The longest election season of our three levels of government is finally over.

Campaigning kicked off May 1st, when the Blue Jays were only 32 games into their season. Ontarians headed to the polls on October 26th, by which point the defending American League champions had been sitting at home for almost a month.

Yes, I am still bitter.

Municipal elections affect the average Ontarian's daily life more than any other kind, yet they tend to become an afterthought somewhere between soccer practice, piano lessons, and Rob's epic crashout on Love Is Blind.

How we got to 25%

In 2018, municipal voter turnout across Ontario was 38.3%. In London it was 39.46%, with 97,947 ballots cast from a pool of 248,212 eligible voters.

Then a pandemic happened. We discovered we liked making sourdough, making the owners of DoorDash and UberEats insanely wealthy, and wearing sweatpants a lot more than we liked eye contact and awkward small talk.

Plenty of people moved to London from the GTA for a quieter, cheaper, work-from-home life. But even after unpacking and meeting the neighbours through "whose cat is this?" posts in the neighbourhood Facebook group, they didn't show up at the polls in 2022.

Turnout across Ontario dropped to 32.9%. In London it plummeted almost 14 points to 25.5%, even though our voters' list grew by roughly 33,000 people.

Four tough years

From 2022 to 2026, a lot of the issues that affect every Londoner moved in a challenging direction.

The number of people on London's homelessness by-name list more than doubled, from 1,036 in 2021 to 2,294 by the end of 2025. Property taxes climbed about 24% over four budgets: 3.1%, 8.7%, 7.3% and 3.4%.

After nickel-and-diming the London Police Service for decades, offering them Dollarama gift cards and best wishes instead of a budget anywhere near the provincial average, we finally gave them the funding they asked for. And they delivered: London's crime severity index dropped 6% in 2024.

But inflation happened too, to the tune of about 10% since the last election. And the cost of housing destroyed inflation, like Western beating York 78–7 in football this year. The average two-bedroom apartment in London went from $1,393 a month in 2022 to $1,651 in 2025. That's an extra $258 a month, or about 19% more.

Then unemployment skyrocketed, hitting a nation-leading 9.2% in April.

A real race, finally

All of that change, only some of it positive, set up a campaign that looked far more competitive than recent history.

In 2022, Josh Morgan was a popular councillor running against a well-past-his-prime former MPP in Khalil Ramal. It reminded a lot of people of Jake Paul boxing Mike Tyson on Netflix, except instead of Iron Mike, the former baddest man on the planet, picture Reggie Strickland, a pro boxer who went 66-276 in his career.

To be fair, 2022 was understandable. Morgan was liked and trusted, and Ramal was about as inspiring as a drop ceiling.

Fast forward four years and a whole lot of struggle, and I expected a big turnout and a big appetite for change.

The mayor's race looked as competitive as any I've seen in my 30 years in London: Mayor Morgan against controversial councillor Susan Stevenson, plus Bronagh Joyce Morgan, Kirsten Krose and Tariq Khan, Londoners with strong business and community leadership chops.

Even with tariffs making everything more expensive, the 2026 campaign was way more active than 2022. Signs, media, debates, candidate events, all of it.

Morgan's "let's keep building on what we've started" pitch was the polar opposite of Stevenson's burn-it-down-and-start-over energy, and social media felt it. X has been deader than the Black Donnellys ever since it stopped being Twitter, but the Facebook and Instagram comment sections were battling harder than the Channel 4 news team taking on the Canadian news team in Anchorman 2.

Change everywhere but here

The appetite for change was obvious across Ontario on election night. More than ten Ontario mayors lost their jobs, including a couple who first took office around the time your writer was in preschool in He-Man underoos: Milton's Gordon Krantz, mayor since 1980, and Sarnia's Mike Bradley, who held the job for 38 years.

London, however, stayed the course. Mayor Morgan won by roughly 19,000 votes, 45.4% to 26.7%, and only one incumbent councillor lost.

Our pool of eligible voters grew by another 51,600 or so, to 332,688, but turnout only eked up 5.5 points, to 31.01%.

Any increase in turnout is a good thing. Most bosses would be thrilled with a 5% bump in revenue. But that number is a little misleading, because we still trailed the province-wide turnout of about 36% by five points.

So why don't Londoners show up anymore?

And why does municipal turnout stay so far below 50% when so many people are struggling and unhappy? There are some logical theories out there.

People don't think municipal government can solve their daily problems. This tracks, if the stories about councillors never getting back to residents carry any ring of truth.

Choosing candidates takes effort. We're so flooded with information that we tune out new stimulus like lawn signs, and we use ad blockers to keep out anything we didn't ask for. Many of London's 100-plus candidates this year didn't even have a website. Local media keeps drying up while we social-media everything, and companies like Facebook block local news links.

Candidates need to give people a reason to show up. London is a big believer in failing upward, or sideways: people who don't work out in one public-facing role lean on their networks and social status to slide into a similar one. New ideas and fresh energy struggle to catch momentum.

We live in an era of cynicism. We don't answer the phone unless the caller is in our contacts, because so many people are trying to scam us. We buy Ring doorbells to screen anyone who shows up uninvited, because some guy out there thinks we want to pay him hundreds of dollars to power-wash our driveway. If we're filtering our calls, filtering our visitors and blocking all our ads, how exactly is a candidate supposed to connect with us?

Above all, do we still trust elected officials? The United States is making it very hard to believe elected officials are accountable, act with integrity, or have our best interests in mind. And plenty of candidates make big "if elected" promises with no track record of creating that kind of change in any role, then get elected and deliver more of the same.

Low turnout doesn't tell us that people are satisfied, or that they don't care. It tells us most eligible voters didn't make participating a priority. Understanding why means asking whether they felt informed, included, and convinced their vote could actually make a difference.

What we can do about it

If you want things to change, spend less time on social media pointing fingers at others for not making things the way you want them, or feeling like nothing will ever change.

Canada has changed a LOT in my lifetime. For better or worse, the people we elected made those changes. If you want a better London, engage in as many ways as you can manage. Volunteer. Support candidates and ideas. Bring your neighbours together. Set a high standard. Donate to a candidate you believe in, and knock on doors for them. Coach a team. Lead an activity. Raise some funds. And celebrate voting: post about it, brag about it, normalize it.

The less we sit at home doomscrolling and feeling like nothing matters, the better our chances of getting where we want to go.

The more we connect, engage, encourage, assist, share, cheer, support, carry, promote, lift, boost, hug, fist bump and compliment, the more likely we are to bring back that "we're all in this together" feeling we had in spades before we got locked to our devices and tucked away in our homes.

Get to know your city councillor. Figure out what matters to them that also matters to you. Ask about their plan, and offer to help. Work with them, your neighbours, your friends and your family to get us all where we want to go:

Less homelessness. Less construction gridlock. More safety. More transportation options and better transit. Some mindfulness about what we can actually afford in property taxes. Choices that don't intentionally wreck the environment. A safer city for women and girls. Good-paying jobs. A thriving local arts community. Parks. Nature. Sports and programs for kids and families.

It would be hard to argue that any of those are bad. It would be just as hard to argue that anyone can deliver all of them exactly the way each of us wants.

Perfect is the enemy of the good, and progress is found in the middle.

If we keep that in mind, 31% will be a number we all chuckle about a decade from now. It's within the power of every single Londoner to make that happen. Or to make it worse.