Another Mississauga city councillor has announced plans to run for mayor in the 2026 municipal election.

Ward 7 Coun. Dipika Damerla will officially register on Wednesday afternoon for the Mississauga mayoral race, her campaign team said in a statement this morning announcing her candidacy.

Damerla, first elected to city council in 2018 when she defeated 11 other candidates for the Ward 7 seat, joins Ward 2 Coun. Alvin Tedjo as current councillors taking on the incumbent, Mayor Carolyn Parrish.

Tedjo was first elected to city council in 2022, fending off four others who were vying for the Ward 2 seat.

Both councillors also ran in Mississauga’s June 2024 mayoral byelection, won by Parrish (43,494 votes), who vacated the Ward 5 council seat to run for mayor.

Tedjo (35,005 votes) was runner-up to Parrish while Damerla (27,119 votes) finished third and Ward 1 Coun. Stephen Dasko (22,408 votes) placed fourth in the race to succeed former mayor Bonnie Crombie, who left in early 2024 to lead the Ontario Liberals.

Dasko, meanwhile, is running in 2026 to retain the Ward 1 seat on council.

Eight candidates vying to become mayor in 2026

In addition to Parrish, Tedjo and Damerla, five others are also entered in the competition to become mayor of Canada’s seventh-largest city.

George Tavares, David Shaw, Mike Matulewicz, Rahul Mehta and Olivia Gannon have all officially thrown their hats into the ring for a shot at earning the top elected post in Mississauga.

Prior to Gannon’s entry on Monday, the field of mayoral candidates had held steady at six since early May. Registration for the 2026 municipal election opened on May 1.

While not househould names, Tavares and Shaw should be recognizeable to anyone who’s followed recent municipal elections in Mississauga. They were among the field of 20 candidates in the 2024 mayoral byelection and both also ran for the office in the 2022 municipal election.

Shaw placed a distant fifth in the byelection (2,843 votes) while Tavares was eighth, with 962 votes.

Some other familiar names in the race

In the 2022 bid for the mayor’s seat, Shaw earned 7,202 votes (6.83 per cent) while Tavares garnered 5,613 votes (5.32 per cent) to finish a distant second and third, respectively, to former three-term mayor Crombie (82,736 votes, 78.47 per cent).

Mehta, meanwhile, ran for the Ward 8 seat on city council in 2022 and Matulewicz was also among the 20 candidates to run in the city’s mayoral byelection nearly two years ago.

Parrish has told INsauga.com on several occasions she’ll run for mayor one more term as she still has “a lot to accomplish.”

The 2026 municipal election will be held on Oct. 26. Candidate nominations opened May 1 and continue untl Aug. 21 at 2 p.m.

For more information on who’s running, how to become a candidate and the election in general, visit the city’s election page online.

Other candidates who’ve registered to run for Mississauga city council, as of Wednesday afternoon (June 3), are:

Stephen Dasko — Ward 1 (incumbent)
Leeann Cole — Ward 2
Chris Fonseca — Ward 3 (incumbent)
Kim Pines — Ward 3
Stjepan Vukovic — Ward 3
John Kovac — Ward 4 (incumbent)
Natalie Hart — Ward 5 (incumbent)
Ismail Bawa — Ward 5
Mandeep Singh Dhaliwal — Ward 5
Aruna Anand — Ward 5
Raghavan Babu Bhogaiah — Ward 5
Joe Horneck — Ward 6 (incumbent)
Joel Binda — Ward 7
Maisa Salhia — Ward 7
Leslie Zurek-Silvestri — Ward 7
Asha Falinski — Ward 7
Matt Mahoney — Ward 8 (incumbent)
Martin Reid — Ward 9 (incumbent)
Ramsha Haq — Ward 9
Anwar Knight — Ward 9
Mohammad Shabbeer — Ward 9
Sue McFadden — Ward 10 (incumbent)
Brad Butt — Ward 11 (incumbent)
Dev Vashi — Ward 11


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