Heating up in the deep freeze

The 2026 municipal election here in Hamilton will happen on Monday, October 26th, 2026.

There’s something about the symmetry of that date that makes my brain happy. Lots of “O’s”, all those “2’s”, and the soft repeat of the “26”? Niceeeeeee. It’s like poetry.

No armchair diagnoses, please.

Similarly, the idea of October weather makes my brain happy when placed in contrast to the misery that is our current frigid state. Sure, I’m a summer boy, but I’d take a crisp October day over this polar nonsense any day.

But October 26th is just the end of the campaign. There’s a lot to get through beforehand.

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Candidates can officially begin registering on Friday, May 1, 2026 and have until 2:00 PM on Friday, August 21, 2026 to submit their paperwork. That Friday in May is the “official” start to the campaign, but candidates have to get ready well before then. Real, competitive campaigns recognize the need to get the machinery in place ahead of time. Campaigns need to ensure their candidate can canvass their community multiple times before the vote, attend as many events as possible, and do the hard work of informing voters about the basics of local government if they even have a shot at winning. All that means a viable campaign (which make up about 15-to-25% of campaigns) needs to get organized long before the doors to City Hall open on that first Friday in May. Exceptions can be made for candidates with unparalleled name recognition (see: the current mayor), but, for most council candidates, it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

With previous municipal elections, we could easily tell when the campaign unofficially started. The 2010 campaign started on June 30, 2008 with Spec columnist Andrew Dreschel’s piece “Eisenberger’s night of the long knives”, chronicling the former mayor’s inability to lead council at the midpoint of his first term. After that, prospective candidates realized just how vulnerable Eisenberger was and began positioning themselves as contenders.¹ The mayoral race sometimes sets the pace for the entire campaign, allowing eager council candidates the unspoken “permission” to kick things off, albeit quietly.

For the 2014 election, it was another Dreschel column that kicked things off. On the front page of the August 26, 2013 edition of the Spec, Dreschel informed the community that Ward 1 councillor Brian McHattie had begun forming his own version of an “exploratory committee” to gauge support for a mayoral campaign.² McHattie indicating an interest in the mayor’s chair meant that the council campaign in Ward 1 could unofficially begin, as could other contests around the city. Matthew Green made his announcement that October and the pace of council candidate announcements snowballed from there.³

In recent years, the campaigns have started with more of a whimper. The 2018 campaign wasn’t a barnburner by any stretch of the imagination, even with new council wards and some high-profile departures of those council members seeking higher office.

The top candidates in 2022 didn’t make any definitive announcements until well into that year. Even though Keanin Loomis was the subject of some “speculation” in February of 2021, he waited until January of 2022 to make anything official.⁴ Mayor Horwath waited until late July - just weeks before the cutoff for nominations - to register, long after many of her supporters had begun to back or, at the very least, consider voting for Loomis, whose campaign had a solid 8 month head start on the former NDP leader’s bid.

This time, she wasn’t leaving anything to chance and came out with her intention to seek a second term way back in July of 2025. Granted, she only did so because Joey Coleman prompted her on the matter, but she could have equivocated if she was on the fence in any way.

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Sure, a handful of right-wing populist personalities in the community made their council ambitions known back in June of 2025 and a smattering of fringe candidates have made “announcements”, but there hasn’t really been a groundswell of support for anyone in any direction.

All that’s not for a lack of trying, though. The city’s developer-backed right-wing political machine has been doing their damnedest to make this a “change” election. They’ve been working hard to synchronize their messaging, whip up as much anger as they can muster, and blame every problem in Hamilton - the state of the roads, the slowing pace of development, the fact that homelessness exists, the coming recession, your own general sense of midwinter ennui - on this current term of council. If it’s good, thank the political right. If it’s bad, blame The Ladies and The Gays (Plus Craig)™. It’s a simple strategy.

Like all right-wing populists, they’re hellbent and determined to unleash their dragons, conveniently ignoring the fact that they have absolutely no ability to train them once they’re loose.

Ultimately, though, they’re in a pretty good spot, campaign-wise. They have the money, they have the determination, and they have the connections necessary to run strong campaigns without the need to do the same legwork as candidates with centre/centre-left/progressive/urbanist/generally-not-rage-based values.

It helps that the local paper of record, the Spec, has one dedicated municipal columnist who clearly and regularly articulates their messaging to a wider audience.

