All candidates

Highlands municipal election, 2026

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Election day
Saturday, October 17, 2026
On the ballot
1 mayor and 6 councillors
Confirmed candidates
14, 2 running for mayor, 7 currently in office

Highlands is the region's smallest municipality by population and one of its largest by forest cover: rural, unserviced for the most part, and with no town centre. Its council's decisions are mostly about what stays as it is - watershed and wildfire protection, quarry and industrial land, and how a community of a couple of thousand people keeps its roads and its fire service - which makes it a very different ballot from the ones next door.

Everyone confirmed to be running in Highlands in the 2026 municipal election. Each of them is sent the same questionnaire on transit, housing, climate, arts, and the rest of what a council decides, and a candidate's own page shows how each of their answers was graded. To compare them against each other and against the region, use the full scorecard filtered to Highlands. For voting places, advance voting and the official candidate list, see Highlands's own election page.

Who is running in Highlands

Returned the questionnaire No reply yet

Candidates for mayor

Candidates for council

Highlands by the numbers

The Highlands field as numbers: who has replied, how that compares with the rest of the region, and how the grades fall here once they are published. Every figure is counted from the same data the list above is built from. No candidate is named in this section; for how one person answered, open their page from the list.

Questionnaire replies

7%

of confirmed Highlands candidates have returned the coalition questionnaire: 1 of 14, with 13 still outstanding.

  • 40% across the region: 85 of 214
  • 12th of 13 municipalities by reply rate
  • 66 questions asked, 54 graded

Grades in Highlands

Every published letter held by a candidate in Highlands, counted once per candidate per topic: 7 grades across 1 candidates here. Only the 7 topics the coalition grades are counted — General and Healthcare access carry no graded question, so no letter is ever awarded in them.

Distribution of published letter grades in Highlands
Grade Grades awarded
A Excellent 1 14%
B Good 4 57%
C Mixed 0 0%
C- Weak 0 0%
F Poor 2 29%

Grades by topic

The same grades, split by the topic they were awarded in. Each bar is one topic's full set of grades in Highlands, so the segments read left to right from the best mark to the worst. A topic with nothing published here yet is left out rather than drawn empty.

Distribution of published letter grades by topic in Highlands
Topic Grades awarded, by letter
Transit A 1
Housing F 1
Climate B 1
Arts B 1
Rolling & cycling F 1
Walking B 1
Governance B 1

Incumbency

Grouped by whether a candidate holds elected office now, used to, or is standing for the first time. Incumbency is role-specific on a candidate's own row — a sitting councillor running for mayor is not the incumbent mayor — and those two land in the same bucket here.

Confirmed Highlands candidates by incumbency
Standing Candidates
Incumbent 7 50%
Newcomer 5 36%
Former Incumbent 2 14%

Wondering how a candidate earns a letter grade, or how someone gets onto this list? The FAQ has answers.