“Universal snow clearing” seems almost like a parody of what a Canadian socialist running for municipal office would campaign on. But for Damian Mikhail, who is running for Waterloo Ward Six, it made sense. Harsh winters and inconsistent — or a complete lack of — snow clearing means that walking around becomes basically impossible.

“That universal snow clearing argument has tended to be quite universally liked. Among young families and seniors, especially,” Mikhail told Jacobin.

Mikhail was formerly the president of the Waterloo University Student Association as well as cochair of the Ontario New Democratic Party youth wing. His first major foray into politics was fighting to “return night transit to Waterloo and stop cuts to the local LRT [light rail transit]” through the New Democratic Party campus club.

Ward Six contains the University of Waterloo but also extends into established residential neighborhoods, creating sharp divisions between the student areas and nonstudent areas, as well as between renters and homeowners. The challenge for Mikhail will be running up the vote count in the student neighborhoods while remaining competitive elsewhere. Turning out students — notoriously difficult to mobilize in municipal elections — will be a challenge in and of itself.

Mikhail is prioritizing door-knocking over digital communication. He says he has already knocked on every door in the ward and encountered a positive response. The last election’s turnout was 23 percent, and the incumbent won with only 896 votes cast.

Mikhail’s platform — three policies that can fit on the back of a postcard — reflects a trend toward a kind of socialist minimalism. In addition to universal snow clearing, he proposes a renters’ protection office “with a mandate for proactive and consistent inspections of rentals in the city and to report on the issues plaguing renters,” as well as a municipal housing corporation that will function as both a public builder and housing operator.

The policy, if enacted, could begin to reshape housing in Waterloo. Despite its avowedly socialist character, Mikhail presents it as less an ideological project than a demonstration of the possible strengths of a municipal government willing to flex its muscles.

“This is actually a conversation we have had as a campaign team. How ideological do we want our kind of framing to be? I’m Palestinian, and a lot of my organizing has been around Palestinian [liberation]. . . .  I’m obviously a very kind of partisan person in many senses.” Mikhail said.

“But the conversation that we wanted to have is that there . . . tends to be a belief that nothing is possible, that change isn’t possible, that the government can’t really do anything for you.

“What we want to do with our platform is give very concrete actions that the city can take that will just improve your life, and the idea for that is, from a more philosophical perspective, is to show the people of Waterloo that you can expect something from your government, that your government should be actively improving your life.”

Solomon Yi-Kieran, another student organizer turned candidate, has been campaigning since February — first for the nomination to run on the Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE) party line, and now as one of the party’s five candidates running for city council.

“One of the benefits of a long campaign is that it has been amazing to see just how much momentum we’ve been building when we’re out there. . . .  I went from being a student organizer whose base was mainly other students to being able to go to any part of the city, do a canvass, and get recognized by every couple of people when I’m out there.”

Vancouver is unique among major Canadian cities in having a well-established municipal party system. This provides some advantages: the formalized party form allows socialist candidates to organize throughout the year and forge strong connections with social movements that, in turn, help promote all their candidates. 

But COPE, Vancouver’s oldest active left-wing party, has won the mayor’s seat and a council majority only once, in 2002. For much of the 2010s, it had no representation on council and was generally considered to be in decline. Then in a 2025 by-election, the city elected Sean Orr — a democratic socialist, dishwasher, and punk vocalist. His victory helped COPE mount a resurgence. Yi-Kieran is emblematic of COPE’s renaissance. Young, social media savvy, and avowedly a radical.

Yi-Kieran has blended together a folksy charm and a militant attitude to produce a constant deluge of videos. In contrast to Mikhail’s minimalism, Yi-Kieran embraces a more wide-ranging politics, campaigning on everything from more municipal Wi-Fi hotspots and universal metro cards to banning surveillance pricing. It fits the Vancouver ecosystem of young, downwardly mobile students and graduates who are tapped in online.

“If we as socialists want to be educating voters, given the kind of horrifically low turnout for municipal elections, we need to be using social media to connect with people in an organic and genuine way.” Yi-Kieran believes. “No matter what policy we’re talking about, the same through lines are always there. It is about equitable access to good services, no matter what part of the city you live in. . . .  It is about making sure that we have a government that is listening to people.”

