TORONTO – Music blasted through speakers as people chatted enthusiastically outside a Toronto venue, moving between tents, a hotdog cart and an ice cream truck on a sunny October day.
What looked like an outdoor festival at Lawrence Heights Community Centre was a fair held to raise civic engagement and encourage the city’s residents to vote in the Oct. 26 municipal election.
The non-partisan event, organized by North York Harvest Food Bank, was attended by several groups including Voice the Vote, a joint initiative by Toronto Metropolitan University’s Democratic Engagement Exchange and United Way Greater Toronto.
Jonathan Dong stood behind a table, a mock ballot box and papers laid out in front him, talking to people and handing them Voice the Vote election handbooks.
“I think that participating in our democratic process, especially considering … how many people around the world aren’t able to cast a vote, is incredibly important,” Dong said in an interview.
“Showing up is how people know that you’re important, and if you don’t show up, you don’t get a say in what happens in the country, in your city, in your own backyard.”
In previous municipal elections, the city has seen what observers described as a worrying downward trend in voter participation.
In the 2023 mayoral byelection won by Olivia Chow, 37 per cent of eligible voters participated. Turnout was less than 30 per cent in the 2022 municipal election and about 41 per cent in 2018.
Across the province, overall voter turnout was nearly 33 per cent in the 2022 municipal elections and roughly 38 per cent in 2018, according to Association of Municipalities of Ontario data.
The turnout at Toronto’s advance polls in the upcoming election was robust, however, with more than 222,000 people casting their ballots early – the highest number in more than a decade.
Dong said he wants to do his part to battle voter apathy.
As a Chinese Canadian who lives in Richmond Hill north of Toronto, he said many voters in his community are particularly disconnected from the electoral process and as a result they don’t have enough representation in government.
“I think it’s very important to have the conversations within these communities to increase that representation and increase our voter turnout,” he said.
At the voter information event, two white posters glued on a wall were decorated with colourful sticky notes on which members of the community wrote why voting matters to them.
“Support for unhoused neighbours,” “a clean city,” and “mental health safety” were among the dozens of notes.
Meanwhile, two taxis were seen ferrying voters to advance polling sites and then bringing them back to the community centre.
Warren Epstein was among those who voted early. He stood by Rania Ahmed, the project lead at Democratic Engagement Exchange, and asked her to write a few messages for him on a poster that focused on affordability and more support for seniors like himself.
“You need people who are going to do things for the people and the senior citizens, and you want to make sure that the right people are voted in for the right activities,” Epstein said.
“And it is time for change.”
Ahmed said Voice the Vote’s 15-member team is trying to help people “feel more hopeful about their future” by leveraging their own communities.
“A lot of people actually don’t know … that the issue they care about is actually tied to their municipal government and not the provincial (or) federal,” she said.
Ahmed said the initiative also provides micro-grants for organizations and individuals who come up with project or event ideas for elections and civic engagement in Toronto, York and Peel regions.
The funding for the initiative comes from United Way. The charity’s senior public affairs officer, Abby Tait, said while the organization has taken part in similar efforts in previous elections, Voice the Vote is a more thought out project aimed at increasing turnout across the city, including among immigrant communities and younger people.
Tait said the idea was born in the summer of 2025, after back-to-back provincial and federal elections.
“So we kind of seized this long runway and said, ‘let’s build something really ambitious,’” she said.
“We developed this kind of community-led project that would really be focused on grounding the municipal election in the local issues that matter to people.”
She said Voice the Vote is using the United Way’s vast network of around 300 agencies to reach communities.
“You can’t have a healthy community if people feel like they have no agency in their community, that they’re not connected to it,” she said.
Roughly 200 people attended the event in Lawrence Heights earlier this month, and around 20 of them were taken to an advance polling site to cast their ballots, said Sarah Watson, the director of community engagement at North York Harvest Food Bank.
Watson said while the food bank can provide emergency support for people in need, it can’t change systemic issues such as lack of affordable housing, food insecurity or unsafe communities.
“We’re really trying to connect them with the electoral process so they can have some influence over who is in government and who is making changes on these issues,” she said.
“A lot of our community members feel like their voices aren’t heard … and when that happens again and again, it can be frustrating and it can cause people to disengage,” Watson added. “We really want to encourage people that it is worth participating, that their voices should be heard.”
Event participant Esther Johnson agreed, saying she will head to the polls on election day because she believes every vote counts.
For people who choose not to vote in this election, “it’s their loss,” she said. “If they’re not interested in… having the input, don’t complain.”
More than 50 candidates are vying to become the mayor of Canada’s largest city, but polls suggest incumbent Olivia Chow and councillor Brad Bradford are locked in a fierce competition one week before election day.
Lydia Miljan, a political-science professor at the University of Windsor, said there are reasons to believe more people will participate in Toronto’s electoral process this time around, given the tight race between the two leading mayoral candidates.
“It just depends on how closely people are following Toronto politics right now, and I think it’s getting in my feeds even down here,” she said. “So, it is heating up quite significantly.”
Miljan said voter turnout is generally lower in municipal elections because it can be overwhelming to take part in a process that elects the mayor, councillors and school board trustees all at once.
She said the lack of political parties giving people a “shortcut” on where local election candidates stand, and the movement of voters between wards in large cities can further suppress turnout.
But in order to have a healthy democracy, residents need to show up, she said.
“It is incumbent upon citizens, regardless of how long they’ve lived in that city, to really make an effort to cast their ballot.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 19, 2026.