Day 8 — Dear Ontario, please run
A letter to Ontario, published as written — dated August 18, 2026, by The Unknown Soldier. This is one person’s voice, not the site’s. Every figure below cites the research, which carries its own dated receipt.
Dear Ontario,
We need your help. We need you to help find better candidates for municipal council and school board elections across this province, and we need it this week. Nominations close Friday, August 21, at 2:00 p.m. After that the ballot is frozen until October 26 — and then it is set for four years.
2026 is the last municipal election before 2030. Whatever gets decided about your neighbourhood between now and then — what gets built, what gets closed, what your kids’ school board does, what your taxes pay for — gets decided by whoever is sitting in those seats. Right now, in most of Ontario, almost nobody is running for them.
We spent the last several weeks building what we believe is the first complete, receipted list of every municipal race in Ontario this year: 2,305 races across all 415 municipalities that hold a direct election — every council seat and every school board seat — with 5,371 candidates on file. Not a big-city sample. All of it.
More than half of Ontario’s municipal seats face no contest at all
1,759 of 3,396 seats — 51.8%. That splits two ways, and the second is the part most people don’t know.
1,398 seats have candidates, but no more candidates than seats. Those people are acclaimed; they win by filing. And 361 seats sit in 260 races where literally nobody filed. Those seats do not get elected at all — after the election, the sitting council appoints someone. In roughly one Ontario race in ten, the “election” is a future appointment by the people already in the room.
And where there are candidates, most have published nothing you can read
27.1% of candidates have a campaign website. 19.3% have anything resembling a platform. In 818 of the 900 acclamation-track races we could fully research — 90.9% — not one candidate has published a plan anywhere we could find. That is 1,233 seats, including 153 mayoralties, going to people who face no opponent and have put nothing in writing.
It is not only the quiet races. In 589 of 1,062 genuinely contested races (55.5%), not a single candidate has a platform on record — a real contest with nothing to read on either side. And outside the cities it collapses: in municipalities under 5,000 people, 3.1% of candidates have a website. Across Northern Ontario, 7.2%. In Toronto, 61%.
Frankly, a lot of these races have less published behind them than a high school student council campaign. That is not a knock on the people running — most are doing this after work, with no staff and no money. It is a description of a system nobody is resourcing.
Meanwhile, one whole class of office was quietly taken off your ballot
The regional chairs of Durham, Halton, Niagara, Peel, Waterloo and York, the District Chair of Muskoka, and the warden of Simcoe County are now appointed by the province, under the Better Regional Governance Act, 2026 (Bill 100, Royal Assent May 7, 2026). The Act deems any nomination already filed for those offices withdrawn.
Roughly 5.4 million Ontarians will not get a vote for the person who chairs the government spending their regional tax dollars. That already happened. It is not a proposal.
That is the direction of travel, and the answer to it is not a comment thread. It is 3,396 seats filled by the best people your community can find.
Please run. Or find someone who should, and ask them today.
Filing costs $100 — $200 for head of council. You need 25 endorsement signatures only if your municipality has 4,000 or more electors; under that, none. School board trustee requires no signatures anywhere in Ontario, at any size — and trustee is the emptiest ballot in the province: 158 of 619 school board races have nobody registered. School boards run multi-billion-dollar budgets and decide what happens to children all day.
The math, plainly. File in one of the 260 empty races and you do not improve your odds — you create the election; otherwise council appoints someone. File in one of the 921 acclamation-track races and you turn a coronation into a choice. Write down what you would actually do, in a race where nobody has, and you become the only candidate a voter can read.
Call your parents and your grandparents. Your aunts and uncles. Your professors, your mentors, your coaches, the person who runs the food bank, the retired engineer who shows up to every council meeting. The people you already trust. Ask them who should be on that ballot — then ask that person directly. Almost nobody runs because they woke up wanting to. They run because somebody asked them.
Everything we have built to help is free. No signup, no data collection, nothing to buy: find your municipality — a page for every municipality in Ontario, showing what is on your ballot and what is currently uncontested; so you’re thinking of running — the rules, the calendar, the real costs, how to register; and a free platform template, written, costed and dated. Take it, change all of it, put your name on it. We do not want credit.
Help us fix the data — we have opened the whole thing up
Here is the entire dataset as a public, editable spreadsheet. Every race, every candidate, every website, email and social account we found — organised into 33 tabs: Toronto, the four GTA regions, the major cities, then by county and region. There is a “find my municipality” tab if you are not sure where to look.
Three yellow columns on every row are for you: what to add or correct, a source link, and your name if you want credit. What helps most is a candidate’s website or platform page that we have blank — that is most of the gap — a correction to a wrong website, ward or school board, someone who has withdrawn, or a candidate who has filed and is not in our list at all. That last one will happen a lot this week: filings arrive daily and clerks publish at different speeds.
Please do not add private phone numbers or home addresses, or anything a candidate has not published themselves — we will delete those. And please do not add opinions about candidates. This is a directory, not a review site.
We are reviewing contributions from 5:00 p.m. every day this week and publishing an updated version each evening, through to nominations closing on Friday. Every change gets checked against the source you give us.
What we got wrong, since you should know before trusting the rest
We had the population governed by those appointed regional chairs at 4.5 million. An independent check against census data put it at roughly 5.4 million, and we corrected it before publishing. Our parser once showed a one-seat French-language school board race with 25 candidates, because Ontario municipalities publish every board’s trustees on a single page and the sections were not distinguished — we caught it, re-read all eleven affected races at source, and quarantined 29 phantom rows. And for a while our own published table did not sum to its own universe: 115 races had no seat count and were silently dropped from the breakdown. That is fixed, and the receipt now prints an explicit universe check.
We publish the errors because a number you cannot check is just a vibe. Everything is dated and sourced. If you find something wrong, that is a contribution too — put it in the sheet. When we get something wrong, the fix is public: our commitment.
We endorse nobody. We are not a party, we are not recruiting for anyone, and we are not collecting your information. If you take the platform template and never speak to us again, that is a completely successful outcome from where I sit.
Friday, 2:00 p.m. It is the only thing in this letter that expires.
If you have ever sat in a council meeting or a school board meeting and thought someone should do something about this — this week, for one hundred dollars, that someone can be you. And if it is not you, spend twenty minutes today asking three people you respect whether it is them.
Please share this with someone in a small town. That is where the empty ballots are.
—The Unknown Soldier