Explainer: What's a weak mayor — and why could it matter for the 2025 election?

Few Albertans will approach the ballot box this October intending to elect a weak mayor, but that's exactly what they will get. As part of Taproot's ongoing election analysis and coverage, today we examine what's known as the weak mayor system, where the mayors we're set to elect in the Edmonton region will largely be equals among their council peers and therefore lack executive, or "strong" mayoral power to push policies through without first convincing at least half of the council to vote with them.

How does this affect elections, voter perceptions, and the results of those we elect? Taproot has endeavoured to ask those questions and find out.

The current weak mayor system

As Brian Kelcey, a former advisor to the mayor in Winnipeg, has argued, most Canadian cities are still governed under the "same weak-mayor model as a 19th century Upper Canada Village." In a nutshell, this means that most mayors in Canada (and all in Alberta) are effectively just another councillor with an equal vote to the others, plus some additional duties, like chairing council meetings or serving as a figurehead at ceremonial events. Mayors are also, unofficially, the email address or name that residents often channel their blame towards when something isn't to their liking in a city.

Why does this matter? When it comes to elections, Kelcey suggests the weak mayor system can create a "disconnect" between voters and the actual power of the mayors they elect. As he points out, mayors routinely receive more votes in a municipal election than all other councillors combined. That means any platform they may have run on to win those votes, like say, promising to build more transit or incentivize more housing, has a strong mandate from voters. But the weak mayor system requires them to work in the background to marshal at least half of the council to agree with them. And beyond this limitation, mayors in these systems are also often tasked with chairing meetings, often silently.

On the ground, Kelcey has argued, this means that mayors can be less prominent than you might expect in council debates. He points to Calgary for an example: In 2022, Mayor Jyoti Gondek voted no on a police request for an additional $6 million beyond an already-approved $9.6-million increase, having run and won more than 176,000 votes on an election platform that promised a "progressive police force". A majority of councillors voted to give the police the money, with Gondek losing the vote 11 to 4. Kelcey noted that Gondek had not articulated her position because she was chairing the meeting; instead, her reasoning to vote no — that the police had not delivered on commitments to work on anti-racism, among other things — only came out in interviews after the vote.

Taproot looked at Edmonton Mayor Amarjeet Sohi's voting record from 2021 to today and where, in particular, he was on the losing side of council votes. One trend is that many of the motions that Sohi has introduced during this council term have been procedural — to go in-camera, to meet in public — as would be expected from someone who is often the meeting chair, so he tended to win those. Nonetheless, Sohi did lose on several votes on issues that people care about. In 2023, for example, Sohi voted against amending bylaws to allow for mixed-use buildings with a focus on supportive housing in McCauley, but the majority of council disagreed; in 2022, Sohi voted no on a motion from Coun. Anne Stevenson about the police funding formula that council passed; in 2022, Sohi voted no on several motions from Coun. Tim Cartmell about snow and ice removal that council passed. This is far from an exhaustive list, and anyone wanting to dive deeper can examine the full list.

Jack Lucas, a political scientist at the University of Calgary who's a leading researcher in Canada on municipal democracy and representation, told Taproot that voter disconnect can boil down to a general challenge for voters to understand what council did, and then further to understand who on council did that thing. "All it takes is a majority vote of council, including the mayor, for a bylaw to pass," Lucas said.

What that means is there can often be no clear delineation or responsibility. "In the absence of parties, it's hard to understand (who's done a thing), because you don't have a councillor who's in the opposition or who's in the majority, and the same is true of the mayor," Lucas said. "So, if council does something, it may have been against the wishes of the mayor, but it takes some explaining on the part of the mayor or the mayoral candidate to make that clear. In provincial or federal politics, if the government did something, you know it was the government party responsible and you can hold them accountable, (and) reward or punish them accordingly."

In a weak mayor system, Lucas continued, the lack of clarity leads to interesting votes once the next election comes around. "Sometimes, if people are unsatisfied with what their council has done, they will punish all of council or the mayor, even if it wasn't necessarily all of council or the mayor who supported those things," he said.

