decidedly with 62%, but the turnout to make the referendum binding did not reach the 50% mark. However, Kingston City Council has promised to pursue the matter anyway.
ChoiceVote%
Yes20,64262.00
No12,16137.00

[Kingston City Council]

The results for Kingston city council are as follows:

Pelee

The results for Pelee Island were as follows:

Peterborough

The following are the results for Peterborough.

Councillors">Peterborough, Ontario City Council">Councillors

Two councillors were elected from each of the 5 wards.

Quinte West

[Quinte [West City Council]]

Elections results for Quinte West city council are as follows:

St. Thomas

Source:

[St. Thomas City Council]

The results for St. Thomas city council are as follows: