Poll by poll

The mayor of it all

Just a hair shy of Hamilton’s 2026 municipal election - 364 days, to be precise - a fascinating poll dropped that might give us some indication as to what we can expect in next year’s campaign. With anxiety about the state of our democracy at an all-time high and legitimate fears amongst many in the community that we are staring down a right-wing wave that has the potential to reshape the city as we know it, this poll gives us the first real glimpse into what we can expect during next year’s campaign and whether we can breathe a cautious sigh of relief.

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The poll was commissioned by the “National Ethnic Press and Media Council of Canada” (NEPMCC). There’s little information on NEPMCC available, though their website is a delightful throwback to the glory days of Geocities sites assembled thoughtfully in a million high school computer labs across the world. They have a limited social media presence and the bulk of their posts reference their annual booths at the Canadian National Exhibition - indeed, almost every single post they have made references the grand opening of their booth and little else, which begs the question: what are they promoting at said booth? Next year’s booth opening?

Of course, there is some information available on the NEPMCC’s non-booth-related activities if you know where to look; the NEPMCC has received over $11.5 million in funds from Canadian Heritage since 2007 for a host of journalism initiatives.

While the poll was commissioned by the NEPMCC, it was conducted by Liaison Strategies, a government relations and polling group founded in 2018 by David Valentin. With a “B+” rating on 338Canada.com, Liaison is in the middle-of-the-pack for pollsters, putting it below established groups like Léger and Mainstreet Research (the latter of which Valentin helped found before leaving in 2018 to set up Liaison), but above firms like Campaign Research, the somewhat partisan pollster “preferred” by the Ford Tories at Queen’s Park.

Like many other polling groups in Canada, Liaison has connections to partisans and other political actors. Sabrina Nanji at Queen’s Park Observer has referred to Valentin as a “Senior Liberal Operative”, the firm has been critiqued by the folks at Open Council for underrepresenting NDP and Green support in provincial polls, and Valentin is currently a registered lobbyist for none other than the NEPMCC.

That should not cast doubt on the legitimacy of the poll that came out on October 27 which, with 800 respondents from Hamilton and a margin of error at ±3.46, looks to be an interesting snapshot into the mood of the city’s civic electorate with one year to go until we head to the polls.

Granted, polling has become less reliable overall as of late, best evidenced by how pollsters absolutely bombed the 2025 Newfoundland and Labrador provincial election. Over the past year, all but one poll showed the governing Liberals in the lead, with some showing their support as high as 59%. On election night, the opposition Progressive Conservatives won a surprise majority, severely diminishing the credibility of some major national polling firms and causing many to ask if polling as we know it is ill-prepared to meet this current, chaotic moment in politics.

Still, let’s see what the Liaison poll shows for Hamilton.

Much has been made of the results showing that, among the mayors of Ontario’s 10 largest municipalities, only our own Mayor Andrea Horwath has a negative approval rating. Of those polled, 41% indicated they approved of her performance while 47% disapproved, giving her a net result of -6%. In contrast, Mayor Olivia Chow in Toronto has a +10% approval rating, Brampton’s Patrick Brown has a +22%, and Vaughan’s Steven Del Duca - so thoroughly rejected by the voters of Ontario in the 2022 provincial election - has a +31% approval rating.

Opponents of the city’s one-term mayor were further buoyed by the mayoral poll itself.

If asked to vote today, the respondents of the Liaison Strategies poll from Hamilton would elect Keanin Loomis over Andrea Horwath by a modest margin. Among all voters, Loomis leads Horwath 38% to 33%. Among the decided, Loomis leads Horwath 46% to 40%.

This poll shows us a couple of things.

First, reports of Mayor Horwath’s imminent electoral obliteration are much overblown. The mayor leads with some important demographics, including women (39% to Loomis’s 34%) and people under the age of 49. Those same demographics were more likely to say they approve of the mayor’s performance when compared to their male and older counterparts. That she leads with any demographics must come as a surprise to the denizens of Hamilton’s online spaces who have, since November of 2022, been living under the assumption that the mayor would either retire after one term or be trounced at the ballot box next October. Well, at least I think they believed that, unless they actually like the mayor and really despise some other person in the community named “Andrea Horvath” that a surprising number of Facebook and Spectator commenters have taken issue with.

