Canadian municipal elections are notoriously barren territory for the left: turnout hovers around 30 percent, and cities are “creatures of the provinces” whose powers conservative premiers like Doug Ford routinely gut. Yet in October’s elections, a groundswell of socialist candidates is running — inspired in part by Zohran Mamdani’s New York City victory, which has made winning power locally feel possible again.
Three candidates anchor James Adair’s Jacobin piece:
- Damian Mikhail (Waterloo Ward Six) — “socialist minimalism”: universal snow clearing, a renters’ protection office, and a municipal housing corporation as public builder and operator. The incumbent won last time with just 896 votes cast.
- Solomon Yi-Kieran (Vancouver, on the COPE line) — municipal Wi-Fi, universal metro cards, banning surveillance pricing, and a citywide at-large campaign grind. Their acceptance-speech line: “We didn’t start this class war, but we’re going to win it.”
- Chiara Padovani (Toronto, York South–Weston) — tenant organizer who helped lead one of Toronto’s largest tenant strikes; lost 2022 by 94 votes, then kept her campaign office open as an organizing hub funded by CA$5–10 monthly donations.
The historical backdrop is sobering: Winnipeg elected a socialist mayor and labor council in 1934, a generation after the 1919 General Strike — and it was the last. Sewer socialism never took root in Canada the way it did in the US; the left chased provincial power instead.
The bet these campaigns make is that housing and cost-of-living crises have changed the math: municipal government can be the beachhead that proves government can materially improve people’s lives. Winning isn’t a guarantee of victory — but as the piece puts it, a win would establish “a beachhead for a different kind of Canadian city.”