Ottawa voters now know exactly who will be on the ballot for mayor. With nominations closed and the candidate list certified, 14 people are running to become Ottawa’s next mayor in the October 26 municipal election which creates an interesting challenge for anyone trying to compare the candidates. How do you give every candidate fair treatment without turning every issue comparison into a wall of 14 columns, particularly when the amount of publicly available policy information varies enormously from one campaign to another.
It’s a question we’ve had to address at Compare Ottawa.
Four candidates receive detailed Issue by Issue coverage
Our detailed comparisons currently focus on four candidates: Mark Sutcliffe, Jeff Leiper, Alex Lawson and Neil Saravanamuttoo.
For these candidates, Compare Ottawa tracks positions across 16 municipal issues, including housing, transit, property taxes, roads, public safety, homelessness, economic development, Lansdowne 2.0 and city governance. The distinction is about the depth of research, not an endorsement or prediction about who will win. These four campaigns have generated enough substantive public material to support detailed comparisons across a broad range of issues. That includes campaign platforms and policy announcements, interviews, media coverage, public records and direct candidate statements and the volume continues to grow. For example, Alex Lawson’s campaign has now published plans covering housing, transit, lobbying, city contracts, roads, federal RTO-4 policy, rural Ottawa, jobs and parking. Mark Sutcliffe has also begun releasing major campaign policy, including a detailed transit plan announced in August. That gives us enough evidence to do something more useful than simply reproduce campaign biographies: we can compare what candidates are actually proposing.
But there are 10 other candidates
The certified ballot also includes Zed Chebib, Peter Westaway, Suraj Harish, Queen Divine Priya Amber Bakshi, Bernard Couchman, Ali Shayvard, Jacob Solomon, Amjad Ali Syed, Josh Rachlis and Geoff Nicholas.
They shouldn’t disappear simply because they aren’t part of the four-candidate detailed comparison which is why Compare Ottawa uses a two-level approach. The other certified candidates can be covered through individual candidate overview pages containing the factual information and policy positions we can verify from public sources. When a candidate publishes a substantive position, it can be added and sourced. What we won’t do is fill empty space with assumptions. If there isn’t enough reliable public evidence to say what a candidate believes about transit, housing or property taxes, “we don’t have enough information yet” is more accurate than guessing.
Why not just rank everyone by polling?
Ranking everyone by polls just creates another problem. Polls are snapshots, not ballots. They can change. They can also be designed around a particular set of candidates rather than measuring every name ultimately appearing on the ballot. Using polling alone to decide who deserves coverage could create a circular problem: candidates receive less attention because they’re less well known, and remain less well known because they receive less attention. Our approach is therefore deliberately flexible. A candidate who currently has an overview page can move into more detailed coverage if their campaign develops, they publish a substantive platform, public interest increases, or sufficient evidence becomes available to support meaningful comparisons.
The goal isn’t to permanently divide the ballot into “major” and “minor” candidates, it’s to make the research useful.
Evidence matters more than campaign volume
There’s another distinction worth making. Publishing more material doesn’t necessarily mean having better policies, and having fewer published policies doesn’t mean a candidate has worse ideas. Compare Ottawa isn’t grading candidates on how sophisticated their websites are or how many news releases they produce. We’re asking a narrower question:
What can we reliably establish about what each candidate proposes to do as mayor?
Where the evidence exists, we summarize it and link back to the source. Where positions conflict, we show the difference. Where evidence is limited, we say so. Coverage should describe the strength of the available information, not become a judgment about the candidate.
A crowded ballot can still produce useful comparisons
Fourteen candidates sounds like a lot but voters don’t necessarily need 14 biographies memorized before election day, voters need a practical way to identify the differences that matter to them.
Should Ottawa prioritize lower taxes or expanded services?
How should the city fix transit?
Where should new housing be built?
What should happen with Lansdowne 2.0?
How should Ottawa respond to homelessness and public disorder?
Should the city spend more on existing roads and infrastructure before pursuing new projects?
Those are questions where mayoral candidates can make meaningfully different choices. Compare Ottawa’s job is to make those differences easier to find while keeping the underlying evidence close enough that voters can check it themselves. And with the ballot now finalized and the campaign entering its final weeks, we’ll continue adding information as candidates publish it. Fourteen people are running for mayor. Every one of them is on the ballot. Our challenge is to give voters useful information about all of them without pretending the available evidence is equal when it isn’t. That seems like the fairest approach.