One of Yi-Kieran’s principal challenges will be the uniqueness of Vancouver’s electoral system. A candidate’s prospects are tied partly to the fortunes of the party, but councilors are also elected at-large rather than ward-by-ward. Rather than representing specific areas or constituencies, each elector votes for up to ten candidates from across the city. It makes campaigning much harder.

“As someone who takes transit and does not drive, you need to go to literally every part of this city for campaigning. It is definitely a challenge.”

“I spend a lot of time on public transit,” Yi-Kieran joked, “but at the same time, I’ve also really enjoyed the way I’ve gotten to campaign within this system. In that, I am literally going to every corner of the city. I am becoming intimately familiar with every single neighborhood.”

Yi-Kieran, who says their dream job would be a high school teacher, has embraced a rhetoric of class war. In their acceptance speech for the COPE nomination, Yi-Kieran embodied the renewed vigor of COPE.

“We didn’t start this class war, but we’re going to win it.”

Few candidates in Canada have taken the fight to landlords as directly as Chiara Padovani. A tenant organizer and social worker who helped lead one of Toronto’s largest-ever tenant strikes, Padovani is running for city council in York South–Weston (YSW).

Unlike Mikhail and Yi-Kieran, Padovani has run before. She ran in 2022, coming within ninety-four votes of unseating incumbent Frances Nunziata, whose office was later found guilty of using city resources to campaign, a violation of the city’s code for councilors.

Padovani’s campaign didn’t end with her defeat. During the race, Padovani had turned her office into a local organizing hub, distributing tenant’s guides door-to-door and helping establish a building-based tenant union. Afterward she was concerned that losing the physical space would slow the nascent organizing effort in YSW. YSW, a deeply racialized, quickly gentrifying, and high-density tenant area, was a prime spot for such organizing.

“I called up about 200 of my election supporters who had contributed to my campaign to run for city council, and I told them I really want to try to keep the office open,” Padovani said. She asked if people could chip in CA$5 or $10 a month.

It worked. She was soon able to guarantee enough reliable income from monthly donations to extend the lease. It has been “the foundation of resourcing this movement, just by having a physical space in the community where people can meet and organize.”

What began as a campaign has since become more durable. It is now an organization operating between electoral and movement work and building a measure of worker power in YSW. “You can’t run an election on a socialist mandate for tenants’ rights if you’re not organizing the tenant community and getting concrete material wins for them to have some faith that things can change.”

There is a confidence and professionalism to Padovani’s current campaign, refined through years of organizing. In many respects, Padovani has acted as YSW’s shadow councilor — hosting community skate events, dealing with constituency work, and building a strong foundation for her current run.

Consequently, the campaign feels almost like an incumbent run. But that just reflects the strength of the movement Padovani has helped build in a corner of Toronto. The first campaign fed into the movement, and now the movement feeds back into the campaign.

“Between the electoral campaign and the organizing campaigns, we’re not doing this to make a point. We’re doing it to win. We need to win material differences in people’s lives. Like, this is what’s at stake. If I wanted to just make points, I would be on Twitter all day, right?”

The Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 transformed Canada’s socialist and labor movements. But it wasn’t until 1934 that Winnipeg elected its first socialist mayor and, with him, a labor-controlled city council. It was a rare victory for Canadian municipal socialists. Sewer socialism never found its footing here as it did south of the border. Instead, political energy was focused on winning provincial governments and chasing the dream of a socialist prime minister.

There are many reasons for the renewed interest in municipal socialism: The worsening housing crisis, the cost-of-living crisis, and the growing failure of government to address either. But Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City has altered what people perceive as the political horizon. Winning power locally has never seemed more possible.

Winnipeg’s 1934 socialist city council would be the last. It was a disappointing experience for many. Unable to make significant changes, the movement fell apart. Winning is not a guarantee of victory. But a victory from either Mikhail, Yi-Kieran, or Padovani would establish a beachhead for a different kind of Canadian city — one capable of proving that government can materially improve people’s lives.