Only Two Owen Sound Incumbents Have Filed for Election With Nomination Deadline Seven Weeks Out
Two of nine current Owen Sound council members have filed to run this fall. No one is challenging Deputy Mayor Greig, and four new candidates have entered for seven seats.
Two of the nine people who sit on Owen Sound council have registered to run in the October 26 election, and all but the mayoral race remains thin with just under seven weeks until nominations close.
No one has filed to challenge incumbent Deputy Mayor Scott Greig, four candidates have registered for the seven council seats, and five are running for mayor, according to the City's registered candidates list. Nominations close Friday, August 21 at 2 p.m.
Mayor’s race unchanged
Five candidates have registered for mayor: Ray Botten, Jodi King, Carol Merton, Richard Thomas and Andrii Zvorygin. Merton is a sitting city councillor. The field is unchanged from the City’s June list.
Mayor Ian Boddy is not among them. Boddy, who has been mayor since 2014 and on council since 2010, is not seeking re-election and will finish his third term this fall, the Owen Sound Sun Times has reported.
Deputy mayor race draws no contest
Greig, the incumbent, remains the only registered candidate for his seat. No one has filed to run against him.
Council field sits at four candidates for seven seats
Tamara Sargent is the most recent candidate to register for council, joining Thomas Arakal, Jacob Morris-Wheeler and Meghan Robertson. Robertson stood as the only registered council candidate at the end of May. None of the four currently sits on council.
Owen Sound elects seven councillors, so at least three more candidates would need to file simply to fill the ballot.
One school board trustee candidate, Eric Lapointe, has registered, for the French-language public board (Conseil scolaire Viamonde).
What residents told the City they wanted — and how Council has handled input
The candidates elected next will follow a term marked by friction over public input. Council has drawn criticism through its current term for narrowing opportunities for residents to be heard, overriding its own committees, and not responding to concerns raised by the public.
In September 2024, Council approved a procedural bylaw that cut each speaker’s time at public question period from five minutes to three, capped the entire question period at 15 minutes, and ended the practice of reading emailed public comments aloud. That decision also gave the Mayor and chair — in consultation with the City Manager and Clerk — the power to keep items off meeting agendas.
The Corporate Services Committee, which includes five public members, had considered those same measures in July 2024 and defeated them. They were resurfaced at Council and passed 7-2, with only Councillors Jon Farmer and Carol Merton opposed.
In April 2026, Council approved a 2027 committee structure that removes public members from the body overseeing the operating and capital budget, union mandates and internal operations, replacing the Corporate Services Committee with a council-only “Resilient” Community Advisory Committee.
That passed in a recorded 6-2 vote, again with only Farmer and Merton opposed. The same package created working groups exempt from the procedural bylaw — groups with no required agendas, minutes, livestreaming or quorum.
The Vision 2050 survey itself became a point of contention. After the City released only a two-page summary of roughly 5,000 written responses to open-ended questions, Owen Sound Current requested the full dataset. City staff declined that November 2024 request, telling the newsroom the expectation that residents might analyze the raw data themselves was “insulting” to the consultant and staff.
When notified that staff had withheld the results, the Mayor and Council did not respond. Owen Sound Current obtained the data through a freedom-of-information request, at a cost of $517.50, and published it in full.
Those responses returned repeatedly to a sense of being shut out.
“Residents continually ask for in person engagement, for example town halls and working groups, and they are ignored (with staff propsals for open houses in place of much needed town halls) or set up and immediately disbanded,” one respondent wrote.
Another said Council “often reacts to citizen input (if they even notice it) with indifference and derision.”
A third wrote that “people are tired of sending feedback into a void and having more and more roadblocks invented to prevent us from being heard.”
Others tied their criticism to how Council handles staff. One respondent wrote that Council “is supposed to be making sure staff are making responsible financial decisions but seem to be a rubber stamp that gives staff an open wallet,” and called for meetings run “so that there is real discussion, not rubber stamping of staff suggestions and limitations on citizen input.”
Another pointed to local knowledge going unused: “We have incredibly smart and experienced people in Owen Sound, who council and staff refuse to listen to. They go out of their way to make it useless to try to have input.”
One was blunter still, urging the City to “end the culture of hostility toward residents and area businesses.”
The survey was an open engagement exercise run in 2024, not a representative poll, so it reflects the views of residents who chose to take part rather than a scientific sample of the city.
What’s still unknown
Whether more candidates will register before the August 21 deadline is the open question in every race. The City adds names to its public list as candidates file, and the field can shift up to the 2 p.m. cutoff.
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