With New Brunswick municipal elections just completed, attention turns to this fall's substantial calendar of other civic elections.

British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, and some communities in the Northwest Territories and Saskatchewan will vote, making for a jam-packed 2026 local election calendar.

It could also auger in significant change in the governance of many Canadian cities and towns. New Brunswick has 77 local governments—35 of them will have new mayors. That is a remarkably high percentage.

Local elections are run on (primarily) local issues. Homeowners care about garbage collection, potholes, attractive parks, snowplowing and other issues that every municipal candidate soon discovers are high priorities.

This column, however, argues that people running for civic office should also be advocating for some larger issues. The local economy. Growth. Downtown. Homelessness. Housing.

Surely there is a need to put some of these on the local campaign agenda.

Perhaps the #1 issue: how is your municipality funded? And how will it be funded in the future? Because the truth is that you can't operate a modern, growing city if it is primarily funded by property taxes. The old system must change.

Municipal governments have done an admirable job in recent years in working with senior orders of government to allocate large grants to cities to accomplish infrastructure projects and accelerate housing, for example. Great. And kudos to the feds for finally opening the coffers. But the problem is that none of those dollars are on-going guaranteed funding.

We need to educate voters to bigger and more complex issues so they can in turn pressure federal and provincial candidates. Getting a share of consumption taxes (Sales, Income, Gas) is, I have argued for decades, a smarter and fairer way to fund municipalities.

Productivity is another big issue for local governments. Canada is failing at improving productivity, and we are falling behind internationally. Resiliency is another vital topic—climate change is a reality, so what are towns and cities doing to mitigate such risks locally. Your economic basehow will you attract investment and talent to your city?

These are big problems to which the public needs to be exposed. I have great faith in the ability of Canadian voters to understand big issues and to make big decisions.

This year will be a chance for local candidates to help their community grow—in many ways.

(Author's Note: in the interest of full disclosure, my latest book is "10 New Trends for Smarter Communities" from which some of these issues are taken)