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Scott Radley’s commentary, which is often published right on the front page of the paper, directly supports the message of Hamilton’s right-wing populists, feeding into the narrative that this October’s election will be nothing short of a “taxpayers revolt”.

“Hundreds of new employees have been added to the municipal payroll,” he wrote in another front-page editorial this past Thursday. “Huge amounts have been added to the operating budget. Plenty more has been tacked on to the capital budget, too. Which has all led to what will be a 21.5 per cent hike in property taxes in one term.” Oh, the humanity!

More than just echoing the populist playbook on taxes, Radley hints that someone is lurking out there, ready to take on Horwath and the “tax and spend” council of 2022-2026.

“If some candidate running against [Horwath] says he or she can return to the days before this term of council when increases generally fell into the two per cent and a bit range - and can show a credible path to that result - will that person find favour with the electorate? That’s to be determined. Though here’s betting someone will give it a shot.”⁵

Sure seems like the columnist knows something’s brewing.

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Just two weeks ago, Radley published another piece - this one on A4 of the Friday, January 9 edition of the Spec and a companion piece to Radley’s podcast, “Placeline Hamilton” - on new Ward 8 councillor Rob Cooper’s first few months on the job. In the article, Cooper openly muses about running for mayor because, as the councillor says, he wants control over the budget process. “There’s only one person who’s really going to decide what the budget is…that’s the mayor,” Cooper told Radley.⁶

Cooper, an ideologically-driven conservative with extensive connections to the local press, later told the CBC that, if his experience with the tax budget mirrors the experience he had with the water budget (namely being mostly left out while the mayor directs the conversation and city staff prepare the numbers), “it’s not going to work for me.” He then walks right up to the line, saying “If you want to make seismic change in a community like Hamilton, there's only one way to do it - through being the mayor.”⁷

The comments are as notable as how the CBC changed their graphic after the story was published; when the article came out at 4:00 AM, Cooper’s photo was beside Loomis’s above the story. By mid-afternoon, Loomis’s photo had been dropped, leaving just Horwath and Cooper as the mayoral contenders with photos on the story.

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For his part, Loomis told the CBC that he would “have more to say about [the election] in the coming weeks.” 

But Cooper appears to have preempted things and is quickly stealing what little spotlight there is in the city. That makes sense, considering Loomis spent the better part of the past four years as the assumed front-runner to take on Horwath while Cooper was, up until a few months ago, a little-known backroom Conservative Party operative who narrowly made it onto council with just 19.4% support from voters in Ward 8. He has to do a little more work to get his name out there than Loomis, who has kept a high and positive profile since his campaign in 2022.

A possible ace up Cooper’s sleeve is the fact that he has a long history with this city’s Conservative/Progressive Conservative establishment. McMaster University political scientist Peter Graefe told the Spec following Cooper’s win that he “likely had an advantage due to his long history with the Tories and benefited from the party’s databases - in addition to his networking skill as a former riding association president.”⁸ That kind of connection can come in handy, especially as the city’s ever-shrinking electorate drifts more and more to the right.

With Radley writing endlessly about “bonkers” tax increases, a coalition of right-wing populists running for council seats across the city repeating lines about the need to “reign in spending”, connections to Hamilton’s three PC MPPs and two Conservative MPs, and access to a vast network of well-funded, deeply-entrenched, and highly-organized right-wing operatives in Hamilton, Cooper might just make a meal of the mayoral election.

Other factors might work in his favour as well. Progressives continue to sour on Horwath’s administration and Loomis is dragging out any announcement about his intentions (which leaves him little runway to make a strong bid and makes it harder for anyone else not in the Horwath or Cooper camps to start organizing if he doesn’t run). Populists, as the theory goes, thrive in a void.

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Complicating things for the city’s right-wing machine is the fact that, in that same CBC article from Saira Peesker in which Cooper strongly suggested he wants to be mayor, the majority of sitting council members said they are going to run for re-election. Nearly all of the centre-right/right-wing populist bloc on council have declared their intentions to stand again, save for Tom Jackson in Ward 6 and Ted McMeekin in Ward 15. Neither of those two said definitively that they won’t be running, with Jackson unavailable for comment before the story (it would be a genuine surprise if the 11-term incumbent didn’t run again) and McMeekin saying he’ll spend the summer thinking things over with his family and team (it would be a genuine surprise if the one-term councillor who has spent five decades in politics and has made an indelible mark on Hamilton did run again).

