Update

Strong mayor powers: what they are, and the question to ask before October 26

Published September 14, 2026

On October 26 Cochrane elects a new mayor for the first time since the Province handed Cochrane’s mayor a set of powers no mayor in this town has ever held. Whoever wins will have them from the first day of the term. This is the only point in four years when we get to ask, in public, how they intend to use them. So it is worth understanding what they are.

Where they came from

In the fall of 2022 the Province passed the Strong Mayors, Building Homes Act. It added a new part to the Municipal Act, Part VI.1, and applied it to two cities: Toronto and Ottawa. A second bill that December, the Better Municipal Governance Act, added the most contested piece, the ability to pass certain bylaws with the support of only one third of council.

From there it spread. Twenty six more municipalities on July 1, 2023, all of them large and fast growing. A few more in 2024 brought the total to 46. Then on May 1, 2025 the Province added 169 municipalities in one stroke, every single and lower tier municipality with six or more members of council. That is how Cochrane got them, along with Timmins, Hearst, Kapuskasing, Iroquois Falls, Kirkland Lake and about fifteen other communities in the northeast. Roughly 216 municipalities, close to half of Ontario, now operate under this model.

The stated purpose has been the same throughout: build housing faster. Whether a town of 5,500 needed this tool to build housing is a fair question. Cochrane’s mayor thought so and said so publicly in November 2023, asking the Province to extend the powers to rural Ontario. So this was not imposed on Cochrane over the town’s objection. It was requested.

What the powers actually are

In plain terms, the mayor of Cochrane can now do the following without a vote of council:

Hire and fire the CAO.
Set the Town’s organizational structure, and hire and fire the heads of divisions.
Create committees of council, assign their functions, and name their chairs and vice chairs.
Direct Town staff in writing.
Prepare and table the annual budget. Council can amend it, the mayor can veto the amendments, and council needs a two thirds vote to override the veto.
Propose a bylaw the mayor believes advances a provincial priority, such as housing, and have it pass if more than one third of council votes for it. On a seven member council, that is three votes including the mayor’s own.
Veto a bylaw the mayor believes would interfere with a provincial priority, again subject to a two thirds override.

The first three can be handed back. The Act lets the mayor delegate CAO and committee powers to council, and organizational structure and division head hiring to council or the CAO. Dozens of mayors across Ontario signed one page decisions doing exactly that in May 2025. The budget power, the one third bylaw power and the veto cannot be delegated. A mayor can only choose not to use them.

Nobody else does this

It is worth being precise here, because the loose version of this claim gets repeated and it is not quite right.

Every other province in Canada runs on the same model Ontario used to: the mayor chairs the meeting and has one vote, the same as every councillor. Nova Scotia looked hard at following Ontario in 2025, mostly at the urging of Halifax’s mayor, and the Premier said no. Ontario is still the only province.

The United States is a different case. Many American cities have what they also call a strong mayor system. The mayor there can typically veto council decisions, appoint department heads and propose the budget. That part is not new. What no American city does, as far as I can find, is let a mayor pass a law that a majority of council voted against. In the US a veto stops something. In Ontario, the one third rule lets the mayor start something, and a simple majority of the elected council cannot stop it. Council can repeal it later, but the mayor can veto the repeal, and undoing that takes two thirds. Critics called that minority rule when it passed, and the label has stuck because it is accurate. Toronto’s own council voted 17 to 8 in December 2022 asking the Province to repeal it.

What Cochrane publishes, and what it does not

The Province requires every use of these powers to be in writing, delivered to council and the clerk by the next business day, and made public. Cochrane does this. The Town keeps a page called Mayoral Special Powers and Duties with a table of every mayoral decision. As of today there are fourteen, from June 25, 2025 to August 21, 2026. Every one of them is about the organization: an executive leadership team, three rounds of restructuring, hiring a CAO (twice), hiring a Chief Transformation Officer, creating committees, directing staff on housing reform, and most recently creating a Chief Financial Officer position. No vetoes. No one third bylaws. That is the record and I am glad it exists.

Here is what the page does not tell you. It tells you what was decided. It does not tell you why the mayoral route was chosen instead of putting the item on a council agenda for a public vote. The regulation only requires reasons in two situations, when the mayor vetoes something and when the mayor proposes a bylaw under the one third rule. For everything else, hiring, firing, restructuring, committees, staff direction, the standard is “in writing and public” and stops there.

To be fair about the record: some of these decisions had council in the room. The August 21, 2026 CFO decision followed an emergency council meeting the night before where council unanimously asked for it, because a filing deadline was about to close the window. The July 2025 restructuring was, according to the resolution that received it, supported by council in a closed session in June. Council also passed a resolution in July 2025 “receiving” the new organizational structure, on a recorded vote of three to one with three members absent.

But that is my reconstruction from reading minutes and agendas side by side. A resident looking at the mayoral decisions page has no way to know which decisions council discussed, which ones it was told about afterward, and which ones went a route council never saw. “Technically public” and “actually understandable” are not the same thing, and this page is the clearest example in Cochrane of the gap.

One more piece of history worth knowing. In May 2025, in the first weeks of the powers, a councillor filed notices of motion asking the mayor to consider delegating some of them back. As far as I can find in the minutes, those motions never came to a vote. The question of whether Cochrane’s mayor should hand any of this back has never been decided in public.

Why this election is the moment

Since August 24 council has been in what the Municipal Act calls a restricted period, because enough members are not running again that the outgoing council cannot make major decisions. The Province clarified this summer that strong mayor powers are frozen during that period too. So for the moment, nobody in Cochrane is exercising these powers.

That changes on November 15. The new mayor will hold every power on the list above from day one, and will decide fresh whether to delegate any of them. Under the budget rule, the first mayoral budget is due to council by February 1, 2027, eleven weeks after the term starts.

This is why now matters. The powers belong to the office, not the person. Whoever is elected mayor will hold them. Before you decide, I think every mayoral candidate should be able to answer these in public:

Will you delegate the hiring of the CAO and division heads, and the organizational structure, back to council or the CAO? If not, why not?
Will you commit to never using the one third bylaw power, and to never vetoing a decision of a majority of council? If you will not rule them out, in what circumstances would you use them?
When you do issue a mayoral decision, will you publish the reason you chose that route instead of a council vote, alongside the decision itself, even where the regulation does not require it?
Will you support a council resolution that sets that as the standard for the term?

What I would bring to council

I am running for councillor, not mayor, so I will not hold these powers. But council is not powerless here. It cannot pass a bylaw forcing the mayor to give reasons. The powers were granted by the Province directly to the head of council, and a local bylaw that conflicts with provincial law has no effect under section 14 of the Municipal Act. Council can, however, pass a resolution that says what it expects: that every mayoral decision be accompanied by a short statement of the reason the matter was not brought to council, and that the Town’s mayoral decisions page show that statement beside each entry.

A resolution like that has no legal teeth. A mayor who ignores it faces nothing but the public noticing. I think that is enough, and I think it is the right tool, because it does not pick a fight with the Province and it does not depend on who the mayor is. It just sets a standard and lets residents judge whether it is being met.

I will move that resolution early in the term. If the incoming mayor beats me to it by simply doing it, better still.

Candidates’ Night is September 28 at Transfiguration Hall. If you are going, this is a question worth bringing.

Sources

If you spot something I have missed or got wrong, let me know and I will correct it. Corrections are noted below.

Updates and corrections

September 14, 2026. First published.
September 14, 2026. Clarified that a bylaw passed under the one third rule can be repealed by council, but the mayor can veto the repeal and overriding that veto takes two thirds. The first version said only that a majority could not stop it.

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