Are municipal politics already partisan?

Since 2021, a group known as Advance Regina has been running ad campaigns in the city of Regina, identifying elected officials as “leftist activists” and advocating for lower taxes and reduced government spending. Another group, Common Sense Regina, has campaigned against the current mayor and two sitting city councilors. Many of the organizers involved in Advance Regina had ties to both the Saskatchewan Party and the Conservative Party of Canada, and Common Sense Regina appears to be backed by a conservative libertarian outfit in Alberta.

This isn’t that out of the ordinary. Third party advertisers making advertisements about issues and candidates before an election is a fairly common practice in Canada. Corporations, unions, activist groups, and political parties themselves all seek to sway public opinion. But Advance Regina and Common Sense Regina are different—they were not targeting MLAs or MPs, but rather municipal politics and politicians. This is remarkable for the sole fact that to most Canadians, municipal politics has no easily identifiable “right” or “left” or party labels.

In most of the world, political parties exist and contest elections at all levels of government, from the national leader to the humble city councillor. Canada is unique in that parties don’t contest municipal elections, except in Vancouver and much of Québec. Saskatchewan’s Local Government Election Act makes no mention of the terms “third-party,” “interest group,” or “political party.”

Since the municipal Reform movement of the early 20th century, the public, politicians, and academics have overwhelmingly talked about municipal politics as something that is uncontroversial and fundamentally not about partisan division. Instead, we like to imagine municipal policy-making as a technocratic exercise based around competent management of city services. As the saying goes, there’s no liberal or conservative way to fill a pothole.

The only wrinkle in this story is that despite the lack of parties, voters still make their electoral decisions on the basis of ideology.

The existence of groups like Advance Regina are a testament to this fact. Making a choice at the ballot box can be difficult, especially in the municipal context when there are a lot of candidates and not much information available on who they are or what they want to do. One easy way of cutting through the noise is by using party labels as an informational cue which provides a general indication of the type of policy a candidate will pursue. So, in a municipal context where this information isn’t available, we would expect to see that voters often choose the “wrong” candidate whose preferences are different from their own.

Surprisingly, this isn’t the case. As noted by Jack Lucas, a prominent scholar in municipal politics, there is a high level of partisan and ideological matching between municipal politicians and the public. This means that, in general, places with more right-leaning voters tend to elect right-leaning politicians, and more left-leaning municipalities elect left-leaning politicians. This seems to happen pretty consistently across all types of municipalities, from large cities to small towns. Looking at the big picture, this indicates that voters aren’t going into the voting booth completely ignorant of how their preferred candidate leans.

While we don’t know for sure how this happens in spite of those informational challenges, voters are much more aware of ideological signals in the realm of municipal policy than we give them credit for. Even something as benign as filling potholes can map onto ideological cleavages. Should a municipality employ union labour for its road maintenance crews, or should it contract work out to private companies?

For their part, municipal politicians are also quite clever in signaling their positions to voters, such as “borrowing” federal party’s colours on their lawn signs (blue can be a nod to the Conservatives, red for the Liberals, or, in former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi’s case using purple to signify being a “middle ground” candidate).

If it is the case that we really are thinking about partisanship and ideology at the municipal level, then why don’t we see candidates organizing in ideologically coherent groups? Simply put, people don’t want their municipal politics to be partisan. A recent study of Ontario voters found that 40 per cent of voters studied were opposed to the idea of municipal political parties, with a further 37 per cent having no opinion.

Among municipal politicians themselves, the story is similar. A 2022 survey of municipal politicians across Canada found that 88 per cent either strongly or somewhat opposed the idea of moving from a non-partisan to a partisan system. Given these numbers it seems unlikely that municipal non-partisanship is going anywhere, especially if voters don’t appear to need party labels to help make an ideologically acceptable choice at the ballot box.

Even in the places where municipal parties do exist like Vancouver or Montréal, the parties tend to be much more loosely organized (with few incentives to vote as a united front) and are completely distinct from their provincial and federal cousins. The few times that a national party has tried to actively extend itself into a municipal election have been ill-received (such as the NDP failure in the Toronto 1969 municipal election) and have been open to criticism that parties won’t be truly representative of local preferences and instead take directions from the provincial or national party.

The dominance of non-partisanship is reflected in how the few successful municipal political parties that have emerged in Canadian history have often ironically emphasized the “common-sense” nature of municipal politics. The aptly named Non-Partisan Association which dominated Vancouver elections for decades framed itself as keeping politics out of city hall, despite being identifiably right-leaning in its policies.

Even the way Advance Regina and Common Sense Regina phrases its messaging reflects a distinctly non-partisan vision of municipal politics. Many of Advance Regina’s social media ads features messaging urging council to “focus on the priorities” of basic service delivery and to stay away from decidedly more “political” issues like renaming roads. Common Sense Regina pitches a very similar message of getting “back to basics.”

That people so strongly prefer non-partisan politics is understandable, especially in a time when partisan divisions are brought into focus by the “culture war.” I take no stake here in the long-running debate on the merits and drawbacks of municipal partisanship. Whether municipal parties have led to higher turnout, policy that’s more congruent with voter’s preferences, or greater polarization is contested among political scientists. The available evidence does seem to suggest that, for better or worse, ideology and partisanship are big parts of how we make sense of the political world even when we pretend it’s not there.

What’s worth more careful consideration is how we limit our consideration of what is political to what is obviously ideological and partisan. Municipal elections are plagued by horrendously low turnout and studies have indicated that voters are less interested in municipal politics and think municipal governments impact their lives less than provincial and federal governments. Municipal politicians enjoy re-election at rates that far surpass their provincial and federal counterparts, often benefiting from simply being a recognizable name on the ballot.

I would suggest that part of the story behind this low democratic engagement is that the lack of party labels somehow signals to voters that municipal politics doesn’t have the same kinds of deep normative divisions that we see at other levels of politics with their highly visible partisan clashes. By doing so, we risk dismissing important decisions about things that deeply affect our communities and lives as merely neutral policymaking.

Advance Regina and Common Sense Regina proves that somebody cares enough about these municipal issues to try to sway others—that should be a signal for all of us to care too.