In Ontario, mayors are getting stronger

The weak mayor system is not set in stone, and a push to give mayors more power (as we see in most large cities in the U.S.) is gaining momentum in Canada. Some suggest more powerful mayors can more directly respect voter intentions. Others suggest stronger mayors can "cut red tape" or deliver on provincial priorities.

Housing in particular is the reason Ontario thinks its experiment with stronger mayors was worth it. In 2022, Ontario Premier Doug Ford's government passed the Strong Mayor, Building Homes Act to allow mayors in Ottawa and Toronto to push through municipal policy changes that would enable housing development, stop changes that would limit it, hire or fire senior city staff, and propose budgets or stop adjustments to them. Since then, the province has expanded these powers to 167 other municipalities in Ontario.

The only way to limit the power of these stronger mayors in Ontario in these instances is for two-thirds of their council to vote against them. "Mayors know their municipalities best, and we support them in taking bold actions for their communities," said Rob Flack, Ontario's minister of municipal affairs and housing, in a release in April.

Still, Lucas stressed that Ontario's changes are not a full strong mayor system. "The mayor still has one vote on council," he said. "There are ways that the mayor can override council and so forth, but it's not all the way to a strong mayor system like you have in the United States, where the mayor is the equivalent of the president, kind of, who runs the executive, while the council is the legislature."

What are the benefits and tradeoffs? "I guess the argument for this (system) would be from the standpoint of democratic legitimacy," Lucas said. "If people know a lot about the mayor, if they invest a lot of time and energy in voting for a mayor, they want that mayor to be able to enact their agenda that they were elected to enact, and that giving them the authority to do that without being overridden by some coalition of council that doesn't have the same kind of cross-city mandate ... might make for effective representation."

Lucas said he's not sure that's what's happening in Ontario, however. "We have to wait and see still how well it's working," he said. He did note, however, that the strong mayor system has, in principle, advantages to clarity of responsibility and accountability, and that both are desirable qualities, especially for bringing a mayor's powers "into alignment with how ordinary people think about the mayor as having particular importance and a particularly important role in municipal councils."

Party time?

Alberta's provincial government, like all other provinces, has the constitutional authority over municipal governments here to create nearly any set of rules it sees fit. In 2024, the United Conservative Party government did just that. Though it avoided creating stronger mayors, it has started changing election rules. Thanks to Bill 20, the coming election will be the first to see Edmonton and Calgary permitted to bring parties into the municipal election.

Premier Danielle Smith has suggested the change simply codifies the partisan nature of municipal politics in larger cities. "We've got 355 municipalities. The smaller the municipality, I don't know that they're as partisan," she said in February 2024. "But when you get into a city the size of Calgary or Edmonton, you better believe it's partisan."

Albertans said they preferred the electoral system without, however, with 68% of respondents to a survey commissioned by Alberta Municipalities suggesting people prefer candidates to run as individuals rather than as members of parties.

When it comes the mayoral election, Lucas expects the introduction of parties to be less decisive for the mayoral race than it will be for candidates running for council seats. "I think that municipal voters in Calgary and Edmonton always pay a lot of attention to their mayoral vote," he said. "So, I would think about the effective party more in the world of council votes than mayor votes."

Lucas said his time with candidates during elections has informed his thinking on this point. "One thing I noticed last (election), when I was going around with some candidates as they were door knocking, is you hear a lot of voters saying, 'Well, which mayoral candidate do you support?'" he said. "And this is a perfectly sensible thing to ask, even in a nonpartisan system, because maybe you know a lot about the mayoral candidates. You don't know anything about the council candidates, so you just ask a council candidate. That gives you pretty good information about if this candidate standing in front of you is someone that you would support or not.

"Now (with parties), we have a situation where a number of candidates are actually affiliated with a mayoral candidate as part of a party. So whereas in the past, the candidates were always quite hesitant to answer that question, now, at least (if) they're in a party, they might be quite happy to say, 'Well, the mayoral candidate I'm affiliated with is so and so, because we're in the same party, and I support their vision, and they support my vision, and we're going to work together to get things done on council.'"

If that candidate is not with a party, Lucas said, they may struggle to answer the question or worry the answer might not align with a potential voter, adding another layer of complexity to the election or a candidate's ability to connect with a voter.

— With files from Colin Gallant