Municipal elections in Canada

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Municipal elections in Canada according to the Canadian Constitution are the jurisdiction of the various provinces and territories. Therefore, they occur on different dates, depending on which province they are in. However, usually municipalities in the same province will have their elections on the same day. Unlike most provinces, territories, and the House of Commons, most municipalities have their elections on some sort of a fixed date. Each province has its own nomenclature for municipalities and some have local elections for unincoproated areas which are not technically municipalities. These entities can be called cities, towns, villages, townships, hamlets, parishes and, simply, municipalities, county municipalities, regional county municipalities, municipal districts, regional districts, counties, regional municipalities, specialized municipalities, district municipalities or rural municipalities. Many of these may be used by Statistics Canada as the basis for census divisions or census subdivisions. Municipal elections usually elect a mayor (or reeve) at large, city councillors (or aldermen), and school trustees. Most councils are non-partisan, however some municipalities (such as Montreal, Quebec City, Longueuil, Quebec, Vancouver, Surrey, British Columbia and Victoria, British Columbia) do have local political parties. However, these are very municipal in nature, and are rarely affiliated with any provincial or federal parties.

Voting may be done with paper ballots that are hand-counted, or by various forms of electronic voting.

[edit] Municipal election chart by province and territory

Province or Territory	Occurrence	Date	Last elections	Next elections
Alberta	3 years	3rd Monday in October	2004	2007
British Columbia	3 years	3rd Saturday in November	2005	2008
Manitoba	4 years	4th Wednesday in October	2002	2006
New Brunswick	4 years	2nd Monday in May	2004	2008
Newfoundland and Labrador	4 years	last Tuesday in September	2005	2009
Northwest Territories	2 or 3 years	3rd Monday in October (taxed communities) 2nd Monday in December (hamlets)	2006	-
Nova Scotia	4 years	3rd Saturday in October	2004	2008
Nunavut	2 or 3 years	3rd Monday in October (taxed communities) 2nd Monday in December (hamlets)	-	-
Ontario	3 years (currently) 4 years (from Nov 2006)	2nd Monday in November	2003	2006
Prince Edward Island	4 years	1st Monday in November	2006	2010
Quebec	4 years	1st Sunday in November	2005	2009
Saskatchewan	2 years (rural) 3 years (urban)	3rd Wednesday in October (rural) 4th Wednesday in October (urban)	2003*	2006*
Yukon	3 years	3rd Thursday in October	2003	2006

*urban municipalities only.