Burnaby’s voter turnout was the lowest in years. How do we change that?

Less than one in five Burnaby residents turned up at the polls Saturday to vote for Burnaby’s new city council.

The city recorded a 19.78% voter turnout with 32,249 ballots cast, according to Elections Burnaby data. There were 163,076 registered voters.

That’s the lowest turnout Burnaby has seen in a municipal election in more than a decade. A highly contentious mayoral campaign in the 2018 election drew 32% of voters to the polls. In 2014, turnout was 27.3%; in 2011, it was 24.6%; and in 2008, it was 23.49%.

So why the historically low turnout this year? Ian Bushfield, co-host of the local politics-based podcast The Cambie Report, suggested it likely has to do with a lack of contenders for the mayoralty.

Incumbent Mayor Mike Hurley ran unopposed for the seat and will be sworn in for his second term early next month.

Meanwhile, the BCA managed to gain back a council majority that it lost in 2020–when three of its seven councillors left the party to sit as independents.

Bushfield said voters tend to place a high priority on the mayoral race—but the low turnout could also mean that Burnaby residents were comfortable with their current council.

“It’s kind of a vote for incumbency, in that situation. When you have an acclamation for mayor, people don’t have strong feelings, I guess, about council. And it’s really hard with our system to parse these different candidates,” he said.

“To Burnaby politics’ credit, there was a clear choice on the ballot between going back to a BCA-dominated situation or taking a risk and trying something new with One Burnaby, or maybe slightly more Greens in there. And it seems like, overall, people wanted to stick with the comfort they knew.”

Bushfield noted that elections are decided by who turns out to vote for them—“and in this case … by those who didn’t turn out”. But he also suggested there may not have been enough distinction between parties and candidates to engage the public enough to make a choice.

All three major parties in Burnaby, for instance, included in their platforms a pledge to create a city-run housing authority that would work to expand affordable housing options. All three also placed a large emphasis on making Burnaby into a “15-minute city,” along with similar promises on improving safety, accessibility, and green spaces.

Along with muddying the waters for voters, Bushfield said it makes it harder for candidates to set themselves apart from others—noting that most candidates are well-meaning citizens who want to run on a platform of their own values.

“But how do you pick from the four people who say they want to make houses affordable, if that’s your priority?” he asked.

“That said, when we look at Vancouver, some of the parties offering different takes, like TEAM, did very badly. So perhaps if One Burnaby had taken a far more NIMBY, ‘let’s freeze Burnaby where it is’ [position], they would have done far worse. And so maybe buying into that consensus allowed them to sneak in the one candidate that they did.”

It’s possible as well, Bushfield said, that the public’s tendency to think an election doesn’t matter if there’s no mayoral race is based on a misunderstanding or overestimation of the powers actually held by the mayoral office.

There can often be a misconception that mayors have more standing in day-to-day council matters than councillors—but that’s not strictly the case.

​​”The mayor is first among equals in many ways. They play the role of chair [in council meetings] and otherwise are the figurehead of the municipal government, but they don’t have many additional powers. They do sit on the Mayor’s Council, and so can bring some voice to regional issues. But in terms of how council functions, they’re one vote, and often not even one vote,” Bushfield said.

“I don’t know quite how to address that—whether the answer is to give the mayor more powers in the way that’s being done in some areas so that it properly reflects what people think the mayor can do, or try to get everyone to better understand our own governments and how it works.”

Bushfield added that the role of local media is “critically important” as it “reminds people of how important … local politics is.”

In figuring out how to get more voters to the polls in 2026—which is a crucially important task, because local elections really do matter in furthering the causes most important to our day-to-day lives—Bushfield says cities need to make local politics more accessible and meet people where they are.

But that goes further than material convenience. Bushfield said the fundamental question at hand needs to move past increasing the number of polling stations and adding signage to make voting more convenient in that sense.

Instead, he said, we need to make voting easy once you’re actually in the booth and confronted with a long list of names on the ballot.

“Fundamentally, the system most of our cities have—where you have to try and sort through dozens of people to pick six, eight, 10, whatever, for council—is discouraging. It’s hard to be reasonably informed and feel confident, it’s much easier to just kind of shrug your shoulders and leave it to others who you trust are making an informed decision,” he said.

“So I think the provinces and cities need to start looking hard at this and considering changing the way we vote to make it simpler so it’s not this mess of names. … And connecting it to people’s lives, so they know it matters.”