Incumbents have an incredible advantage when it comes to municipal elections. Across Ontario, over 80% of incumbents were successful in their re-election bids during the 2022 municipal elections, up from 76.5% in 2018. In Hamilton, the average number of incumbents who lose their seat in any given election (based on data from 1960 to 2022) is approximately 2 and, in many of those cases, it’s the mayor who loses re-election. From Lloyd Jackson to Andrea Horwath, Hamilton has had 11 mayors (including Vince Agro’s year as acting mayor after Vic Copps’s heart attack). Of them, seven have been defeated in their re-election bids.

In five of Hamilton’s elections from 1960 to 2022, no incumbents were defeated and, in seven of them, three or more incumbents lost their seats (with 2022 being one of those elections). That means that Hamilton runs about average in Ontario for incumbent success rates, which are still extremely high. Once a candidate wins their first election, it can be very difficult to replace them unless they go willingly.

Around six council members are reliably opposed to the right-wing populist playbook and a few more (like Ward 9’s Brad Clark) represent a more mainstream, “classical” conservatism. There are no guarantees in municipal politics, but the right would have a hell of a time defeating even a couple of those council members, assuming all follow through with their bids for re-election. And, the more work the right puts into winning those council races, the fewer resources there are for Cooper and his mayoral bid. Alternatively, the city’s right-wing establishment could simply focus on Cooper’s campaign for mayor and try to hold the plurality they have on council, optimistic that they can, when the time is right, entice the requisite number of council members to their side for budget votes to prevent the need for an unsavoury mayoral veto.

All this is to say that the city’s right-wing establishment has a few options available for them. That, of course, ignores the inevitable infighting that happens when a group of politically-engaged Hamiltonians get together and assumes that another right-leaning candidate like Chad Collins or Vito Sgro or Peter Dyakowski doesn’t enter the race. But given Collins’s poor polling, Sgro’s past electoral results, and Dyakowski’s lack of seriousness about the race (his chilling call to take “your city back” aside), it sure seems like Cooper will be the conservative choice for mayor.

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There are still a great many “unknowns” as the election heats up. Will Doug Ford throw another grenade into municipal affairs just before the election? Will his government abolish the office of school trustee, leaving 22 local elected officials in search of other opportunities? Are there other high profile mayoral candidates out there just waiting for the perfect time to announce their entry into the race?

Then there’s the great mystery of who might run for council and (if the seats still exist come election time) trustee. If Cooper makes a mayoral move, does that mean Terry Whitehead will be back for another kick at the can? Will the troika of right-wing populists who mused about council runs against perceived progressives last year be joined by other fellow travellers? What about the city’s non-establishment, pro-Palestine left? How about the conspiracy theorists and culture warriors who made bids for trustee and council and the mayor’s chair last time? Who will take up the mantle and become this generation’s Brother Baldasaro!?

There are 98 days until nominations open for the 2026 municipal election. In that time, the sun will begin to poke out more and more, the snow will melt away, and the world will, once again, come alive.

The municipal campaign might seem like it’s hibernating, but it’s beginning to rouse from its slumber. The deep freeze may be keeping it subdued, but it’ll come alive before you know it. Best be ready when it does.

1  _{Andrew Dreschel. “Eisenberger’s night of the long knives” Hamilton Spectator, June 30, 2008 (Spec archive link).}

2  _{"" “McHattie eyes mayor’s chair” Hamilton Spectator, August 26, 2013 (Spec archive link).}

3  _{Julia Chapman. “Five Hamilton young professionals to watch” CBC Hamilton, October 26, 2013 (Link).}

4  _{Scott Radley. “One candidate is already in. Who else might run for Hamilton mayor in the 2022 election?” Hamilton Spectator, February 10, 2021 (Spec link - Paywalled).}

5  _{"" “Mayor’s budget draws a battle line for coming election” Hamilton Spectator, January 22, 2026 (Spec link - Free Gift Article).}

6  _{"" “Rookie councillor disappointed in city’s budget process” Hamilton Spectator, January 9, 2026 (Spec link - Free Gift Article).}

7  _{Saira Peesker. “Majority of Hamilton council planning to run for reelection this year” CBC Hamilton, January 23, 2026 (Link).}

8  _{Christie, Mac. “New Ward 8 councillor says he parked Conservative affiliations, but political-scientist says party data gave him edge” Hamilton Spectator, September 24, 2025 (Spec link - Paywalled).}