Despite the jubilant cries of the city’s semi-anonymous social media accounts, Horwath is still very much in the race. She has some work to do, but she can’t be discounted yet. This further explains her frequent claims that she’s in-it-to-win-it in the 2026 election - another one of which was made to the Spec’s Scott Radley for his Halloween op-ed about the 2026 mayoral race.¹ Horwath isn’t in the habit of losing, having only failed in one of the eleven campaigns she has contested since the 1990’s, earning over 50% of the vote in seven of those instances.

Second, people have not forgotten about Loomis. Even when considering “undecided” voters in the poll, Loomis is at roughly the same level of support he earned when he ran in 2022 and has plenty of room to grow. The Radley op-ed notes this as well, saying that, after 2022, he was able to get over the “name recognition” hump and become a recognizable political figure in the community.

If Loomis were to run again, he would be well positioned to win this time. And looking at the issues voters in that same Liaison poll raised might offer a roadmap forward on how he could seal the deal. More on that in a minute.

Third, for all their bluster, the possible contenders from the city’s right wing aren’t inspiring voters. Former councillor and MP Chad Collins is the only name from among the city’s political right to appear on the poll, with other possible options - identified by Radley as former mayoral candidate Vito Sgro, local Conservative Party activist Peter Dyakowski, and Ward 14 councillor Mike Spadafora - notably left off. Collins barely breaks double-digits among decided voters, with just 11% of respondents saying they would be willing to vote for him if he were on the mayoral ballot. Even more discouragingly, Collins’s numbers are dismal among the people most likely to vote. Those voters 50+ - who overwhelmingly disapprove of Horwath - have all broken for Loomis, leaving Collins with scant support amongst the segment of the electorate that most reliably shows up on election day. For those 50 to 64 years of age in the poll, Loomis has a 44 point lead on Collins (and a 29 point lead on the mayor) and, for those 65+, Loomis leads Collins by 39 points (and 11 over the mayor). In the next piece down below on the poll-by-poll results for the federal election, I discuss how people 65+ helped secure some important seats for Mark Carney. Winning those folks might very well mean winning an election and Collins just isn’t there with that demographic.

While Radley’s op-ed throws three extra names into the mayoral mix, just 2% of voters (and 3% of those already decided) said they would consider voting for anyone other than Horwath, Loomis, and Collins. Now, those numbers would invariably change if you put a recognizable name into the poll, but how much the numbers would change remains a mystery. This is particularly true when you consider that each of the three mentioned possible candidates has only a modest profile; Sgro hasn’t been active in widely-read circles since his mayoral defeat in 2018, Dyakowski is mostly popular online and amongst Conservative Party activists on X/Twitter, and Spadafora, while a somewhat recognizable name in his own Ward 14 and on the mountain, may not have the needed name recognition in all the corners of the city. This means each of the city’s possible right wing candidates for mayor has an uphill battle to “introduce”/”reintroduce” themselves to the electorate - a battle that a candidate like Loomis clearly doesn’t have to fight.

Add to that the fact that each of the right wing candidates would be battling for the same small segment of the electorate with little to distinguish between each other. Collins and Sgro come from the world of right-leaning Liberals while Dyakowski and Spadafora have both offered themselves to the electorate in Hamilton as Conservatives/Progressive Conservative candidates.

If there was any lesson to be learned from Bratina’s 2022 campaign, it was that the old school variant of right wing politics in Hamilton doesn’t have the same pizzazz it once did. When placed up against a recognizable name with lingering social democratic cred and an interesting young pragmatic urbanist, that kind of politics was only good for around 17,000 votes - more than enough to win a council seat, if concentrated, but nowhere near enough to capture the office of mayor. If a man like Bratina - whose political brand seemed unstoppable during his decade-long stint at City Hall that came to a close in 2014 and was able to send him to Ottawa twice - couldn’t swing it for the right wing populists, it’s hard to imagine any of the other names on the list capturing the mayor’s chair.

The results of this poll should give the city’s right wing movement pause. On the one hand, a recognizable right wing mayoral candidate can “lead the slate” of council candidates already lining up and give them the boost they might desire in their own races. But running any kind of campaign would require resources and could further fracture the already fragile coalition the city’s political right has built. The factious gathering of developers, pro-car advocates, anti-woke online crusaders, bullish law-and-order types, labour traditionalists, and partisans from the right of the Liberal and Conservative/Progressive Conservative worlds is only united because they believe they can eek out victories in a few key races.

