James Brose has been watching the web page for his small eastern Ontario township’s upcoming fall election, and he’s worried.
Brose has been the mayor of North Algona Wilberforce, a collection of cottage-country communities about 130 kilometres west of Ottawa, for the last eight years. He served the township of about 3,000 people as a councillor for four years before that.
But the retired 69-year-old farmer is bowing out as mayor at the end of this term due in part to a health scare last year.
And while candidates in North Algona Wilberforce and over 400 other Ontario municipalities still have until 2 p.m. on Aug. 21 to file their nomination papers to run for a seat on their local councils — and seven people have already done so for North Algona Wilberforce’s four regular council seats — no one in Brose’s township had stepped forward as of Friday to succeed him as mayor.
“I am concerned,” Brose told CBC on Thursday, even as he admitted that being mayor is “not a role a lot of people are just so anxious to jump into.”
The title comes with a significant workload, and dealing with social media interactions is challenging, he said. On a personal level, Brose has a son in B.C., and the job of being mayor doesn’t allow for extended vacations.
Add a heart attack (where workload may have played a small part, he said) and quadruple bypass surgery last year, and Brose decided it was time to pull back.
“I’m feeling great and I would like to say I’m back to 100 per cent health. But with that in mind, I was just not certain that I wanted to invest another four years of my time in the role of mayor,” he said.
Only 1 mayoral candidate so far
The factors Brose cited for why he’s not running again, and why others may be reluctant to seek office, are not dissimilar to what CBC News heard from eastern Ontario candidates during the 2022 municipal election season.
Nor is North Algona Wilberforce alone in struggling, so far, to see a sufficient number of contenders emerge this year.
In the towns of Carleton Place and Petawawa and the Township of Beckwith, for example, only one mayoral or reeve candidate, the incumbent, filed their nomination papers as of early Friday afternoon.
That potentially augurs another wave of acclamations as in Ontario elections past. In 2022, 179 municipalities had one or more council positions acclaimed, according to the Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO).
As of Friday morning, five incumbent councillors in Ottawa — Cathy Curry, Laine Johnson, Riley Brockington, Isabelle Skalski and David Brown — faced no opponents. The city sent out a reminder of the looming filing deadline on Friday.
For the seven-member Town of Arnprior council about 65 kilometres from the capital, only five people had filed their nomination papers as of early Friday afternoon.
Thirty-two Ontario municipal councils were fully acclaimed in 2022, up from 26 in 2018, according to AMO, which stressed in a release late last month that “healthy democracy depends on competitive elections and diverse voices.”
Incumbent Coun. Dan Lynch, who’s running for deputy mayor in Arnprior, filed his papers early, on May 14.
But he’s not worried about the otherwise slow trickle of candidates in his community. He said he’s sure a robust number of candidates will file on time, like they did “at the last minute” four years ago.
“Arnprior is a slow-moving town,” he said.
Arnprior, Ont., councillor Dan Lynch, third from left, said he expects candidates in his town to file their nomination papers late. (Dan Lynch)’Gotta love the community’
Outgoing Mayor Brose in North Algona Wilberforce said he’d like to believe, “although I don’t think it’s true,” that no one has put their name forward to follow in his footsteps because “I’ve done such a great job that they don’t want feel they can live up to the expectation.”
Lynch, who has been acclaimed in Arnprior in two of his four previous successful council bids, said he would like to remain unopposed this fall as residents of Arnprior “are satisfied with the job that I’m doing.”
“If it’s not broken, don’t fix it,” he said.
Both men agree though that while money is not the reason they entered municipal politics, the meagre remuneration (relative to the effort the job requires) can be a barrier for younger, working-age residents to take part.
“If they’re having to do this on a full-time basis, the remuneration certainly doesn’t make it viable,” Brose said.
“And if you’re working full-time and trying to do this on a part-time basis, then you’re also taxed with investing the additional time which takes you away from family and it all adds to the equation.”
Lynch was more blunt.
“As a councillor [here], you get 21,000 whopping dollars a year, no pension and you’re putting 24 hours a day for [dealing with] your cell phone emails…. For $21,000, you gotta love the community, you gotta love the work and you gotta be retired.”