Leanne Caron is the 44th Mayor of Guelph. With all polls reporting just before midnight on Monday, the five-term Ward 5 city councillor emerged as the person to lead the Royal City into its bicentennial and beyond with 54 per cent of the vote. Ward 6 City Councillor Ken Yee Chew came in second with 34.1 per cent of the vote, a nearly 20-point difference that Chew was not able to make up from when the first tranche of ballots dropped after 8:30 pm.

As for the rest of the mayoral field, John Edward Krusky did almost three times as better as he did in 2022 by securing 2,470 votes or 5.6 per cent in third place while Ryan Meunier claimed 3.3 per cent in fourth. Rajee Sinha and Evaristo Ramos, Jr. finished in fifth and sixth respectively with 1.8 per and 1.2 per cent.

In Ward 1, Dan Gibson sailed easily to re-election with 30 per cent of the vote, while former provincial Liberal candidate Mustafa Zuberi will join him in the council chambers with 19.6 per cent. Owen Martens finished in third lagging just 167 votes behind Zuberi. Housing activist Daniel Kaufmann was a distant fourth with just 10.5 per cent.

The very packed Ward 2 slate was a veritable photo finish for second place, but teacher and activist Kim Fry jumped to the head of the pack in the middle of the evening and finished with 2,593 votes, or 15.7 per cent. Greg Cox, who was for a time sitting in second place, ultimately finished in third place with 2,371 votes while honey enthusiast Mike Barber was just 70 votes behind in fourth. Incumbent Rodrigo Goller skated to re-election with nearly 4,000 votes.

Phil Allt also easily secured a new term in Ward 3 with 36 per cent while his wardmate Michele Richardson only achieved fourth place with 15.5 per cent. Instead, former Downtown Guelph Business Association executive director Marty Williams will take the second chair after getting 24.3 per cent of the vote while Kevin Bowman, who finished third in 2022, got the bronze medal once again despite increasing his vote count by nearly 900.

Ward 4’s incumbent councillor Linda Busuttil nearly doubled her vote count from 2022, but she still finished in second place behind Brandan Clark, who in his third run for council seemed to be the recipient of the votes left from Christine Billings’ exit from municipal politics; Clark added 2,283 votes in 2026, while Billings won with 2,202 votes in the last election. Former City of Guelph manager Derek McCaughan lagged behind in third with 17.3 per cent while Jesse Guite and Ali Malik were statistically tied in last place.

More competitive than it might have seemed with even 10 competitors, the Ward 5 race, like Ward 2, was down to the wire. Cathy Downer secured re-election with 2,389, or 16.8 per cent of the vote, which is 400 fewer votes than she secured in 2022, but pharmacist and homelessness activist Danny Lui finished in first place with 2,505 or 17.6 per cent. University of Guelph student Michael Agueci finished in third with 15.3 per cent followed by teacher Greg Cawsey with 14.8 per cent and businessman Jon Christensen with 14.1 per cent. Food security activist Dakota Cherry was the only other Ward 5 candidate to secure more than 1,000 votes.

Ward 6 will send two rookies to council with Rebecca Adam and Luke Devos finishing in first and second place with 26 per cent and 24 per cent of the vote respectively. Katherine Hauser, who was appointed to the position last summer after Dominique O’Rourke was elected to the House of Commons finished in third place with just 16.7 per cent and about 100 votes ahead of Laura McQuillen. Shane Coulis secured a decent 14.4 per cent despite finishing in fifth.

In the school board races, Martha MacNeil was easily re-elected as one of the trustees for Wards 1 and 5 in the Upper Grand District School Board while it was a close race between Bill Foster and Aaron Blair for the second chair. Ultimately, Foster won with just 17 more votes than Blair.

In Ward 2, 3 and 4, recent Upper Grand Board chair Ralf Masenbrink was re-elected with 24.7 per cent, but newcomer Dan Atkinson got the most votes with 44.3 per cent. Randy Freese and Lange Frosst seemed to cancel each other out with 15.8 and 15.1 per cent between them. Kyle Reaburn was easily returned to the board for Ward 6 and Puslinch with 71.5 per cent compared to 28.5 per cent for his only competitor, Pallavi Ramchandani.

Incumbents Marino Gazzola and Vikki Dupuis plus new candidates Holly Sabara and Natalia Crewson are the new Guelph trustees at the Wellington Catholic District School Board.

See the full unofficial results on the City of Guelph’s website here.

The City of Guelph hasn’t released any official numbers in terms of turnout, but if you add up all the votes for mayor and divide it by the number of registered voters in Guelph according to Elections Canada, then turnout was nearly 48 per cent in this election, which is actually five points higher than the turnout was in the last competitive mayoral election in 2014.

Other interesting results from around Ontario:

• Bronwynne Wilton is the new Mayor of Centre Wellington after getting more votes than the current mayor and the former mayor who were both running.
• Alvin Tedjo also defeated the current and former mayor to become the head of Mississauga council.
• Cambell Cork will be the only member of Wellington County council who will not be returning to Woolwich Street in November.
• George Minakakis has done the impossible and ousted Gord Krantz to become the Mayor of Milton. Krantz has served as that town’s head of government since 1980.
• For the third time in three years, the City of Cambridge has changed hands with Councillor Scott Hamilton winning nearly 57 per cent of the vote while incumbent mayor Jan Liggett finished third.
• In the replay of the 2022 election, Shannon Weber will now take over from Dorothy McCabe as the Mayor of Waterloo.
• In another replay from 2022, Keanin Loomis beat Andrea Horwath to become the next Mayor of Hamilton.
• Despite reports of tightening polls in the last days, Olivia Chow was handily re-elected to be Mayor of Toronto with 54.2 per cent of the vote versus 41.1 per cent for Brad Bradford.