And, if they’re tapped into the news from the mainstream media, they may think they can.

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There’s been a lot of media focus on some recent high-profile right wing municipal victories in Canada. Except the analysis, as is too often the case with reports from Canada’s ultracentralized and increasingly uncritical media, misses some key factors, unfortunately spreading a narrative that’s poorly researched and contextless.

Alberta held their municipal elections on October 20. These were the first in which local political parties were present since they dissipated in the late 1970’s (the rise and fall of local parties in Alberta is slightly different from their evolution and change here…but that’s a story for another time).

Calgary saw three parties run candidates. Two - Communities First and A Better Calgary - were explicitly right wing, promising low taxes, abundant services, and a crackdown on public disorder. A third party - The Calgary Party - charted a moderate, urbanist course and ran on a platform of improving transit, increasing urban density, and promoting housing affordability. While the majority of councillors elected remain independents, Communities First won 4 seats and earned 25.6% of the overall vote for councillors while A Better Calgary was only able to win 8.6% and elect a single councillor. The Calgary Party, despite taking 19% of the vote, was also only able to elect a single councillor, though two of their other candidates came within a few hundred votes of winning against right wing opponents.

The big story was the election of Jeromy Farkas, the right wing candidate who has been a figure in Calgary’s politics for over a decade since his time as a research fellow with the Manning Foundation. He served on Calgary City Council for a single term from 2017 to 2021, and quickly became the unofficial leader of the council’s conservative block. Farkas won a thin victory over Sonya Sharp, the candidate of the Communities First party, meaning two right wing candidates earned around 52% of the vote. Even more scintillating to the country’s national media is the fact that both were well ahead of the city’s incumbent one-term mayor, the politically ambiguous Jyoti Gondek.

Then, on November 2, came Quebec’s municipal elections. Like Alberta, Quebec’s largest municipalities feature the involvement of political parties, though la belle province has had partisan civic affairs for decades. For eight years, Montreal was run by the progressive urbanist political party Projet Montréal (of which, for full disclosure, I was a somewhat passive member of while studying at McGill). But the party’s leader and Montreal’s mayor, the charismatic and dynamic Valérie Plante announced she would not seek another term as mayor last year, citing growing toxicity and bitterness in politics that was making it hard for her to accomplish her agenda. The results of Montreal’s election saw the centre-right Ensemble Montréal win control of city council and the mayor’s chair on a moderately pro-car, anti-crime platform.

Both of these victories have buoyed the spirits of the political right. Canada’s media have fixated on those two sweeping successes from right wing candidates, helping to shape the narrative that municipal voters across the country are poised to support any civic candidate who promises to attack bike lanes, deal harshly with crime and homelessness, and bring a combative spirit to their city hall.

But there’s something the wider media missed - something that may have had more widespread attention if we had stronger local media and something that might be slightly more relevant for the case of Hamilton.

Last June, a member of Windsor City Council resigned to take a job leading their local public housing organization. Fifteen members of the Windsor community registered to run in the ensuing by-election. Most of those 15 candidates ran on platforms that included commitments for better, more affordable housing, improving transit, increasing urban density, creating more green and public space, and using the role of councillor to advocate for increased funding in the areas of mental health, addictions, and support for people experiencing homelessness.²

The by-election took place just last week, on October 27. The winning candidate, Frazier Fathers, (who earned over 47% of the vote) was an affordable housing researcher and advocate who campaigned on a platform of traffic calming, better parks, and implementing a rental licensing program.

(Side note, but somebody on the r/Windsor subreddit created a visualization of the by-election results in Lego and it’s ridiculously adorable.)

So while the Canadian media presses the narrative that the only way to win a municipal race is to fixate on imagined crime waves, attack bike lanes, and lean into hard right wing populism, there are more subtle cases showing that a thoughtful urbanist platform can still win elections. And that could be good news for Loomis, if he decides to run again. Indeed, with his personal appeal, established brand, and existing support in the community, it might help push him over the top. Just so long as his team recognizes what the important issues in the community might be and how he can establish himself as the most competent leader to deal with those issues.

