Jim Watson re-elected mayor of Ottawa

Incumbent Jim Watson coasted to an easy victory in Ottawa’s mayoral race.

Watson took 76 per cent of the vote in early results, handily beating top challengers Mike Maguire and Anwar Syed, who won 18.5 and 1.4 per cent respectively.

This will be Watson’s second term in a row as Ottawa’s mayor – his third overall.

He has had a long career in municipal and provincial politics. First elected to public office as a city councillor in 1991, he was later elected mayor of Ottawa in 1997. He ran for provincial office in 2003 for the Liberal Party of Ontario and served as Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing and as Minister of Health Promotion in former Premier Dalton McGuinty’s government.

Watson jumped back into municipal politics in 2010 to run for mayor, easily winning with 48.7 per cent of the vote.

The 2014 Ottawa mayoral race was fairly dull, and this is an unsurprising outcome. The Ottawa Citizen, in an editorial endorsing Watson said, he “has been, in a word, safe,” and that the race’s outcome may have been different if he had faced stiffer competition.

During this campaign, Watson pledged to continue expanding Ottawa’s light rail transit routes, one of which began construction during his first term; to lower the property tax cap from 2.5 to 2 per cent, and boost funding for housing and homelessness programs.

One candidate in the mayoral race, Robert White, had pledged that, “If I am not elected I will move away from this backwater of a city.” It’s unclear whether he will keep that election promise.