Why So Many Mayors Are Quitting

In November 2023, one of Quebec’s youngest mayors, then twenty-three-year-old Isabelle Lessard, stepped down mid-mandate. That summer, she’d dealt with intense wildfires that forced the evacuation of about half the town of Chapais, a northern community of about 1,500.

• Mayors and municipal councillors across Canada are stepping down from their positions in record numbers
• Intensive workloads, high expectations, low salaries, and harassment incidents contribute to the increase in resignations
• Some municipalities have organized educational workshops and support resources for prospective local candidates

Any leader managing a crisis can expect scrutiny, but some of the criticism Lessard received, including for not dressing professionally enough, hit her hard. Tensions arose between her and her colleagues. The discovery that the blaze was probably the result of arson also took a toll on her. In a 2025 interview with Who still wants to do politics?, a Radio-Canada podcast, she said she developed a form of social anxiety. “I started fearing people and what they are capable of,” she told host Régis Labeaume, a former Quebec City mayor.

Lessard’s resignation is not an isolated case. In Quebec, some 1,115 mayors and municipal councillors elected in 2021 (about 14 percent of the total) didn’t complete their terms, a 50 percent jump from the previous four-year period. There are no overarching bodies that consistently track municipal resignations, but data from by-elections offer a fairly reliable picture.

Council positions filled in by-elections went up by over 30 percent in Alberta between 2021 and 2025. In Ontario’s 444 municipal governments, there have been more than 150 resignations from seats won in 2022 as of mid-March, double the number from 2018–22, according to data compiled by the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, or AMO. The trend goes beyond Canada: in France, mayors caught between mounting expectations and budget pressures are stepping down in record numbers.

Mayors and city councillors are at the forefront of the challenges shaking up our communities, including more frequent extreme weather events, crumbling infrastructure, homelessness, and a dearth of affordable housing. With soaring construction costs and a dated tax system, facing those challenges often hinges on provincial and federal financing.

Then there’s the matter of dealing with constituents. Governments’ public health responses to the COVID-19 pandemic left many communities increasingly polarized, with the public’s frustration often levelled at local elected officials. In 2025, for the annual Canadian Municipal Barometer, a large research project, 63 percent of the mayors and councillors surveyed said they had experienced some form of harassment in their most recent term or campaign for office.

“It used to be that if you wanted to say something nasty to a politician, you needed to go to their office or send them a letter or call them on the phone. Now you can send an anonymous Facebook message,” says Erin Tolley, the Canada Research Chair in Gender, Race, and Inclusive Politics at Carleton University and one of the lead researchers for the barometer. “You can harass them directly in their pockets.” While some voters are overly vocal, many more are disengaged: less than 40 percent turned up to elect a mayor in Montreal or Calgary last year.

So why would anyone want to enter local politics? Many people don’t. Half of Quebec’s mayors ran unopposed last year. Grassroots work on social, environmental, and other issues has long been a training ground for future politicians. Research shows that, these days, more people who might have been strong candidates believe they can make a greater impact staying outside of government, says Petra Wolfbeiss, director of AMO’s membership centre.

Christa Lowry, who’s now mayor of Mississippi Mills, Ontario, was drawn to local politics in 2014. At the time, the rural community near Ottawa was bitterly divided over a plan to expand a small hydroelectric dam. A thirty-six-year-old professional musician and nutritionist who had recently returned to her hometown, she attended council meetings to get first-hand information on the project. But she didn’t see herself reflected in the overwhelmingly male and older council. She decided to run for councillor, feeling she could both connect with locals and bring more transparency to decision making.

“I wasn’t promising the moon and the stars,” she recalls. “I ran on wanting to make sure that communication was happening in a more regular and committed way, because at that time there really was very little communication coming out and not in ways that people could access easily.”

Lowry was first elected mayor in 2018. The municipality now releases four newsletters a year, livestreams council meetings, and posts announcements and practical information daily online. It also holds public information sessions multiple times a year and sets up a tent at seasonal events, such as the local beer fest, to give residents a chance to talk to staff and council members.

But her job hasn’t gotten easier. Municipal leaders are expected to address shortcomings in housing, health care, and child care without adequate support from upper levels of government, she says. Mississippi Mills, for instance, can’t meet demand from the 700 families currently waiting for a daycare under Canada’s $10-a-day child care plan.

“Property taxes were never meant to pay for these very complex solutions that are needed for complex problems,” she says.

Compensation hasn’t caught up with the times either. Mississippi Mills just voted to raise the next mayor’s pay to about $61,000 a year, starting in November. For now, it stands below $38,000, which Lowry supplements with other governance roles and music gigs. Councillors make about $21,000; starting next term, they’ll make just over $24,000.

Marc-André Guertin has a relatively comfortable base salary of $84,000 as mayor of Mont-Saint-Hilaire, a town of 19,000 people in the greater Montreal area. But the compensation doesn’t reflect the political complexity of the job and the sixty-to-eighty-hour weeks, he says.

The day Guertin was sworn in, in 2021, Quebec’s appeals court ruled against the municipality in a thirty-year-old land dispute with developers, which sent him scrambling to respond. “When you pull the handle, the parachute must open very, very quickly, because you rapidly get pulled into a level of government that is extremely rigid,” he says. “We’re talking about more than a hundred laws and regulations governing the municipal sector.”

Even under normal circumstances, the workload is intensive. The Mont-Saint-Hilaire council passed 388 resolutions last year, and councillors, who also have day jobs, participated in two dozen consultative committees, commissions, and boards. That’s not counting the informal social interactions. Stepping out to buy bread rarely takes less than forty-five minutes, Guertin jokes.

And then, there’s the abuse. Lowry faced online body shaming when she ran for re-election in 2022. Guertin wasn’t prepared to see a chair thrown at the council or to handle death threats against municipal staff.

“In my personal life, when I was faced with complex personalities, or narcissistic, toxic people, my strategy was to stay away from them,” he says. “But now, for my community, I have to deal with these people.”

By 2022, the AMO was repeatedly hearing from board members about harassment incidents, says Wolfbeiss. But it’s not just the public. Many accusations have also come from within city hall, Tolley notes.

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That’s when the AMO began trying to address some of the forces weakening local democracy, including insufficiently diverse councils and a lack of civic knowledge.

“A lot of people don’t understand what municipal governments do,” Wolfbeiss says. “They get frustrated with their local council because they have opinions about immigration. But of course, that is not a municipal issue.”

AMO’s Healthy Democracy project launched a campaign to encourage people from underrepresented communities to run for office. The organization also gives free workshops to support first-time candidates and officials considering re-election and offers a host of civic educational tools to better engage youth, increase voter turnout, and nurture respectful disagreement.

Alberta Municipalities organized twenty webinars for prospective candidates ahead of last year’s elections. It published a social media tool kit for officials and a campaign to educate voters about the rising costs facing councils, an attempt at countering popular pressure to reduce property taxes.

In December, the Association of Manitoba Municipalities released a guide for mayors and people running for local office to deal with harassment, including threats and online hate. Quebec has made 7.5-hour, post-election training mandatory for municipal officials and, in 2024, set up a helpline connecting them and their families to psychological support services.

In Mississippi Mills, Lowry tries to ignite in others the calling she felt twelve years ago. When she spots an active community organizer, she delivers a pitch.

“One of the things that I have done, and I’ve encouraged everyone around me to do, is thank them. Thank them for that and say, ‘Hey, have you ever thought about community leadership? Have you ever thought about municipal politics? Because I think you don’t know that you would be good at something like this.’”