The Liaison poll includes a couple of important tidbits on which every mayoral campaign would be wise to focus. Of those tidbits, polling on the issues of importance might be the most important.

For every municipality surveyed, crime was the number one issue of concern for voters (except in Ottawa, where it was the number two issue - a single percentage point behind affordable housing).

Hamilton was no different. Over one third of voters identified crime as their number one issue of concern, followed by taxes, homelessness, and affordable housing.

Despite the reality of crime in Hamilton - that overall crime has remained steady and that some key crime indicators are showing signs of decline while crimes associated with inequality are showing signs of increase - and the fact that consistent increases to the Hamilton Police Services (HPS) budget have not yielded any significant results with regards to a dramatic reduction in crime, Hamiltonians remain deeply concerned about disorder. Side note, but I’ll be looking at crime stats in Hamilton in more detail at some point in the future.

All of this matches the confused results from the Wilfrid Laurier University/HPS survey that was released in September. While 93.7% of respondents to that survey said they believed it was safe to be outside in the city during the day, there was considerable concern over “social disorder”, namely those things that can, as the study notes, “undermine residents’ sense of safety, signal weak informal social control, and highlight neighbourhood conditions that may attract or sustain crime.”³ It is entirely possible, then, that the respondents who said “crime” was their top municipal issue in the Liaison poll might have really said, if given a more nuanced set of options, that they’re worried about the possible crime that may occur in areas perceived to be “disordered”.

Given that over 1/3 of those polled said that “crime” was their big issue, some of the possible mayoral camps can easily use this to their advantage.

Mayor Horwath has the most to lose from crime/perceptions of crime being the main issue going into the campaign. She’s held the reins of power for three-ish years, during which time people have seen little movement on issues of social disorder. There were a series of approaches she could have taken - working seriously with planners, social workers, and advocates on what changes could be made to public space to increase perceptions of safety, embarking on a similar project to the one being pursued in St. Thomas which aims to end chronic homelessness by 2027 (given that, among the perceptions of social disorder “people living in public spaces” was something 36.4% of respondents to the Laurier/HPS survey said they saw daily, constituting the single largest indicator of disorder seen by Hamiltonians), or continue on with her style as leader of the opposition at Queens Park and press the provincial government for the mental health, addictions, and housing funding needed to tackle these perceptions. Hamiltonians have not seen that action from her, nor have they seen anything else innovative and forward thinking that had made residents feel more safe. Indeed, at this point, it seems like she’ll be saddled with the fallout from the most visible effort to expand shelter space - the Barton/Tiffany Outdoor Shelter - without being able to take credit for much else.

This provides an opportunity for Loomis and Collins (or whichever right wing candidate steps up) to distinguish themselves. The right will go all-in for law-and-order, calling for a massive expansion of the HPS, harsh policing of marginalized people - people experiencing homelessness, people suffering from addictions, people experiencing mental health crises, etc. - and a general call for the end to “woke” policies that they will try to claim have caused our “crime problem”. This may have a certain appeal (more on why that’s the case in the piece below), but it has limitations.

Where a pragmatic urbanist campaign can succeed is by turning the conversation around. Acknowledge people’s perceptions of a lack of safety, yes, but tie it to how we need a diversified employment base, opportunities for youth in the form of public library and recreation programs, a commitment to affordable housing that brings non-profit providers to the table in a meaningful way, the natural connections that come with a walkable and vibrant downtown core, and a public safety program that seeks to address crime before it happens by investing in communities and people.

The importance of other issues in that Liaison poll shows this is possible. A full 23% of respondents said issues relating to affordable housing and homelessness are important to them, meaning a commitment to a plan of action that puts non-profit and community housing providers in the driver’s seat will appeal to them. Sure, 15% of respondents said taxes were their main issue, so a case can be made that investing in crime prevention now will be cheaper than being forced to pay for crime management later. And only 8% of people said “traffic” was their main concern (which should be humbling for some of the city’s political right, who have been acting as though it will be among the issues that will guarantee their victory in 2026), so hyping up strong, resilient, walkable, healthy, connected neighbourhoods - neighbourhoods where there are eyes on the street and natural interactions between people which increase perceptions of safety - seems like it will inspire more voters than enrage.

