Association of Municipalities of Ontario

He was being asked to commit to a number he knew his infrastructure literally could not support and he said no. That's worth knowing, okay, the ability to option out.

The third wave came in August of 2023 at the Association of Municipalities of Ontario conference where Premier Ford announced that 21 additional municipalities, those with populations expected to exceed 50,000 by 2031, would be offered the strong mayor powers if their mayors committed in writing to housing targets.

And then there was the fourth wave, which frankly was massive.

In April of 2025, the province announced plans to expand the strong mayor powers to an additional 169 municipalities.

By 2022, the number of candidates hit an all-time low.

The Association of Municipalities of Ontario is keeping track.

We had seen candidate numbers overall going down, a decrease as well in the number of new candidates stepping forward, and really high acclimation numbers.

Acclimation is when a candidate, often an incumbent, faces no challenger.

From your real world experience, what is holding people back running for office? 1-888-817-8995.

Is it getting any easier? Our guest this hour, Lindsay Jones, thinks it might be.

Lindsay is Executive Director of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario.

Welcome to Ontario Today.

Some of it will be for natural reasons and some will be because of the job not being what they thought it was going to be.

The big thing that the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, which is the provincial body that represents all 444 municipalities in the province of Ontario, put out some stats just recently this week after the nominations was closed and after everything, and they did a dive into And of the 444 municipalities, only 19 municipalities have their entire council have been acclaimed to this next term in office.

Now, according to the report that AMO had put out, this is down from last year, which is good.

And I think that's good for democracy.

A very dramatic change in how municipalities operate moving forward.

Because this is the first election where a lot of these municipalities will be elected.

I was recently chatting with Robin Jones, the former president of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario.

And she says she told me on the record that there are some councillors who are stepping back because they don't want to deal with the consequences.

There's a real crunch coming, my friends.

The Association of Municipalities of Ontario, the AMO, they flagged this problem explicitly in a 2016 report entitled Coming of Age.

2016, so a decade ago.

They warned that if nothing had changed, the cost to municipalities of caring for seniors would increase by roughly 140% by 2036.

We're going to be taking a look at this balancing act in depth in a later episode.

Now, despite how things are structured under the Constitution, for about a decade after the download, municipalities did indeed push back, loudly and persistently.

Let's start with the AMO, the Association of Municipalities of Ontario.

They represent about 420 municipalities across the province.

Steve, can you explain what that is for people listening? I apologize.

AMO is an acronym for the Association of Municipalities of Ontario.

And it's kind of the provincial-wide conference for municipal elected officials to gather.

And there's kind of two tiers inside that because you have our large municipalities and then you have the rural setting municipalities as well.

And I think part of what we're going to talk about today are the ways in which we can really support the economy as these things continue to happen.

So we took a delegation of tourism partners to the Association of Municipalities of Ontario conference.

That was about two weeks ago now.

It's hard to believe.

Hi, Sean Meyer from Municipal World here at the AMO conference in lovely Ottawa, speaking to a wide variety of influential local government officials and just generally really important people, like my next guest, who I will let introduce themselves.

Hi, I'm Lindsay Jones, Executive Director of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario.

So I called you really important, I wasn't kidding.

So far, so good.

There's a lot of excitement and energy already with the trade show getting set up and delegates starting to come through registration.

And it wouldn't be AMO without a surprise government announcement.

So we just came from that press conference.

I will let you tell folks just in a quick snippet what that announcement was.