Waterloo Region Votes
Information About the 2026 Municipal Election
To help voters make informed decisions in the municipal election, we link to many external resources. This page describes our approach to including media on the site.
Here are our rules of thumb:
We now have a brief Issues page. The purpose of this page is to help voters get a broad overview of a few widely-discussed issues in the campaign, so voters can dig deeper if they choose.
On this page we attempt to link only to official pages (such as those published on municipal websites) and to established news sites.
The question of whether a news site is “established” arises on the Issues page and for media items we classify as “Articles”. When considering what media outlets to treat as news, we consider the following:
Does the organization produce original, independent journalism, as opposed to reposts, opinion pieces, or promotional pieces?
Is the organization accountable to someone other than itself? Does it have a named editorial structure? Does it have a corrections policy? Is it part of a recognised press body?
We are looking for evidence of independence and accountability.
Some sites we consider to be established news sites include:
We link to most recordings of all-candidates meetings and debates, regardless of who produces them. The rules of thumb for being considered an all-candidates meeting are:
We link to most questionnaires. We define a questionnaire as a survey that is posed to all candidates for a particular position, where all the questions are the same and the candidate responses are published (preferably verbatim).
Many questionnaires are published by advocacy groups, but established news media sometimes publish them as well.
We do not link to every opinion piece about the municipal election. We reserve the right to refrain from linking to any particular media item.
There are good reasons to consider opinion pieces skeptically. They are often authored by pseudo-anonymous authors. Sometimes they are written by people associated with a particular candidate’s campaign, or people who claim to be neutral but have strong partisan agendas. Sometimes opinion pieces contain statements that are hyperbolic or incorrect. Despite this, they can be useful to illustrate conversations and controversies that come up during the campaign.
Linking to an opinion piece is not an endorsement of its views. We sometimes link to opinion pieces that disagree with each other.
Some of the opinions we are more interested in include:
We will tend to link to opinions that add something new to the conversation. When groups use grassroots/astroturf campaign to flood the internet with many identical opinions we will not link to all of them.
Linking to an opinion (or a set of opinions) does not reflect how popular it is among voters overall. Some groups are noisy online but do not hold widespread views.
Endorsement lists recommend specific candidates to vote for. Usually they are offered by advocacy groups pursuing a particular agenda. We consider endorsement lists to be like any other opinion, and will consider linking to them.
In principle, many endorsement lists published by organizations are not permitted, because those groups have not registered as Third-Party Advertisers with the municipalities where they are making endorsements.
Voters who feel that a particular endorsement violates third-party advertiser rules should contact the relevant Municipal Clerk(s). The Region of Waterloo publishes contact information for all Municipal Clerks on its Municipal Elections Compliance Audit Committee page.
Many news outlets produce profiles of candidates running in local races. We link to many of these, even though multiple profiles of the same candidate are often very similar.
Sometimes candidate profiles resemble questionnaires in the sense that all candidates are asked identical questions. Usually if each candidate is presented in an individual article, we classify these as candidate profiles. Otherwise we use our discretion.
Elections get heated, and some users of our site may find the contents of media we link to objectionable. Our goal in this website is to help voters make more informed decisions about the municipal election, and sometimes that information is unpleasant to read. As a reminder: we do not endorse the position of any media we link to, and as a nonpartisan website we do not endorse candidates.
If you are thinking of suing us for defamation, you should be aware of Canadian case law: in particular the Crookes vs Newton Supreme Court decision from 2011. This ruling asserts that in most cases linking to a defamatory source on the Internet is itself not defamatory.
Here are some background articles about this decision:
Some of the media sources we link (most notably the Waterloo Region Record) keep their content behind paywalls or registration walls, and ask you to subscribe to read to their content.
Local journalism is important, and if you can afford it we recommend subscribing to some local news sources. However, it is also possible to read the articles on some of these paywalled sites using the PressReader website.
All four local library systems (Cambridge Public Library, Kitchener Public Library, Waterloo Public Library and the Region of Waterloo Public Library) subscribe to this service. In order to use their subscription you will need a library card and your library PIN (which you can set at the library).
Click the link above and at the login screen choose Libraries & Groups. Then find your local library system. Log in with your library card number and your PIN. You can then find paywalled articles we have linked by publication, publication date and title. [CHECK]