The opportunities are endless. It just depends on who will take them.

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The October 27 Liaison poll gives us a quick snapshot as to the mood of the electorate one year out from our municipal elections. On the mayoral front, things don’t look good for Hamilton’s political right. Even though the issues might seem like they’re in their favour, a savvy political operation can quickly capture the narrative and ride a wave of support to victory. While no one should count Andrea Horwath out just yet, she’s having a hard time selling her vision to the people of Hamilton. Certain demographics are in her camp, but not by much. She has work to do, but she’s still in the running.

All this points to two main takeaways: all is not lost for Hamilton’s progressives and the mayoral election is still anyone’s race.

While it may be anyone’s race, there’s clearly one person many Hamiltonians would be all-too-eager to support. Now we just need to wait for him to make his intentions known.

The detailed results cometh

Poll-by-poll results usually come out with some speed after an election. For the Ward 8 by-election, the City’s elections department released preliminary poll-by-poll results almost immediately. The poll-by-polls for this year’s provincial election came out so fast, I was able to write about them in early March.

The results from the federal election, though, were kept under wraps for a preposterously long time. Yes, there were judicial challenges and by-elections and all that to endure, but results normally come out much quicker than they did for this election.

After an excruciatingly long time, the poll-by-polls were released this week, giving me a chance to drop all the totals into a map and visualize the outcome in the Hamilton area. So I am happy to present the Hamilton-specific results of the 2025 federal election:

A few things to consider here.

The first is the absolute scale of the NDP’s collapse in Hamilton.

The New Democrats did not win any polls in Flamborough-Glanbrook-Brant North, Hamilton East-Stoney Creek, Hamilton Mountain, and Hamilton West-Ancaster-Dundas. Only in Hamilton Centre did the NDP win any polls, taking 41 of the 225 active polls, and not exceeding 50% of the vote in any of the polls they took. The NDP’s support was limited to sections of Strathcona, downtown, and St. Clair/Blakely by Gage Park. The NDP’s candidate, Matthew Green, was only able to carry two polls east of Gage Avenue.

Elsewhere in Hamilton, the party performed far worse. In Hamilton East-Stoney Creek, where the party’s standard-bearer was, in essence, a ghost candidate, the NDP was only able to crack double digits in the raw vote count in 69 of the riding’s 229 active polls. In four polls, the NDP candidate received 0 votes.

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The second thing to consider ties into the first.

Some of the poorest, most marginalized polls in the City of Hamilton went decisively for the Conservative Party. McQuesten, Normandale, the Keith, Stipley, and Rolston - neighbourhoods across three different ridings - all featured very high vote totals for Conservative candidates. People on the margins are breaking for the Conservative Party, even if the party’s policies would have no effect (or, in some cases, an adverse effect) on their wellbeing.

Then again, this is part of a pattern we are seeing around the world. In the New York City mayoral election, people living in extreme poverty and people without any post-secondary education overwhelmingly supported the centre-right-ish establishment candidate Andrew Cuomo over the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani.

And there’s a reason for this. In mid-October, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Olivier De Schutter, spoke with The Guardian newspaper in the UK about a report he was about to submit to the UN General Assembly. His observation was that the shrinking of the welfare state and the shredding of the social safety net has directly contributed to the rise of right wing populism around the world. This has, as he noted, fostered a “sense of scarcity” that the hard right has taken advantage of with ease.

His warning is clear: “The message is: it is us against them. And what goes to one group must be denied to others, because there’s not enough for everyone…It’s a discourse that sets people against one another. And that’s extremely dangerous, and I do think that is what the far right is now reaping.”⁴ In the European context, De Schutter was speaking mainly about rising anti-immigrant sentiment.

While the anti-immigrant sentiment is only lingering in the background of the Canadian conversation (while still being very much present, particularly when the topic of Temporary Foreign Workers comes up), the Conservatives under Pierre Poilievre successfully created a Rorschach test of a paper tiger to present to the Canadian people. Poilievre and the Tories railed on about how “regular people can’t get ahead” and leaving the “because of…” statement open to interpretation with a wink and a nudge depending on who they were speaking to at any given moment. “Trudeau” and “the elites” and “woke activists” could become anyone you wanted, anyone to direct your anger toward, anyone who stood in the way of you getting ahead.

