Look closely as you drive along the main streets of Oshawa and you might see one of Bonnie Powers-Edgar's small, photocopied signs.
There are only about 25 across the entire city of 152,000 people - signs Ms. Powers-Edgar, an office clerk, and her daughter made together to aid her bid to become one of seven regional councillors in this municipal election.
Twenty-five other people are vying for the seats as the city tries a new system of governance. The City of Oshawa has abandoned the ward system and is going for at-large representation for every level of council, making it one of the only cities of its size in Ontario to run a government this way.
It means councillors can work on improving the whole city instead of catering to certain neighbourhoods, said Ms. Powers-Edgar, who likes the concept. It even motivated her to run.
That said, she's already noticed some pretty huge drawbacks.
"There's no way any candidate is going to cover 150,000 homes," she said. "It's not financially feasible."
Instead, Ms. Powers-Edgar has taken advantage of a two-minute slice of free airtime on Rogers Television, campaigned on Facebook and relied on word of mouth.
That's what many of the 54 candidates have done during this election - the first race since the mid-1980s in which every candidate tries to win votes all over Oshawa.
In the last election, constituents voted 64.9 per cent in favour of broadening the representative base, whittling the number of races in Oshawa down from 10 to three. Competition is tight, as is money in a city where the taxes are high and the effects of the recession are still being felt.
There are already calls for the new system to be reversed.
Mayoral candidate Louise Parkes said she was "vehemently opposed" to the idea when it first came up in council, where she's held a seat for 10 years. Ms. Parkes, who is running on a platform pushing fair taxation, said she'd like to have public consultation about the system and perhaps another referendum in two years - enough time for constituents to see if they actually like it.
"We'll make sure people are educated to understand what it is, to make sure the question is clear and logical," she said.
Political experts question the future success of the system in Oshawa. The at-large system works well in small towns and villages where most candidates are recognizable, said Neil Thomlinson, professor and chair of the political science program at Ryerson University. But in a larger place, the lesser-known competitors can really get lost in the shuffle.
"It just makes running a campaign impossible for anybody that isn't really well heeled and can't raise that kind of money" required for a campaign, he said. "That's why wards are generally thought to be more democratic."
Ward systems also give community activists and people of different socioeconomic backgrounds a better crack at representing their neighbours, he said.
Candidates might also suffer the "ballot effect" - voters ticking off names at the top of an alphabetized ballot and ignoring those closer to the bottom, said Robert McDiarmid, a professor of political science at York University who studies municipal election finance.
"What letter your last name begins with should not be a factor," he said. "We already know it's a huge challenge for constituents to know where candidates stand because there are no parties."
He fears the vast choices may overwhelm people and discourage them from voting at all.
Nester Piedwerbecki, the councillor who introduced the idea of the referendum (council voted 6-5 in favour of putting the question on the ballot) said he did it because the ward system was preventing council from looking at larger issues.
"People were getting a little too set in the ward system and just worrying about their own little turf," he said. "What's happened in Oshawa with [expansion]of the University of Ontario and the problems going through changes at General Motors, people should have had a broader vision of what we needed to do."
Mayor John Gray, who is hoping to hold onto his job, did not support the system but wants to see it through for an entire term - mainly because it'll be pricey to hold another referendum in the meantime.
"Why blow $300,000? That's how much [facilitating]an election costs," he said. "Is that going to be a wise use of taxpayers' money?"
At the very least he'd hoped the at-large system would produce more, and thus some stronger, candidates.
"That's not been the case. There are some stellar challengers in the race and some that are not going to be an improvement, shall we say, if they were to be [re-]lected."
Despite the limited visibility of her campaign, Ms. Powers-Edgar hopes the constituents she does meet will appreciate her civic pride and work ethic.
"I believe you should work for your city as a whole," she said. "I am proud to call [Oshawa]my home. But I want to stand up and smile and say 'Yes, Oshawa is a great city.' "
Special to The Globe and Mail