How to deliver over a THOUSAND zines
If you've been along for the ride from the beginning, you'll already know that I took on a massive project for the Ottawa elections to create a zine for each ward in the city with info about their local councillor candidates.
To bring this project to life, I partnered with Synapcity and over the course of the election season, volunteers stepped up to help design the cover art, compile the candidates' answers, print and fold zines, and distribute them across the city. Together, we:
- wrote 4 questions for the city councillor candidates to get a feel for who they are and the primary focus of their campaign
- invited 85 city councillor candidates to to participate in the project
- collected 60 questionnaire responses from (almost) EVERY ward in the city1
- made 24 zines, one for each ward in Ottawa
- printed and folded more than 1,200 zines
- distributed to 50+ locations across the city (including some delivered door-to-door in certain neighbourhoods, which might bring the number up to 100 or so!)
Although I'm disappointed by the election results and the low voter turnout,2 I'm so proud of what we were able to accomplish during this election.
I started thinking about these ward zines in 2025 when I saw The Sprawl's ward zine series in the lead up to the Calgary municipal election. I've been inspired by Jeremy Klaszus' work with The Sprawl since I was a high school student in Edmonton. Alongside a couple local Edmonton publications and podcasts, The Sprawl made me excited about city politics and the excitement has continued, bringing me to Ottawa for journalism school and then to the creation of Mid City!
I met Jeremy for coffee in Ottawa a few days before the election and it was so cool to see the two projects side by side!
I connected with Synapcity at the end of 2025 and we started cooking up ideas for the election. We brainstormed questions and logistics, and eventually landed on a plan to send 4 questions to all the councillor candidates, design unique cover art for each of the wards, and distribute them throughout the city.
Above all, we wanted to get people to the polls to vote and we wanted to spotlight the councillor candidates.
The bulk of the content in our ward zines comes from the following questions we brought to the candidates:
- What is an underrated gem from your ward?
- If you had to campaign on one issue what would it be?
- What does community safety mean to you?
- What is one thing most people don't know about you that makes you fit for the job?
Each of the 24 zines had its own original cover art designed by one of the 17 volunteer artists who signed up to contribute. Many of the artists chose to design covers for wards they had a personal connection to.
We hosted a folding party and from there, volunteers took piles of zines home to their neighbourhoods to help distribute and you can see all the recorded drop-off locations here:
I want to give a massive THANK YOU to everyone to helped make this happen, including the 60 councillor candidates who participated in the project!
The only "empty" zine was in Ward 21 where David Brown ran uncontested and didn't fill out our questionnaire. It's a bit of a bummer because the cover art is so fun and one of my favourites (click here to download the zine). On a similar note, there was also only one candidate running in Ward 16, the re-elected Riley Brockington. Despite running uncontested, he still filled out our questionnaire and you can read his answers in our Ward 16 zine.↩
According to the CBC, "36.2 per cent of eligible voters cast a ballot for mayor; the lowest turnout since 2003."↩