That was appealing to people who have been left behind by the government and failed to see any benefit to the NDP’s propping up the Trudeau Liberals when life was getting harder and harder. Yes, the media did not help by fixating on the NDP’s social policies while ignoring all their economic proposals during the campaign, but, by that point, it was too late. Poilievre knew there was anger out there. He knew that anger is a very effective political tool. And he knew how to weaponize it to benefit himself, even if it meant doing little to tangibly support the people who back you.

The Tory platform was a monument to our scrambled politics. How was the plan to scrap the capital gains tax going to help working people? Or the plan to eliminate the Underused Housing Tax? Or the plan to buy more government drones and border surveillance towers? Or reducing taxes on resource extraction companies?

The only thing that could have somewhat helped working people was their pledge to reduce the lowest personal income tax level to 12.5%, but that would be offset by increased costs for things that the state once subsidized or provided, meaning that the approx. $900 they claim working people would have saved was really just a rebate that people would be forced to spend on accessing services from private providers.

The Conservative platform railed against universities, the “soft-on-crime” Liberals, and a clowder of imagined “woke” boogeymen. In the absence of a progressive party offering inspiring solutions and with a Liberal Party offering a technocrat peddling austerity, it is unsurprising that some of Hamilton’s most marginalized communities opted for Pierre’s angry vision.

But it’s clear that vision has limitations. And that brings me to the third point.

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If these results show one thing definitively, it’s that seniors went in hard for Mark Carney and the Liberals. Those polls covering senior living neighbourhoods, retirement homes, and assisted care facilities were some of the places that returned the strongest Liberal support. And, in some cases, it was those voters who helped the Liberals cross the finish line.

On Hamilton Mountain, Liberal MP Lisa Hepfner only beat Conservative candidate and former Haldimand County Mayor Ken Hewitt by around 2,500 votes. If you strip out the the polls covering the riding’s retirement homes (including the massive St. Elizabeth’s village in the far southwest corner of the riding), Hewitt would have won by around 600 votes. Each and every large retirement community on Hamilton Mountain was won by the Liberals, and most of them with over 50% support. It isn’t at all an exaggeration to say that it was seniors who won Hamilton Mountain for Hepfner and Carney. Strong support for Liberal candidates across Hamilton shows the same pattern: seniors communities were all-in for Elbows Up.

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So what do these results show us?

In terms of patterns, it’s hard to tell. The working class realignment is something progressives will need to contend with, and not by tacking to the right. Following the lead of right wing populists and embracing social conservatism isn’t what will win people back. Mamdani and Zack Polanski, the new left wing leader of the Green Party of England and Wales (which is surging in the polls), have shown us that with abundant clarity. People desperately want a party that gives them hope for a more fair world and that doesn’t leave people because of who they are. Whomever the next NDP leader is would do well to remember that.

Generally speaking, this map doesn’t tell us much else about trends. Older voters rejected Pierre Poilievre’s brand of angry populism, but will they remain enamoured with Mark Carney’s “Stanfield-esque Progressive Conservative” act? Working class people supported Poilievre’s Tories, but can a new NDP leader (or Green leader) lure them back? When the threat of annexation is gone, will voters in Hamilton Centre or on Hamilton Mountain still back little-known Liberal MPs, especially if they’re offered a compelling new alternative?

The answer to all of these questions will only come with time. In fact, it may take as long to decipher these results as it took for Elections Canada to publish them. But good things come to those who wait, so I’ve been told.

1  _{Scott Radley. “Opinion: It’s one year until the municipal election. Who is considering a mayoral run?” Hamilton Spectator, October 31, 2025 (Spec link - Paywalled).}

2  _{Taylor Campbell. “Crowded race: Meet 15 candidates running in Windsor west-side byelection” Windsor Star, October 16, 2025 (Link).}

3  _{Tarah Hodgkinson, et. al. “Results of the 2025 Hamilton Community Safety Survey” Wilfrid Laurier University and the Hamilton Police Service, September 8, 2025 (Link).}

4  _{Ashifa Kassam. “Welfare cuts have fuelled rise of far right and populism, top UN expert says” The Guardian, October 21, 2025 (Link).}